E.g., at 370A6, 378B6, 439B4, 451A7, 460E6, 504E5, 515B4-5, 562B4, 580D4, 608A6.

Indeed to the contrary it seems persons who think they have a reputation to protect, such as Protagoras or Theodorus or Gorgias, are all the harder to engage in a conversation worth having.

344E1-3.

The perils of aging, subjective and objective (both what the old man thinks and how he talks about it); What is a friend, really? Why wait around and figure out how to be just when people admire the man who takes what he wants, even if it is from themselves that you take it? The masterful expert is the servant of the person that needs him. People concocted the idea of justice merely to have great enough numbers to overwhelm the strong man they wish they were. If you had a ring that made you invisible what would you do? What if rhetoric and poetry were so powerful they could even persuade the gods to look the other way? What would we say virtue was if it weren't something we had to live up to ourselves, but we could make up a board game that shows it, with tokens and rules? Can a person be both as strong and fierce as a wolf but as loyal as Fido? What are the proper ways to talk about the gods, since they are really divine, after all? that is, what makes a god a god? And that's just the first fifth of the Republic!

The “care of the soul” he promises the Athenian jurors he will never let them ignore as long as he can breathe (Apol. 29D2-E3; 30A7-B4 36C5-D1, 38A1-8, 39D7-8, 41E3-7).

Indeed Book One is quite a lot like an aporetic dialogue, or three of them – though its particular function, I believe, is largely to serve as foil the hugely successful and extensive conversation of Books 2 thru 10, by illustrating three very different ways conversations can fail.

Since Socrates is always addressing us even when reporting what he said to his interlocutors “yesterday,” I have adopted the orthographic protocol of omitting quote marks around his remarks to his interlocutors, as well as around what he says to us only.

κατέβην (327A1): Though the downward direction will later be used as a metaphor for descent into an inferior place (the Cave of Book Seven) one overreads to find it so here. To characterize the entire “evening” as a descent is wrong: the dialogue is a triumph. It is true that the Piraeus area is a less pleasant place than Athens for all the reasons that port towns can be, but what is downward about going there is that going to the seashore is always down just as going from shore to land is upward, as witness the title of Xenophon’s Anabasis. The visible horizon is always higher than the ground we stand on.

Ariston (A1) is also the father of Adeimantus (C2 and 388A) – and also of Plato. His family, as well as that of Plato's mother Perictione, trace their roots far back into Athenian history.

τῇ θεῷ (A2): He does not tell us which. At the end of Book One (354A11) we learn it is Bendis, about whom little is known except that perhaps she is a Thracian goddess and that the Thracians in Piraeus were encouraged by the Athenians and joined by the Piraeans to celebrate their goddess there. Socrates’s lack of specificity implies that Bendis is “the Goddess of Piraeus.”

τε … καί (A2) invites us to compare the two participles it links (προσευξάμενος and βουλόμενος θεάσασθαι), as if they were a pair.

θεάσασθαι (A3).

The different motives, to pay homage and to enjoy the spectacle, correspond to the different grounds for praise: beauty and propriety. By answering his μέν not with δέ but with μέντοι and a litotes Socrates both avoids the invidium of pitting the Thracians against the Athenians and also suggests that the beauty of the Athenian contribution was fitting and the propriety of the Thracian contribution was beautiful.

προσευξάμενοι δὲ καὶ θεωρήσαντες (B1): Instead of saying, “When it was finished we left”, he repeats the two motives, and in the original order. The absence of chiasm—the “apodotic” chiasm of before and after if I may so style it (cf. nn.157, 996, 1140, 1304, 2678, 2807, 2820, 4258, and 417A6-7, 464B6)—is more noteworthy than its presence would have been.

τὸ ἄστυ (B1), strictly the fortified part of Athens, Athens-proper as opposed to its suburbs, reminding us that Piraeus is a mere appendage of a city.

κελεύειν used twice (B3,4): Polemarchus will have his slave talk to Socrates and Glaucon in the same manner he talks to his slave.

αὐτός (B6) includes the sense ipse (your master), but also has the force of challenging the slave to point out the person told him to tell them, i.e., “Where’s the teller himself if it’s not you?” or, “And where is he?”

The slave’s οὗτος (B6) is cheeky.

The slave’s ἀλλά (B7) is impertinent and suggests if anything that he is treated harshly by Polemarchus.

By repeating ἀλλά (B7) Glaucon acquiesces to the slave’s command with a hint of mockery.

And therefore the son of Ariston and the brother of Plato. From Apol.34A2 we learn he is enough older than Plato to act as his guardian.

ἄστυ (C5), again, renewing the distinction between the real city and the suburb.

γάρ (C6).

τοίνυν (C9) as if to draw a conclusion Socrates could have drawn for himself. Polemarchus wishes to telescope his demand to Socrates.

τούτων (C9): not “us” as above (C7). The threatener exempts himself in order to diminish his responsibility for the threat.

Again with τοίνυν (C14) Polemarchus wishes to introduce his choice as a given fact. His addition of the redundant οὕτω is like saying “That’s that.”

ἆρα γε … οὐδ’ ἴστε (328A1): By his choice of particles Adeimantus effects a transition from the threat of force to an attempt to persuade, the alternative Socrates himself had suggested above. His γε feigns a touch of surprise and his δέ a touch of criticism, so as to suggest that the reason to stay is both unsurprising and unquestionably agreeable. Thus his strategy of persuasion, like Polemarchus’s threat of force, is to pre-empt disagreement. For pre-emptively critical οὐδέ cf. Cephalus’s opening remark to Socrates (328C6, infra).

καινόν (A3). Cf. Gildersleeve ad Justin Martyr Apologia I.15 (New York, 1877): “νέος of the organic, καινός of the inorganic; νέος of that which grows, καινός of that which is made.” Cf. Phdrs.267B1.

καὶ πρός γε (A6): Polemarchus chimes in with an eager adverbial use of the preposition, as in English we say, “Plus, there’ll be a vigil!” For γε adding an unexpected item cf. n.66 ad 329D2.

ἄξιον (A7) raises again the moral and esthetic pairings with which Socrates began, πρέπειν / καλόν and προσευξάμενος / θεάσασθαι. Polemarchus is after all trying to persuade Socrates by saying the spectacle is “worthy,” but can only say it will be entertaining. In fact as a παννυχίς it will be very costly of time.

ἀλλὰ μένετε (A9), another ἀλλά echoing his slave’s ἀλλά (327B7), but now warmly cajoling. Reinforcement with μὴ ἄλλως ποιεῖτε sounds dictatorial but Greek usage is exactly the opposite, as when we say, “Don’t even think of saying No” or when we say “I insist.” It is a formula for closing an attempt at persuasion rather than strengthening it.

μενετέον (B2): the verbal adjective depersonalizes the compulsion, maximally.

Losing spirit, becoming despondent and shrinking from the task are common experiences during Socratic investigation, as are their opposites, eagerness, willingness, and sanguinity: Charm.156D; Rep.450D5-451B1; etc.

The list of names (B4-8) has the form A τε καὶ B καὶ δη καὶ C καὶ D καὶ E, with C representing Thrasymachus. Commentators, knowing what is coming, read an emotional tone into καὶ δὴ καὶ that it does not in itself have:

καὶ δὴ καί introduces the last item of the list at Phdrs.274C8-D2 and Leg.643B7-C2ff, as if to effect closure. At Rep.563E10-4A1 καὶ δὴ καί [καὶ δὴ om.AM] introduces the final item, which is also the target of the list. To such use of καὶ δὴ καί we may compare the addition of δή (but no second καί) again to effect closure, as at Crat.411A7-8; Leg.631C1-5 and C5-D1, 661A5-B4, 810E7-8; Lys.215D4-7; Meno 87E6-7; Phlb.50B1-4, 59C2-3; Rep.526D2-5, 544C2-7 (with ironic γενναία), 549C8-E1. καὶ δὴ καί introduces the last item before the generalization at Leg.758E4-6 (where this last item is then taken up in the sequel) and at Rep.367C7-D2 (which rehearses 357C2-3) and 419A5-10. However, it introduces the second of many items in Soph.265C1-3, where the said item is a generalization of the first item (φυτά for ζῷα: cf.Cornford ad loc., pace Campbell). At Leg.747A2-5 it effects a transition to the third of four categories of items (arithmetic, geometry, acoustics, kinetics), and at Leg.760A7-B1 it introduces what is simply the fifth of six items, and at 917A4-5 the fourth of five. For other instances of categorical transition done with δή cf. Leg.679D4-E3; Parm.155D6-8 (cf.142A3-4); Rep.373A2-4, 493D2; Tht.149D1-3, 156B2-6. Compare use of ἤδη at Soph.260C8. At Tim.82A8-B2 (καὶ κοῦφα δή) δή signals an abandonment of a balanced μέν / δέ and an extension of the δέ clause instead. At Leg.962D10-E9 it is added to an item in order to stop the flow and place an ironical spotlight on the item; and at 967D6-8A1 to cast the light of praise.

The force of καὶ δὴ καί in the present passage is simply to effect a transition from the first category of persons present at the house, who live there, to the second category, people from the outside and needing therefore further introduction by defining genitives designating their city (the first two) or their father (the last of the three).

We soon learn (C2) he was conducting a private sacrifice, alone, in the inner courtyard.

ἑωράκη (C1). The pluperfect along with καί describes how Socrates resolves his own surprise: The image that had settled in his memory was in fact (καί) an old image that envisioned a younger Cephalus.

παρ’αὐτόν (C3). We already know that Cephalus is isolated from the company around him, both by his absence from their gathering and by their perfect willingness to join him. I want to ask him, “What about your kith and kin?” He will tellingly raise the issue himself, when he speaks about οἰκεῖοι in two very different ways, positively at 328D6 and negatively at 329B1.

οὐδέ (C6) with all mss. (Burnet accepts Nitzsch’s οὐ δέ) implies some other unstated criticism that this fault will only corroborate and exacerbate. οὐδέ was used in this pre-emptive way by Adeimantus above (328A1). Cephalus’s behavior—immediately to hug Socrates and then to scold him—continues the implicitly hostile treatment of Socrates.

ῥᾳδίως (C8) rather undercuts Cephalus’s plea. He speaks as if the two of them have so much to talk about that of course they will get together, and that they haven’t gotten together only because of Socrates’s imperfect recognition of how Cephalus’s age isolates him.

καταβαίνων (C6): again the downward is still physical (cf. n. ad 325A1); but as Cephalus’s own designation of the destination it reveals his sensitivity to the fact that Piraeus is hardly a “destination.”

τοῖσδε (D5) the “first person” demonstrative pronoun. Cf. Stock ad Crito 44E.

ἀλλὰ τοῖσδε … σύνισθι (D5): again (cf.A9) an attempt to persuade Socrates by sandwiching in at the last moment the lure of youth. That Cephalus refers to his sons and their friends as youngsters (whether νεανίαις [AM] or νεανίσκοις [FD]) though they are upwards of forty is an index of his eager rhetoric.

μὴ οὖν ἄλλως ποίει (D4-5): again the “Don’t do otherwise but do this” formula, with its contrapositive redundancy, to cap a wave of persuasion by revealing, or politely feigning to reveal, how desolé the requester will be if the requested fails to requite him. More eager rhetoric.

ὡς παρὰ φίλους τε και πάνυ οἰκείους (D6). Cephalus yearns for company, even the intimacy of family relations, and yet he spends a lot of time sacrificing alone. Why is he so preoccupied with it?

καὶ μήν … γε (D7).

πυνθάνεσθαι (E2) means both ask (for a report) and learn (from a report), having to do with the kind of knowledge one may have from hearsay rather than direct experience (cf. 344C2 [and contrast Gorg.470D9-E6], 358D3, 476E5, 491C6, 530E1; Prot.318A4). The verb therefore figures large in the “reported” dialogues (such as Symposium and Phaedo; cf. also Phdrs.227B8) where a person who could not be present for the event feels both eager to have a report and skeptical as to whether the report will be adequate. In using this word Socrates as the younger man puts himself at the disposal of the older (as he does to the Guest at Soph.216D3). He corroborates this below with ἡδέως πυθοίμην and ὅτι σοι φαίνεται and ἐξαγγέλεις (E5,7). Cephalus then acknowledges the broad berth that Socrates has given him, and indicates that he will be filling it, for he opens with ἐγώ σοι and repeats οἷόν γέ μοι φαίνεται (329A1-2).

The question (E3-4) is ready to the lips of Greeks today. A few years ago I was introduced as a “φιλόσοφος” to Antonis, an elder of the Cretan village Afrata. He greeted me thus: κιά που ἤμου εἶσαι | κιά που εἶμαι θά ’σαι (“Where you are, I one day was. Where I am, you one day will be.”) More recently I had a message from him inviting me to return to Crete and drink some wine with him sometime before he dies.

With the juxtaposition ἐγώ σοι … ἐρῶ (329A1) Cephalus sits his interlocutor down across from himself to listen, as it were, suggesting that he will speak at length (as when in English we start by saying, “Let me tell you about ...” or “I'm glad you asked me that question” – cf. Phdo.96A1: ἐγὼ οὖν σοι δίειμι and 96A6: ἄκουε τοίνυν ὡς ἐροῦντος; also H.Maj.292C3, Meno 89D3, ), or that he will say something unexpected (Crito 44A2, Gorg.486E2, 522E5-6; Thg.130D2. The second person pronoun can be left out with small effect: Ion 537A; Leg.931B Meno 97B1; Phdo.89A9 (ἐγώ σοι var.); Tht.152D2.

ὀλοφύρονται συνίοντες (A4): His shift from first plural to third plural, despite ἡμῶν, draws attention to the fact that he wants to distance himself from “them.” It is already obvious that he brings them in merely as foil.

ποθοῦντες καὶ ἀναμνῃσκόμενοι (A5) is an hendiadys, or, given the two verbal complements before and after the participles, a “binary construction” (for which cf. Riddell Digest §§204-230, and cf. 378B2-4, 386A2-4, 431A7, 433E12-4A1, 451C5-6, 462B5-6, 493C4-6, 515C4-5, 615B2-5). Some are distributive (n.774) and others are non-distributive (n.2410). The present tense of the participles indicates Cephalus finds their behavior tedious.

περί τε τἀφροδίσια καὶ περὶ πότους τε καὶ εὐωχίας καὶ ἄλλ’ ἄττα ἃ τῶν τοιούτων ἔχεται (A5-7), a list interesting both for its form and its content.

The content and criterion of the list, bodily pleasure, is usually done with three items, food (F), drink (D), and sex (S), usually in that order. So 389E1-2 (D,S;F), 439D6-7 (S,F,D), 580E3-4 (D,F,S); H.Maj.298E1-2 (F,D; S) ; Leg.782E1-3A4 (F,D;S), 783C9-D1 (F,D;S), 831D8-E2 (F,D,S); Phdo 64D3-7 (F,D; S), 81B5-6 (seeing, touching; D,E; S); Phdrs.239A2-B5 (F; D; aposiopesis for S); Prot.353C6 (F,D,S). Drink and food can be done with the pair drink and feast (εὐωχία), as 420E3-4, 488C6; cf.Ep.VII 326D2-3 (F,D,S), and here. Conversely, feasting can cover both drinking and eating, as 411C4. Just so, at 436A11-B1 we have two kinds of pleasure, that of τροφή and that of γέννησις. It appears that Cephalus’s list is the only instance in the corpus besides 439D6-7 where sex is mentioned first.

As to its form, the anaphora of περί and the reiteration of preparatory τε after πότους mark sex as a category apart from drink and revelry (i.e., indicate that the items in the list have the relation A; B1,B2). But since καὶ ἄλλ’ ἄττα would then strictly be generalizing only the latter, we might take the anaphora of περί as having been discontinued to avoid slavish parallelism, and supply it mentally before ἐυωχίας as well as before ἄλλ’ἄττα (cf.Rep.580E3-4). Anaphora regularly marks a subdivision but not always, as a single example will suffice to reveal: Rep.389E1-2, τῶν περὶ πότους καὶ ἀφροδίσια καὶ περὶ ἐδωδὰς ἡδονῶν, where epanalepsis of περί militates against the implicit categorical distinction in order to effect closure.

Cephalus’s list closes with ἄλλ’ ἄττα ἃ τῶν τοιούτων ἔχεται, dismissing a tedious listing of logically coordinate items. The dismissal and closure is more often done by articulating the universal (here it would have been ἡδονή [or ἡδοναί]). ἔχεσθαι can denote the relation of the case (as subject) to the case (as verbal complement in the genitive), as here and at Gorg.494E1ff, Leg.811E1; Rep.389E7; but also the relation of the case (as subject) to the universal (as verbal complement), as at Leg.775D6-7, 859E3-4; Polit.289A; Tht.145A8. For the former relation various metaphors are used: ἀδελφά (Leg.811E4, 820C1, 956E6; Phlb.21B1; Rep.436B1, 558C3; Soph.266B2-3); ἑπόμενα (Leg.815C2-3; Phdrs.239A2; Polit.271B4(cf. ap.crit.); Rep.406D5, 544C; Tht.185D3 (literally denoting an actual sequence); Tim.24C3, 42B1; cf. συνεπόμενα, Phlb.56C5); the pregnantly logical συγγενῆ (Leg.820B9, 897A4; Phlb.11B8 (cf. σύμφωνα, B6); Polit.258D5, 260E2); συνέριθα (Leg.889D4); τὰ ἐφεξῆς (Tim.30C2). For a review of the terminology cf. Ast ad Leg.775D6-7 (VII.20, p.384), Stallb.ad Polit.289A.

With τινῶν (A7)—“so they say”—Cephalus moves from the imitative and onomatopoetic ὀλοφύρονται, to a description of their thoughts, to a virtual quotation of their words.

ἔνιοι (B1) singles out a subgroup of the πλεῖστοι (A4) who will serve as the special target for Cephalus’s criticism. Describing the others has provided him a preamble to presenting his own view.

ὀδύρονται (B1), onomatopoetic like ὀλοφύρονται. Cephalus is mocking his peers for the way they act when their juniors mock them. ὑμνεῖν invokes the image of a nagging wife (cf. her litany at Rep.548C8-E1, and cf. Euthyd.297D4 [referring to 297B9-D2]; Leg.653D5ff; Prot.317A6; Rep.463D7 [approbatory]; Tht.174E5 and 176A1), and is cognate with ὗθλος (on which cf. 336D4, infra).

οἰκείων (B1), the term he had used, with φίλοι, when inviting Socrates to come visit (328D6).

With καὶ ἄλλοις καὶ δὴ καὶ Σοφοκλεῖ ποτε (B7) we have the first of several run-on constructions by Cephalus (cf. C4-5, D5-6). At first the καί with ἄλλοις links these “others” back to Cephalus himself, who by virtue of the irreal construction above has indirectly denied that he is a οὕτως ἔχων. Then, immediately after καὶ ἄλλοις comes καὶ δὴ καί followed by a singular noun, indeed the proper name of a single person, so that καί and ἄλλοις suddenly seem proleptic: “I’ve run into people who aren’t that way, both others and in particular Sophocles.” Yet just as soon as this construction comes into view, we encounter the enclitic adverb ποτὲ leaning back on Σοφοκλεῖ and therefore linking this dative to a future verbal construction, namely παρεγενόμην which comes two words later. Cephalus is eager to get to his special instance of a προπηλακισμός τοῦ γήρως answered by Sophocles’s response, and to set it into sharp relief with the behavior of the age-peers he has just described.

συγγίγνεσθαι (C2), pres., of sustained activity.

αὐτό (C3). Greek, eschewing metaphor and embracing simile, here requires a periphrasis unneeded in English which conversely finds metaphor congenial. Thus αὐτό (which I’ve translated with the demonstrative adjective “that”) plays a strictly expletive role as antecedent to the ὥσπερ clause by which the simile is expressed. ἀποδράς (read by Burnet for ἀποφυγών though found in no ms.) is an improvement made needless by ὥσπερ, which at the same time corroborates the repetition of ἀποφυγών as the hinge of the comparison. The simile itself, ὥσπερ λύττοντά τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην ἀποφυγών, uses τινὰ as a sort of an indefinite article establishing λύττοντα as an attributive participle modifying δεσπότην in tandem with ἄγριον.

εὖ … καὶ τότε … καὶ νῦν οὐχ ἧττον (C4-5): Another run-on statement, where the first καί should be, and is, correlated with the second, but then their parallelism is broken by added words that vitiate the parallelism after all, just as the dative Σοφοκλεῖ, above, had at first appeared to correlate with καὶ ἄλλοις but then, followed by τότε, became the beginning of a new construction requiring the dative for a new reason (παρεγενόμην).

πολλὴ εἰρήνη … καὶ ἐλευθερία (C6-7) is meant to be a formulation of the opposite of Sophocles’s λύττοντά τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην, with εἰρήνη corresponding to the adjj. and ἐλευθερία corresponding to the noun. πολλή is added, as often, to magnify, or complement, quality with quantity. In formulating the opposite of what we are released from—namely, what we are released into—Cephalus perhaps unwittingly suggests the notion of a release from toils (ἀπαλλαγὴ πόνων), a euphemism for dying: cf.ἀπαλλαχθῆναι below, D1.

τῶν γε τοιούτων (C6), another infelicity of expression which at first seems to point back but then when we encounter the asyndeton at C7 (ἐπειδάν αἱ ἐπιθυμίαι ..., where M and correctors of F and D as well as Stobaeus have γάρ, a lectio facilior), its reference is turned forward toward δεσποτῶν πολλῶν καὶ μαινομένων (D1).

Potential ἔστι (D1), incorrectly unaccented in Burnet’s text.

δεσποτῶν πολλῶν καὶ μαινομένων (D1) is Cephalus’s redo of Sophocles’s more interestingly binary construction, λύττοντά τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην, somewhat flattened by his intervening formulation of the opposite, πολλὴ εἰρήνη καὶ ἐλευθερία.

τοιούτῳ (D6) effects another mild change of construction in midstream: “If a person is not balanced, both age and youth treat this sort harshly.” Contrast the alternative expressions, “Both age and youth treat harshly the sort that isn’t balanced,” and “If a person is not balanced, both age and youth treat him harshly.” Cephalus speaks in his apodosis as if he had done the protasis with a relative clause.

εὐφήμει (C2).

καὶ τούτων πέρι καί τῶν γε πρός τοὺς οἰκείους (D2) where γε means “to boot.” For καί γε adding an item unexpected or different from the previous, extending the conception beyond its usual limit and to a new level, cf. Charm.168E9-9A1(καὶ ἔτι γε); Crito 47B9-10; Gorg.450D6-7; H.Maj.295D3, 300E8-301A6; H.Min.368C4; Leg.679A4-6(καὶ μήν γε), 728D8-E1, 746D7-E2(καὶ πρός γε); Phdo 82B7; Rep.328A6(καὶ πρός γε),425B1-4, 438C3(καὶ ἔτι γε), 499B2, 598E1-2, 608B5-7; Tht.156B5, 175E7; and G.Billings, Art of Transition, 69. It appears to be a stylistic affectation of Protagoras’s, e.g. Prot.334AC, 351A, et passim. The anastrophe τούτων πέρι helps to hide an almost unmeaning doubling of the prepositions (i.e., περὶ τῶν πρὸς τοὺς οἰκείους). Cephalus needs the πρός (plus accusative) in order to insinuate that the problem with the οἰκεῖοι is how to meet their attack with a counterattack.

E.g., Ar.Ran.82.

With κόσμιος (D4), a synonym for σώφρων (399E11 and 403A7 and nn. ad locc.; Charm.159B2-3; Leg.802E8-10, 831E6-7), contrast their demonstrative griping (ὀλοφύρονται) and wailing (ὀδύρεσθαι); and with εὔκολος contrast their nervous anxiety (ἀγανακτεῖν) and ceaseless complaining (ὑμνεῖν).

At first Cephalus seems to grant their claim, but then brings us up short and tells us he grants only Socrates’s claim that they won’t grant his claim (οὐ γὰρ ἀποδέχονται).

ἀλλά (E7) baldly changing the subject.

τῷ (E8): the definite article indicates the story is proverbial.

καὶ δή (330A3) moving to the target case.

The dative τοῖς μὴ πλουσίοις (A3) corresponds with the dative in which the Seriphian stood as indirect object of ἀπεκρίνατο. Cephalus assumes that the person who would say he’s happy because rich says so because he’s a poor man who is bearing old age with difficulty; but Socrates has suggested that it is the many who say this, not the poor. Cephalus’s inference is based on the assumption that the criticism is driven by envy.

ἐπιεικής (A6).

εὔκολος ἑαυτῷ (A6), here the opposite of χαλεπῶς φέρων (A5).

The tripartition is both a philosophical and a rhetorical topic. Within the Platonic corpus, explicitly or implicitly, cf. Alc.I 130E8-1C4, 133DE; Cleit.407B1-408A9; Eryx.393C4-D6; Euthyd.279A4-C4; Gorg.467E, 477A8-C5, 503E-504B, 511D1-2, 514A5-515A1ff; Lach.195E10-196A1; Leg.631B6-D1, 660E2-5, 661A5-B4, 697B2-6, 717C2-3, 724A7-B3, 743E3-4A3, 726, 743E, 870B1-6; Lys.207C1-D2; Meno 70A6-B1, 71B6-7, 78C6, 87E-88B; Phdo 68C1-3; Phdrs.239A2-240A8; Phlb.26B5-7(with B1-2), 48C7-E10; Rep.362B2-C6, 366C, 432A4-6, 591C1-D10, 618C8-D5; Symp.205D1-8; Tht.144E5-145B6ff. Outside Plato, cf. Arist.EE init., EN 1098B12-15, MM 1184B1-6, Pol.1323A21-7; Bacchyl.10.35-49; Cic. de fin.3.13.43, TD 5.27.76 & 5.30.85, de off.3.6.28; D.L.3.80-1; Hdt.1.29ff; Lys.1 sub fin.; Plut.de educ.lib.5Cff; Soph.fr.329; Stob.Ecl.2.7(136W); Theogn.255-6; Xen.Oec.1.1.13, Mem.1.5.3-4; In the rhetorical treatises, cf. Arist.Rhet.1360B25-8, ad Alex.1422A4-10 (cf.1440B15-20); Cic.ad Herr.3.10, Part.Or.22.74-5, Top.23.89, and cf. Walz Rhet.Gr.4.738.14-739.1, and Cope ad Arist.Rhet.2.21.5 (2.207-8). Cf. also Thompson ad Meno 87E, Shorey WPS 629 (ad Leg.679B).

ποῖ’ἐπεκτησάμην; (B1): for ποῖος expressing or feigning indignant surprise cf. Charm.174B4; Euthyd.291A1, 304E7; Gorg.490D10, E4; Lach.194D10; Tht.180B8, and n.1491.

τις (B1) mitigating the spatial metaphor of μέσος. Once again Cephalus makes a clever comparison structured by reversing points of view.

νῦν οὔσης (B6), echoing (ἡ) νῦν οὐσία (B4), Cephalus’s word for wealth.

ἀγαπᾶν (B6), expressing moderation and therefore giving moral content to the μέσος metaphor. Presumably Cephalus views his grandfather as too concerned, and his father as too insouciant, about money. Socrates next moves to matter of his namesake’s over-concern.

It is noteworthy that Cephalus is never said to be rich (even 330D2-3 infra falls short of this) though this is all that one notices about him, so that this is his οὐσία. The sacrifices he is performing both before (328C2) and after (331D6-9) this brief conversation are an extravagance that speaks louder than words.

Proleptic τε (C4) leaning back on the dative ταύτῃ, which recalls the dative διπλῇ and thereby indicates that τε will be meaning “both” in a both/and construction. The dative ᾗπερ below (C6) completes the construction.

σπουδάζουσιν (C5) goes beyond ἀσπάζειν and ἀγαπᾶν and suggests that a man like Cephalus’s grandfather, who loves to make money, may neglect his sons. A spendthrift like Cephalus’s father might likewise be faulted for neglecting his sons since he’s wasting the substance they would inherit. Socrates has perhaps revealed the reason why Cephalus wants to be in the middle between these two extremes. The conjecture by Groen van Prinsterer reported by Adam ad loc. (Platon.Prosopog.,111) and the emendation by Hemsterhuis cited in the ap.crit. by Burnet (i.e. Λυσίας for Λυσανίας at 330B5) is unnecessary ingenuity. From what Cephalus here tells us it is unlikely he would name any of his three sons after his father!

ποιήματα (C3): English has forgotten that the poet is etymologically a “maker,” and so the connection between making poems, making children and making money is less obvious; but to a Greek it is right beneath the surface. Thus the joke at Charm.162D2-3, in the context of Charmides’s defense of Critias’s definition of σωφροσύνη as τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν.

κατὰ τὴν χρείαν (C6) introduces the issue of money’s usefulness which is Socrates’s next topic.

συγγενέσθαι (C7), aorist rather than present. Contrast 329C2 above.

πάνυ μὲν οὖν (D1).

τοσόνδε (D1) the “first person” demonstrative adjective of quantity (contrast “second person” τοσοῦτον). Socrates is apologizing for asking one more question about money as if the question were bothering only himself.

ἀπολελαυκέναι (D2) perfect.

Thirty lines (330D4-331B7): cf. 329A1-D6.

ἐγγύς (D5) must go with οἴεσθαι rather than τελευτήσειν, despite the proximity to the afterworld that makes it more visible (below, E3). What the expression loses in logic it gains back in psychological verisimilitude, much like our expression, “death staring him in the face.”

οἵ τε γὰρ λεγόμενοι μῦθοι (D7), with proleptic τε, as above (C4) purchasing in advance a berth for a second step (here begun with καὶ αὐτός, E2). Though τε … καί usually links intimately related things, it may link unlikes also, including pure opposites which are after all two sides of one coin (H.Min.366A5, 369B3-4; Leg.885B1; Tht.199B8); complements (Prot.313D); alternatives (Leg.732C4); subject and object (Phdo 66A6); process and result (Gorg.478C2, Rep.341D8); ground and inference (Phdrs.254A2; Rep.334D3, 335B4); action and purpose (Rep.573B3); example and universal (Phdo 74D4-5; Rep.339E2, 362E5f, 374D1-2, 381A4); abstract and concrete (Phdo 87C2); metaphor and its meaning (Rep.472A5, 555D7-8, 564D10, 609A3-4); meaning and metaphor (Rep.509D2) act and evaluation of act (Gorg.460D2: an hendiadys, really); statement and explanation (Leg.867E6, 868D5; Rep.380C7 [cf. n. ad loc.]); and even strongly contrasting items where we might expect μέν / δέ (Euthyph.6D5 [satirizing perhaps a blind spot of Euthyphro’s]; Leg.687C10-11, 881A5-7; Rep.527A6).

στρέφουσιν αὐτοῦ τὴν ψυχήν (E1-2). Placement of αὐτοῦ emphasizes τὴν ψυχήν as specifying the inward location of the tortured feeling. Two hundred Stephanus pages from now we will again be reading about a painful twisting of the soul, but there it will be τρέπειν rather than στρέφειν (περιτροπή, Book Seven).

δ’οὖν (E4) emphasizing the result by declaring moot any further controversy about the cause.

καὶ αὐτός (E2), in contrast with οἵ τε λεγόμενοι μῦθοι, the widely public stories. αὐτός stresses the solitary aspect of the experience. For the first time Cephalus talks about himself without a comparison to others, for a moment at least (cf. 331B6-7 and n.110, infra).

ὑποψίας … καὶ δείματος (E4) redoes δέος και φροντίς above (D6) in reverse order.

ἑαυτοῦ (E6), subjective genitive with ἀδικήματα. Its early placement again stresses the inward and meditative aspect of the experience that Cephalus is stressing.

Proleptic καί (E6) before ἐκ τῶν ὕπνων corresponds to καί before ζῇ, suggesting that ζῇ is a metonymy for daytime life as opposed to nighttime, when we sleep.

μετὰ κακῆς ἐλπίδος (331A1), poetic: cf. συναορεῖ, 331A7. Cephalus is, and has been, working his language into the idiom of the Pindaric passage he is about to quote: στρέφουσι 330E1 / πολύστροφον, 331A8; ἐλπίδος, 331A1 / ἐλπίς, A8; ἡδεῖα, 331A2 / γλυκεῖα, A6; ἀεὶ πάρεστι, 331A2 / συναορεῖ, A7; μεστὸς γίγνεται, like being flooded at sea, 330E4 / κυβερνᾷ, 331A9. The double agenda, to make his own argument and to create a segue to the quote from Pindar, results in the run-on locution, ἀγαθὴ γηροτρόφος, where he needs ἀγαθὴ to make the contrast with κακῆς above but also wants γηροτρόφος to anticipate the quotation below. Commentators not realizing Cephalus is painting himself into a corner, disagree whether to take ἀγαθὴ with γηροτρόφος or with ἐλπίς.

100

Pindar, frg.214 Bergk, Loeb edd. (both Sandys's and Race's) = 233Boeck = 256Turyn. ἐλπίς is perhaps hypostatized in Pindar’s hymnal manner (Synesius, de insomniis 17: ὕμνησε τὴν Ἐλπίδα ὁ Πίνδαρος). καί with a relative (ὡς) introducing an illustration, is otiose.

101

δικαίως καὶ ὁσίως (A4), terms of moral approbation much more distinct in meaning than the terms he has used up until now, since they represent cardinal virtues.

The cardinal virtues are traditionally four: δικαιοσύνη, σωφροσύνη, ανδρεία, σοφία (e.g. Pindar N.3.76; Xen.Mem.3.9.1-5, 4.6.1-12; and, in non-speculative passages in Plato, Crat.411-414, passim; Euthyd.279B4; Gorg.507AC; Leg.630A8-B2, 631C5-D1, 957E2-3, 964B5-6, 965D1-2; Phdo 69C1-2; Rep.427E10-11, 443E5-4A2, 500D7-8). Sometimes other virtues, particularly ὁσιότης, appear instead of in addition to these four (Gorg.505B2-3, 507AC; Leg.837C6-7; Meno 74A4-6, 88A6ff; Phdo 114E5-5A1; Prot.330B4-6, 349B1-2, cf.359B2-4; Rep.395C4-5), but the quaternion is authoritative enough to support Socrates’s argument for the eliminative argument of Bk 4 below (427E6-432B5ff).

It is of course the burden of much Socratic investigation whether the several traditional virtues constitute a spectrum, a range, a plurality or a unity (cf. e.g. Prot.329B5-E2); but natural usage appears to allow one of them, δικαιοσύνη, to refer to virtue as a whole (Euthyphr.11E4-12D4; Gorg.477C2 (vs.B7-8); Leg.630C6, 957E2-3 (where it is treated as the virtual genus of the other three!); Meno 78D5; Phdrs.276C3, 277D10-E, 278A3-4; Polit.295E4-5; Prot.327B2; and cf. Theogn.147). Sometimes σοφία can be used in this way (e.g., Gorg.467E4; Leg.688B; Rep.585B13-C1), and sometimes the whole group of virtues might be referred to by the pair of these, as Lys.207CD, Soph.247B1-2. By far the commonest way to refer to the whole by a pair is, however, by the pair δικαιοσύνη and ὁσιότης: Gorg.479B8-C1,481A5, 507B2-4, 523A7-B1 (and B2); Meno 78D4; Phdo 75C9-D2; Phlb.39E10-11; Rep.458D8-E2, 461A4, 463D5, 479A5-8, 496D9-E1, 610B6 (cf.615B7), and cf.391A1-2; Tht.172A1-2 (cf.172B2-3). Cf. also the speech of Protagoras, Prot.322C7 (δίκη καὶ αἰδώς), Hes.WD 192, Tyrt.12.39f (=Theogn.937)], and Theogn. 291-2. This seems to be the function and meaning of Cephalus’s pair in the present text. It means what we mean when we say somebody is “decent and god-fearing,” but if we translate this way Socrates will not so easily be able to pick out δικαιοσύνη at 331C2.

102

δή (A10) moving to the target idea.

103

τῷ ἐπιεικεῖ (B1) Burnet needlessly reads καὶ κόσμιοι in addition, on very weak authority (one of three mss. of Stobaeus).

104

ἐξαπατῆσαι ἢ ψεύσασθαι (B2) denotes fraud, since deception and lying barely qualify as ἀδικήματα unless one profits from them. In law the elements of fraud are three: (1) intentional (2) deception for (3) gain.

105

The position of ἄκοντα (B2) indicates that the first μηδέ is not corresponsive with the second but emphatic. The point of this detail is not that one might have done the misdeed unwittingly—for such an error conscience is blind and wealth therefore useless—but that one can always afford to “err on the side of caution.” Looking back over one’s life one might recall an incident where he was “forced” to tell a “white lie” that, because white, was not justiciable. Now he can clear his conscience by making reparation for it. For ἄκων meaning against the will rather than unwittingly, cf. Arist.NE 1110B18,ff.

106

The construction (B1-4) is somewhat telescoped. According to the syntactical order, the coordinate conjunction μηδ’αὖ links the infinitive ἀπιέναι with the infinitives ἐξαπατῆσαι ἢ ψεύσασθαι, but in terms of sense the latter infinitives, describing unjust acts, are continued by the participle ὀφείλοντα as if in analepsis (though in all strictness it is not unjust to owe, but to leave never having paid). The αὖ is therefore mildly illative.

107

ἔπειτα (B3) can be used (as also εἶτα) to link a circumstantial participle to an ordinate verb (here, ἀπιέναι), to stress that regardless of the nature of the participial circumstance the action of the participle precedes that of the ordinate verb (‘having done this he then [ἔπειτα] does that:’ cf. Phdo 70E7, 82C8). The reason for making the temporal sequence explicit is often that the occurrence of the first event should have or might have obviated the occurrence of the second, in which case the circumstantial participle is concessive and ἔπειτα means “still” instead of “then,” as at Apol.20C7; Charm.163A7; Gorg.456D7, 457B1 (remembered by Socrates at 460D3), 461E3, 519E5, 527D6; Lach.192B7; Phdo 90D1 (cf. Burnet ad loc.); Prot.341E4, 343D1, 358C1; Rep.336E8, 337E5 [and n.297 ad loc.], 434B1). My explanation is based on Stallbaum’s remarks ad Phdo.70E.

108

θεῷ θυσίας τινὰς ἢ ἀνθρώπῳ χρήματα (B2-3): Dividing the debt into debts to gods and debts to men (sacrifices and money) continues the dyadic representation of virtuous living that Cephalus had begun with δικαίως καὶ ὁσίως above, 331A4.

109

συμβάλλεται (B5) has mercantile overtones (cf. συμβόλαια, 333A12, infra).

110

From χρησιμώτατον (B7) it is clear that Cephalus is talking about buying one’s way out of injustices in this world in order to avoid the more heinous penalties fabled to take place in the other. The range of injustices that can be so recompensed, namely, fraud and forfeiture, is however severely narrow. Cephalus is groping to extend the importance of what he has—wealth—to buy off the one thing he cannot manage to accept—his own demise. Beneath the surface old age has deprived him of his composure after all. He closes by contrasting himself with a rich man without his wits about him, who would presumably keep the money he owes or stole.

111

πάγκαλως … λέγεις (C1).

112

τοῦτο δ’αὐτό (C1) undercuts his general praise of the speech in a way we recognize as Socratic. He introduces his objection gently, by isolating (αὐτό, 331C1) a part of what Cephalus has said; but just as in the case of the σμικρόν τι of the Protagoras (329B6), to answer the question he asks will require, motivate, structure and constitute the entirety of the ensuing conversation.

113

τὴν δικαιοσύνην (C2): Without apology Socrates chooses only δικαίως from Cephalus’s (perhaps loosely intended) doublet, δίκαίως καὶ ὁσίως (A4: cf. n. ad loc.), and then isolates it so as to make it a topic for discussion (using τοῦτο δ’ἀυτό: cf. Gorg.453B2 for the expression and the idea, and cf. n.268 ad 336C6-D2, infra). Cephalus is more interested in piety, however, and perhaps more interested in acting piously than talking about it, and so he takes the first opportunity to depart πρὸς τὰ ἱερά (331D9).

114

αὐτὰ ταῦτα (C4), without further qualification, in and by themselves.

115

δικαίως / ἀδίκως (C4): The alternatives as usual in moral contexts ignore the tertium. Cf. n.160, infra.

116

τοιόνδε (C5), “first person” demonstrative adjective of quality: cf. τοσόνδε, 330D1.

117

φίλου ἀνδρός (C6), here a natural and unexceptional specification, will soon (332A9) have a dispositive role.

118

ἀπαιτοῖ (C6).

119

μανείς (C6) suggests only a passing emotional state, not the permanent insanity one often finds in translations. μὴ σωφρόνως ἀπαιτοῦντι (E9 and 332A4-5) is even more circumstantial since it dispenses with etiology. What is at stake in the distinction is Socrates’s stress on the essentially transient or “situational” aspect of human affairs.

120

οὐδ’αὖ (C8): being a friend he would neither give it back nor tell him the truth about where it is, unlike the proverbial whistle-blower whose moral scrupulosity requires him to ruin his associates. οὐδ’αὖ echoes μηδ’αὖ at B2: Socrates’s responses characteristically reveal him to be a good listener. Cf. 340C9 and n.

121

πάντα ἐθέλων τἀληθῆ λέγειν (C8-9) redoes μηδὲ ἄκοντά τινα ἐξαπατῆσαι ἢ ψεύσασθαι (B1-2).

122

Socrates’s term is ὅρος (D2). The metaphor is that of a boundary line, by lying within which something would be just.

123

παραδιδόναι (D6), one converse of παραλαμβάνειν (330A8, B4). The other is καταλείπειν (330B6), which conceives of the subject having died.

124

ὑμῖν (D6) may address the whole group and not just the two to whom he is talking.

125

ἤδη (D7).

126

τῶν ἱερῶν ἐπιμεληθῆναι (D7). It would seem unlikely that, but would be quite significant if, Cephalus intends now to perform another sacrifice having completed one just moments before (328C2). Nobody asks.

127

γε (D8) jokingly asserts or acknowledges his rights to this dubious inheritance.

128

ἅμα (D9).

129

κληρονόμος (D8): the conceit of inheritance nicely fits the usual protocol of Socratic discourse whereby the role of answerer can be passed on to another. Cf. Charm.162E; Phlb.12A; Prot.331A. Cf. also the notion of paying interest on an account deferred: 504B, infra.

130

τὸ τὰ ὀφειλόμενα ἑκάστῳ ἀποδιδόναι δίκαιον (E3-4). No extant line of Simonides says this, in these or so many words. Adam’s inferences (ad.loc.) from the absence of such are therefore baseless.

131

μέντοι (E6) heaped on μέντοι (E5).

132

ὁτῳοῦν (E9) is a strong asseveration.

133

μή (E9) makes the circumstantial participle conditional, so that together with ὁτῳοῦν we have the protasis of a present general condition (ἀποδιδόναι representing a present indicative in the apodosis).

134

καίτοι γε ὀφειλόμενόν που (332A1): The intimate relationship between “ought” and “own” is a blind spot that goes back to the I.E. root *εικ, whence Eigentum, for which compare the Latinate calque, “property.”

135

δέ γε (A4) introducing a minor premise. The bare optative may be understood either as representing subjunctive with ἄν in a present general condition (note generalizing ὁπωστιοῦν, echoing ὁτῳοῦν, 331E9) in virtual past tense oratio obliqua (referring to the time “we asserted” this denial [i.e., 331C5-8: cf.331E8]), or more easily as the protasis of a past general condition (ἦν to be understood with ἀποδοτέον), Socrates treating the present general version of the assertion just above (331E9f) as equivalent to the future less vivid version he had used in 331C5-9, and then casting it into the past because when he asserted it.

Placing the propositional contents of a premise into the past in order to indicate that it was agreed to earlier (Smyth’s “philosophical imperfect,” §1903) is the usual dialogic shorthand when the “questioner” is re-adducing what the “answerer” has already agreed to (cf.n.582 ad 350C7). The tense, that is, reminds the “answerer” that he must agree or grant the point, or else change his position. Adam’s “oratio obliqua of self-quotation” (ad loc.) is a misleading portrayal of the idiom, and Goodwin’s converting the sentence into a future less vivid condition (GMT §555) misses it entirely.

136

τὰ ὀφειλόμενα (A8): The proleptic placement suggests that the controversial aspect of Simonides’s assertion might lie in these words; and Polemarchus picks up the suggestion by telling us what Simonides thinks ὀφείλειν ought to mean in this connection (A9-10).

137

μηδέν (A10) is emphatic: “οὐ denies the fact, μή the conception” (Gildersleeve): cf. 334D7, 345D7, 350A3, 397A12, 412E2 (μηδένι), 484A1, etc., and Smyth §2734.

138

μανθάνω (A11), idiomatic: “I get it.” The speaker announces he has perceived why or with what warrant his interlocutor has said what he has just said, and then (with ὅτι) states what this is (cf. 372E2 and n.1050).Always included is a more or less voluntary indication to the interlocutor that his meaning was not immediately evident, but now is perhaps too evident: Polemarchus has foisted conventional morality onto the wisdom poet!

139

χρυσίον (A12): the weapon has been replaced by an item one more usually places into another’s custody.

140

ἐάνπερ (A12).

141

ὅ γε ὀφείλεται αὐτοῖς (B6): With limitative γε he acknowledges that the term ὀφειλόμενον needs to be newly delimited, and then, with δέ and repeated γε, he gives the new delimitation. Against the δέ γε of all the mss., Adam and Shorey read δέ (a scribitur in Ven.184 preferred by Bekker, though Burnet and Chambry do not even place it into their app.critt.) arguing that the collocation δέ γε is inappropriate here, but the second γε, like the third one Polemarchus adds two words later, merely continues the force of the first one.

142

The suddenness is in ἄρα (B9); the feigning is in αἰνίττεσθαι, which like μανθάνειν above provides Socrates a means to show the answerer what he is freighted with defending (“answering for”). After all, Polemarchus has advocated the position of Simonides on the poet’s authority (cf. πείθεσθαι, 331D5). He is arguing Simonides’s position and Socrates has made Polemarchus responsible for the position himself only to the extent that Polemarchus is telling what about Simonides’s statement he approves of. When Polemarchus under the force of the ἔλεγχος has to modify Simonides’s position, in all likelihood he is improvising a solution without owning up that the solution is his own. If so, attempts to find lines in Simonides that represent this second position (e.g. Adam [who had helped Polemarchus by treating even his first citation of Simonides’s position as being this second one despite the words in Plato’s text {n.ad 331E31}] citing Xen.Hiero 2.2) are unneeded.

143

διενοεῖτο (C1).

144

τὸ προσῆκον ἑκάστῳ ἀποδιδόναι (C2): Socrates carefully repeats Polemarchus’s quotation of Simonides verbatim (331E3-4), changing only this one word, as if it were mere semantics (ὠνόμασεν, C3).

145

ἀλλὰ τί οἴει (C4). The emendations don’t help. Polemarchus seems to mean, “Obviously—what else do you think?” boasting that he himself understood all along when certainly he did not. Socrates in his usual manner ignores the bait and takes his interlocutor seriously (here, literally), and tells him what he thinks by starting an imaginary elenchus of Simonides.

146

Solitary as before, and self-fulfilling as we now know.

147

ἐξαγγέλλεις, 328E7; πυθοίμην, 328E4; πυνθάνεσθαι, 328E2.

148

ἡ τίσιν οὖν τί ἀποδιδοῦσα ὀφειλόμενον καὶ προσῆκον τέχνη ἰατρικὴ καλεῖται; (C6-7). The καί in ὀφειλόμενον καὶ προσῆκον is exegetical: “what’s ‘owed,’ i.e., what’s appropriate, which is what he meant.” Socrates re-uses this formula below (C11). The question introduces a matrix to be filled in with examples.

149

δῆλον ὅτι (C9). More often Socrates’s interlocutor does not understand how to fill in the matrix: e.g. 382A7-9, 602C1-5. Cf. also 353C5-6, 510C2, 597D13, 601E5, 618C8-D5.

150

I.e, the προσῆκον.

151

ἡ τοῖς ὄψοις τὰ ἡδύσματα (D1). The exact meaning of ὄψον will become important below (372C2).

152

οὖν δή (D2): That he has moved on to the target is not only revealed by the content of the question but is also announced by formal “discourse markers,” here the connective particle οὖν and the δή that indicates a before-and-after point in the discourse (for which compare ἤδη). For δή used in this way with connective particle δέ, cf. Alc.I 111E11; Charm.169E4; Leg.963B4; Phdo 65A9; Prot.311D1, 312A1, 312E2; Rep.333A10, 342A1, 349C4, 439A1, 470E4, 523E3; Soph.221D1; Thg.123C6, 123D15, 126C3; Tht.185C4 (returning to true subject after an irreal warmup), 189A6. With connective ἀλλὰ, Rep.335C14; with connective τε, Rep.439D2-3; without connective, Charm.166B5; Symp.199E6.

For δή announcing the conclusion of an argument ex contrariis, Rep.374C2; of a sorites, Rep.351E6; of an analogy (which is tantamount to induction from one case), Leg.808D3, 962A9, cf.899B3; Polit.294E4, 296C4, 296C8. The strength of this particle to indicate the move to the target is shown in Rep.427D1, where it resumes a topic that has not been mentioned for pages. Contrast δὲ δή introducing surprised question, Gorg. 452B4, 452C3 (and Denniston ad loc., 59); and marking a transition not to the target but (like δή infixed in lists [supra, n.34]) to a new class of examples: Crito 49C2.

153

N.b., εἰ … δεῖ ἀκολουθεῖν … τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν εἰρημένοις (D4-5).

154

Re-use of an exemplary case as a stepping stone to a new or higher level is a common pedagogical technique in real life and in the Socratic epagoge. Crat.387-8 (τέμνειν); Leg.631C1-D1 (dovetailing by means of πλοῦτος), 694E6-7 (ποίμνια / πρόβατα), 906C4-6 (adapting material from the list of ἄρχοντες at 905E); Minos 313B-314,ff (re-use of Phoenix); Phdrs.268A8-269D8 (re-use of Pericles); Tht.184D7ff and 185A4ff (eyes and ears); Symp.199D (re-use of πατήρ).

155

Note also that though he repeats the doctor he does not repeat the cook (μάγειρος, C11-12). The teacher must always move on to new illustrative examples lest a single example begin to accrue the dignity of the precept. By far the most natural pattern in the use of exemplary material as the argument proceeds forward is therefore “overlapping substitution:” 352D8-353E11(eyes/ears are repeated but the knife is dropped), 419A5-6 (redone at 420E1-421A2), 444C5-E6ff, 479A1-8 (cf.475E9-6A5); Charm.165E-166B (AB in question and AC in answer), 170AC (sim.); Gorg.450D6-7 redone at 451B1ff (where πεττευτική is dropped); Leg.643B7-C2, 709A3-7 and B2-3, 961D1-962A9; Phdo 70E4-71A10 (redone with overlap substitution at 71B2); Prot.311B5-C7 (cf.E2-3), 319BD; Symp.200BD; Tht.147B (and Campbell, with more examples, ad loc., defended the manuscripts against a streamlining emendation: “It is in Plato’s manner to surprise us with a fresh example at each step of the argument instead of dwelling upon one already adduced”). Leg.889B6-8 and 892B3-4 is noteworthy since the latter passage purports to refer back to the former but alters the contents with overlapping substitution.

156

ἐν τῷ προσπολεμεῖν καὶ ἐν τῷ συμμάχειν ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ (E5).

157

Reading προσπολεμεῖν (E5) with mss. ADM rather than the προπολεμεῖν of F (which would be an exegetical synonym for συμμάχειν and like κάμνοντας above [D10] would specify only the treatment of friends). Chiastic order between question and answer (AB,BA) is just as natural as, but more common than, repetition of the order of the question in the answer (AB,AB). It is a case of the chiasm of before and after (cf. n.14). Adam’s note reveals a presumption that epagogic word order must observe the niceties of symmetry, which we are taking pains herewith to disprove.

158

ἆρα (E11) marking the target by making it a question, the two examples being presented as statements. The καὶ (ibid.) is correlative.

159

The single expression πολεμοῦσι (E11) covers both συμμάχειν and προσπολεμεῖν, just as κίνδυνος above had covered both salvation and wreckage.

160

ἄχρηστος (E11) had been used in the two example-statements (explicit in E7; understood in E9), but when it is used with ὁ δίκαιος it suddenly sounds different and has a new connotation of failing to be a χρήσιμος ἀνήρ. χρήσιμος, like δίκαιος, and like Cephalus’s terms κόσμιος (329D4) and ἐπιεικής (330A5, 331B1), are terms widely used in causal speech. Although their users might not be able to define justice or usefulness, the terms fall easily from their lips as terms of approbation (just as the of them is merely an insult). In the vocabulary of moral valuation the tertium is often ignored in this way (viz. when one says a man is not moral he most often means by a litotes to say that he is immoral).

161

τοῦτο (E12) referring to the proximate question, in contrast to the ones that came before. It is narrow but true to say that the questioner’s job in a dialectical conversation is to secure yes-answers (so Arist.Topics: cf. B.Einarson AJP 57[1936]33-54 and 151-72), since yes answers (and, of course, no-answers to questions that expect no) allow him to continue accumulating the propositions that will constitute a συμπέρασμα. At the same time, the answerer expects to say yes—that is, he expects to be asked questions whose answer is obvious, and indeed must give the obvious answer (H.Maj.304A3, cf. Erastae 138DE)—and then he suddenly discovers he has granted enough to be refuted; he must answer yes if the proposition is a correct one. Dialectical questioning fails when the answerer says no, and it turns to eristic when the answerer tries to say no.

162

Cf. 333E1ff. Many of Socrates’s elenchi end, as this one does, in a reductio ad absurdum. The result is absurd not because it contradicts another of the answerer’s premises (in this case he will have a choice which one to rescind or modify) but because it contradicts a proposition absurd to deny. Since it is never necessary to assert a proposition that “goes without saying” such propositions remain implicit until as here an argument leads to their contradictory.

163

ἄρα (E13).

164

The force of καὶ γάρ (333A2), as at 340A9 and Euthyph.14A1, is to concede the truth of the answer only to deny its value as an answer: “To say justice is useful in peace tells me little, since farming is also useful—useful in its case at least (γε) for the acquisition of food.”

165

πρός γε καρποῦ κτῆσιν (A4) Socrates gently indicates the connection by using πρός plus accusative again, emphasized by γε.

166

Note δὲ δή (A10).

167

In using πρός in his answer (A12) he follows suit with the form of the question.

168

δέ (A13): a connective instead of an interrogative particle at the beginning of his “question” presumes his interlocutor knows he will be asking a question, as often (335B6, 376E11, 377A1). Compare ἄν “carried forward” (cf.382D11 and n.1306) Contrast ἆρ’ οὖν which he next uses.

169

This is corroborated in the sequel, which focusses on the role of the κοινωνός. The point of the substitution is that contractual relationships require fairness but partnerships presume it. D.J.Allen’s notion of a “partnership between buyer and seller” makes nonsense of all three of these terms.

170

δῆτα (A14) acknowledges that he is giving the response Socrates is expecting, and thus indicates he believes that Socrates’s presumption to be clarifying his meaning is correct.

171

Compare 333B1-2 (ἆρ’ οὖν ὁ δίκαιος ἀγαθὸς καὶ χρήσιμος κοινωνὸς εἰς πεττῶν θέσιν) with 332D10-11 (τίς δυνατώτατος κάμνοντας φίλους εὖ ποιεῖν καὶ ἐχθροὺς κακῶς πρὸς νόσον καὶ ὑγιείαν). We have χρήσιμος instead of δυνατός, and εἰς instead of πρός; and instead of the “helping friends and harming enemies” formula we have simply “partnership” (κοινωνός).

172

That the κοινωνός is a friend is implicit. Note that in addition to being χρήσιμος the κοινωνός is stipulated to be ἀγαθός (B1, the adjective being attributive). Addition of this term is meant to memorialize Polemarchus’s moral aversion to the inference that the δίκαιος might be ἄχρηστος. Socrates echoes the stipulation in the subsequent example-questions (ἀμείνων [B5,B7]), but then drops it.

173

What makes it obvious is the etymological connection between πεττεία and πεττευτικός. As there is a rhetorical, there is also a dialectical figura etymologica. This is the first one we have encountered in the dialogue so far. Often a superficial use of etymology leads to error: Rep.348C5 (treating κακοηθεία as the opposite of εὐηθεία); 439E5 (θυμοειδές / ἐπιθυμία). Cf. n. ad 375A2-3.

174

Playing draughts is not a throwaway item, however. It is one of Socrates’s favorite examples for mental activity, respectable therefore in some respects although not in others. It was invented by Theuth alongside mathematics and writing (Phdrs.274CD); it enjoys pride of place therefore alongside geometry and the rest (Gorg.450D6-7 [cf. Dodds ad loc.]; Leg.820C7, 820D1-2; Polit.299E1). It can stand for a kind of knowledge that does not improve the soul (Charm.174B), and a kind of knowledge that jokingly vies with virtue for being hard to teach (Alc.I, 110E). At 374C5-7 below it is compared with the art of war in an a fortiori argument.

175

ἀλλά (B4) introduces the question because like the last one it is designed to incite resistance and get a “No” answer.

176

τοῦ οἰκοδομικοῦ (B5): In place of a choice between two we have a comparison between two, with comparative adjectives replacing adjectives in the positive grade, and a genitive of comparison replacing an ἤ (B2) that had meant “or else.”

177

In English we do refer to a mason as a bricklayer but never to a chessplayer as a pawnplacer.

178

τε (B8) is noteworthy, as an unobtrusive (because enclitic) wedge making a place for an otherwise unexpected καί which in turn (because proclitic) creates a berth for the new item, cithera-playing. For this τε cf. Leg.633C1.

For other instances of clinching the point with an accelerated last minute addition of exemplary material after the conclusion is reached, cf. Charm.168E9f; Crito 47B9-10 (eating and drinking added [with γε]); Lach.193AC (a single non-military example); Leg.658A7 (ἱππικόν added to imitate the indiscriminateness of the contest maker), 716D2-3 (but note mss.); Lysis 220A1-6; Phdo 64D (clothes), 96D8-E1; Polit.284E4-5, 293B5-6 (εἴτε καὶ αὐξάνοντες); Prot.332B6-C8 (where adding τῇ φωνῇ clinches the point by disambiguating the last example), 356C5-8 (adding acoustics); Rep.340D2-7 (γραμματιστής), 396A8-B7 (and n. ), 475E1(τεχνυδρίων added after harder parallels are excluded).

Sometimes the last minute addition actually begins a transition to something new, as when at Gorg.475A1-2 the addition of the new item μαθήματα to the list from 474D3-4 moves the interlocutor to volunteer a generalization; or as when the addition of γυμναστής at Leg.720E2-3 begins to free us from the paradigm of the doctor so that we can move on to that of the lawgiver; or as when the elaboration of the conclusion elicits a transitional objection from Glaucon, at Rep.475B11-C8. Compare also the addition of sleeping and waking to the other pairs of opposites at Phdo 71C1-2 and, at Charm.161D-162A, the re-instantiation of the principle reached with new examples that usher in the next step of the argument.

Related is the better known and much more commonly employed technique, dubbed “cumulative illustration” by Campbell (Rep.2.259), the technique of moving through exemplary material at an accelerated rate before drawing the conclusion (e.g., Rep.438B4-C4, 507C1-5), including generalization or lavishing particularization of the last item (e.g., Phdo 70E6-71A10; Phileb.21D9-10). For a fuller treatment of this range of phenomena cf. n.197)

179

We are right back at the dilemma of placing one’s possessions in the hands of another (παρακαταθέσθαι, 331E9 and 332A12), except that there it was gold (332A12) and here it is silver. Does Polemarchus not yet realize this?

180

πλήν γ’ ἴσως (B11).

181

I.e., when it is to be spent rather than placed. Clearly Polemarchus did not mean by θέσις ἀργυμίου a decision whose hands to place it in!

182

κοινῇ (B12), an adverb, reproduces κοινωνός.

183

That the κοινωνός is a consultant, rather than a client or a venture partner with whom one might consummate a συμβόλαιον, becomes crystal clear at this point, and with it the need to clarify συμβόλαια with κοινωνήματα at A13.

184

πρὸς τὸ χρῆσθαι (B11): Socrates’s objection-question-form places χρῆσθαι, as a new general heading, into the position of the εἰς τί (for which he has reverted to πρὸς τί) and then instantiates it (buying or selling a horse), and suggests which κοινωνός would be better than the just man in that instance (ὁ ἱππικός). Notably, the instantiation is done with a present general conditional protasis, itself introduced in a mild anacoluthon which I have reproduced in my paraphrase (ὥσπερ [vel.sim.] is wanting).

185

καὶ μὴν... γε (C3), following πλήν γε in the previous question, shows that this question threatens further (καί) damage to Polemarchus’s position.

186

ὁ ναυπηγὸς ἢ ὁ κυβερνήτης (C3): the acceleration gotten by suggesting two terms when only one is needed is ominous.

187

Announced by οὖν (C5).

188

In its first articulation the criterion was τὸ χρήσιμον (332E13), arising as an objection to ἄχρηστος (332E11), which Polemarchus found morally derogatory. Socrates humored this objection by adding ἀγαθός to χρήσιμος at B1 (cf. n. ad loc.). In his next question he retained both adjectives in a comparative formulation (B4-5), and in the next he reduced them to the single comparative ἀμείνων (B7). In the last phase of the argument (B11-here) his question-form did not need to make the adjective explicit and he used none (C1: ὁ ἱππικός [sc.ἀμείνων κοινωνός ἐστι]); ὁ ναυπηγὸς ἢ ὁ κυβερνήτης [sc. ἀμείνονες κοινωνοί εἰσιν]). Here, as is appropriate in the definitive and concluding question (which we should call the συμπέρασμα), he reverts to the original formulation, speaks amply, and leaves out the “scire licets.”

189

ἢ χρυσίῳ (C5): an instance of the technique noted above (n.1898), where the last minute addition facilitates a transition, this time a reversion to the original formulation of 332A11-B3.

190

παρακαταθέσθαι καὶ σῶν εἶναι (C7): cf. 331E9 and 332A12. The double infinitive describes the activities of the two κοινωνοί, one man putting it into the custody of the other and the other keeping it safe for him.

191

ἄρα with ὅταν (C11).

192

πάνυ γε (C10) vs. κινδυνεύει (D2).

193

καὶ ὅταν (D3).

194

καὶ κοινῇ καὶ ἰδίᾳ (D4). The action is useful to the depositor, but the usefulness is inherent within the act of guarding, whoever does it.

195

φαίνεται (D5).

196

φήσεις (D6), assert or declare to be true a proposition voiced by another, as at 377E8, whence οὔ φημι means “deny.”

197

Note the pacing of the examples, first one (C11f), and then another with expanded articulation of the question (expanded both by καὶ κοινῇ καὶ ἰδίᾳ and by the ὅταν δέ clause, D3-4), then the expanded articulation applied to two examples simultaneously (D6-8), then the generalization (D10-11).Moreover, the new examples, shield and lyre, range back and re-use previous exemplary material (cithera, B8; war, 332E5), widening thereby the application of the current result.

For this and other pacing strategies cf.(with notes) 334C12, 353C5-6, 397E6-7, 437B1-4, 438B4-C4, 442E4-3A10, 455E6-6A12 (where note the freedom in the development of cases), 507C1-5; Charm.168BD, 173DE; Crat.390B1-C5; Euthyd.298D; Gorg.495E6-6B5; Ion 540B6-D2; Leg.643B8-C1, 709B2-3; Phdo 70E6-71A10, 75C9-D2ff, 90A4-9, 105D13ff; Soph.258B10-C3 (where the mss. readings exhibit pacing and emendation is unnecessary); Tht.188D7-9A14; Tim.82A8-B2.

198

φυλάττειν (D6, repeated from D3), is here elaborated by καὶ μηδὲν χρῆσθαι adduced from C8 as the original warrant for φυλάττειν at D3, with χρῆσθαι placed at the end of the protasis so as to maximize the connection with the usefulness of justice, here the first word of the apodosis (D7). The noose tightens.

199

ἀνάγκη (D9): The necessity he refers to pertains only to the “analytic” truths that a musician uses the lyre and a soldier the shield. ἀναγκή and ἀναγκαῖον are often used of logical truths and truths by definition (353E4, 443C3, 458D2; Charm.168C3; Phdo 87E1; Prot.332B1). By a conversational convention he agrees to the whole by agreeing to the last (as 374D7, 433C3, 462D4, 463B13, 477E2, 495C7, 529D4-6, and 611A10 [τοῦτο denying the whole by denying the last]; Gorg.453D10-11; Prot.333E5-4A2, 354B), to which compare the convention of answering a series of questions in reverse order (as Charm.169D5-8, D9; Euthyph.2B3, 10B3; Leg.890E6ff [and England ad loc.]; Phlb.54A6; Rep.462D6-7). Cf. Riddell, Digest §§305-6.

200

οὐκ … πάνυ γέ τι σπουδαῖον (E1): From above (332E11-12), that justice should be useless is an absurdity. That same conclusion is here mitigated by understatement.

201

τόδε τι (E3): It is noteworthy that he does not pause to secure the answerer’s agreement to the conclusion but moves on, owning up to the fact that it is with an idea of his own (first person demonstrative). Soon enough we will see where he is going, and what is going on.

202

ἐν μάχῃ εἴτε πυκτικῇ εἴτε τινὶ καὶ ἄλλῃ (E3-4) chooses either the wrong genus (μάχῃ should have been ἀγῶνι) or the wrong species (πυκτικῇ should have been ὁπλητικῇ) but then quickly makes the error moot by generalizing with εἴτε τινὶ καὶ ἄλλῃ. Campbell’s comment that πυκτική is “added to vary the notion of μάχη from ὁπλητική,” notices the awkwardness, but his solution doesn’t help since by playing the role of the genus, μάχη retains more of ὁπλητική than it leaves behind.

203

I place a comma after λαθεῖν and read ἐμποιῆσαι (E7), with all mss. To take νόσον as the object of λαθεῖν (Jowett ad loc. calls it a personification) is easier than breaking the parallelism of οὗτος with οὗτος above and ὅσπερ below, and avoids the awkward suggestion that λαθεῖν rather than ἐμποιῆσαι is being contrasted with φυλάξασθαι. Cf. κλέψαι below taking πράξεις. The parallelism is improved by reading καί before ἐμποιῆσαι, read by Stallbaum with the note “in multis codicis abest.” It is conversely reported by Adam as the reading of the corrector of Venetus 185 (Burnet’s D) and of the Monacensis 237. Slings attributes it only to the former. All notice of the reading has since been dropped in Burnet and in Chambry.

204

τὰ τῶν πολεμίων ([sc.ἀγαθὸς] κλέψαι) καὶ βουλεύματα καὶ τὰς ἄλλας πράξεις (334A2-3), another awkward list due to καί proleptic with βουλεύματα in interrupted attributive position after τά, but followed by correlative καί and a new article that renews the attributive position. κλέψαι is as awkward taking τὰς πράξεις (esp. after taking τὰ βουλεύματα) as λαθεῖν was taking νόσον above. To point out with Campbell (ad loc.) that κλέψαι can mean steal as well as overtake recognizes the problem but burdens us with a far-fetched zeugma.

205

ἀναπέφανται (A10). Both the prefix and the tense express surprise at the conclusion.

While φαίνεσθαι with infinitive in oratio obliqua designates uncertainty, or the sense that more thinking is needed, with the participle (the construction with verbs of perception) it can designate an assertion as “perceived” (to be true) at some moment during or at some place in the dialectical process and rethinking is no longer necessary. This dialectical use of the verb is one of many evidences that the conversation is viewed as an event or an experience. To think of the contents of an ongoing conversation in this way and to “follow the logos whithersoever it may lead” resembles and anticipates Hegel’s concept of phenomenology. Cf. n.1454.

For instances of the term, cf. Alc.I 112D8-9; Charm.154D4-5, 172A8; Crat.387D1-2; Crito 48D3; Gorg.460E1-2, 481B5, 495B4-5, 508E7, 517A4; Euthyd.282A2, 289A3, 297A6; Euthyph.9C8; H.Maj.291C8, 294E7-9 (with elaboration of the metaphor), 300D6 and 7, 302D6; H.Min.369B3, 371E7 (with ἄρτι); Ion 541E8; Lach.193D2 (with ἐν τῷ πρόσθεν); Leg.646D8, 896C6; Lys.220A4, 220E3, 220E4; Phdo 94C9 (with νῦν); Phdrs.245C2, 261D7-8; Prot.333B5-6, 355B6, 357A6, 360C3; Rep.335E5, 336A9-10, 350C10, 441A5-6, 445B3-4, 587A13, 612D8; Soph.232B3-4, 233C11, 258A7-8, 260B7-8, 264C1; Tht.179B8-9, 181B2, 181E6. 190E3, 5. It can be so used absolutely (without oratio obliqua): Charm.166D9 (prob. = “as it appears to you at the moment” cf.Rep.337C5), 175B1; Crito 46D6; Euthyd.289D10; Gorg.527E2; Rep.434E3-5A3 (elaborating the metaphor), 484A2, 487B7, 491C8, 602D6; Soph.231B6-7 (παραφανέντι; cf.φάντασμα, infra 232A2-3), 256D4, 264C11; Tht.157D4, 183A4, 199C8 (παραφαίνεσθαι). It can be used in a personal construction (e.g., “We will become obvious being wrong”): Euthyd.282A2; 294E7-9; Leg.898D6-7; Lys.220B1; Prot.313C2; Tht.165C8, 181B2. Construction with the participle of εἶναι is often not made explicit: Crito 48C1; Gorg.457D4 (with νῦν), 478E1, 479D2, 508E7 (where the metaphor is spatial rather than temporal); Euthyd.292B7; H.Maj.293B5, 297C6 (mildly contrasted with δοκεῖν), 297D3 (with ἄρτι), 303E12 (with νυνδή); H.Min.375D5; Leg.896B1, 899B6; Lys.218B5; Phdo 76A1; Phlb.11D11, E1, 21A1, 31A5, 66A9, 66E8, 67A3; Polit.268B8, 305C10; Prot.351E5, 355B6; Rep.383A1, 351A4, 440E2, 464B5, 478D11-12, 584A2 and 3 (cf.φαντάσματα, infra A7-10), 602D6, 611B7; Soph.224D2, 233C8; Tht.151E2, 157D3 (cf.φάντασμα, 155A2). At Rep.454D it takes participle in the μέν and infinitive in the δέ clause, the latter perhaps by an attraction from the ensuing articular infinitives.

For dialectical φάινεσθαι with prefix ἀνα- acknowledging the change of perspective caused by the discovery, cf. Charm.175D5 (after B1); Gorg.514A4, H.Min.369B3, Ion 541E8; Leg.896B1; Lys.220E4; Polit.305C10; Rep.350C10, 484A2, 487B7; Soph.224D2, 233C11, 260B7-8; Tht.157D3,164C3. For use of the perfect πεφάσθαι cf. Rep.410A6, 464B5, 478D11-12; Soph.231B9-C2, 264C1; for ἀναπεφάσθαι cf. Charm.160D3, 172A8; H.Min.369B3, Phdrs.245E2, 261D7-8; Rep.350C10; Soph.233C11. With prefix προ- cf. 545B1, Charm.173A3.

There is a “dialectical” γίγνεσθαι as well, depicting a position as arising (as a truth) in the dialectical process (409E2; Gorg.459A7, 478D7, 494D7, 512D5; Lys.219B7; etc.). The two idioms are combined at Tht.186E12: καταφανέστατον γέγονεν ὄν.

206

καὶ κινδυνεύεις … μεμαθηκέναι αὐτό (A10-11): As the sloppy language indicates the argument is merely a jocular appendix to the main reductio by which Socrates stealthily races to the conclusion that the just man is a thief. The three cases simply exemplify the general principle of the μία δύναμις τῶν ἐναντίων, and it is on the force of this general principle—though, as often, it is not enunciated as such -- that the just man, qua guard, becomes thief.

207

He simply steps forward with καί (A10), just as he had moved abruptly into the argument he has just finished with τόδε δέ (333E3).

208

Αὐτόλυκος (B1), “Very-wolf,” quoting H.Od.19.395-6.

209

τοῦτο (B8), second person demonstrative, quoting Socrates’s μέντοι clause (B5) which for the first time used this language of ὠφελία and βλάβη.

210

With λέγεις (C1) Socrates continues ἔλεγες (B5) and ἔλεγον (B6), emphasizing that the position Polemarchus is taking is his own.

211

δοκεῖν in Socrates’s question (C1,C2), easily pairs up with the contrasting εἶναι (ὄντας, C2) because weak; ἡγεῖσθαι (in Polemarchus’s answer, C4) is a stronger term. “Feel” in English gets the relevant weakness of δοκεῖν. On the different modality of these terms cf. L.Bodin, Lire le Protagoras (Paris 1975).

212

That is, it is not that I like him (φιλῶ) because he is a friend (φίλος) but that he is a friend (φίλος) because I like him (φιλῶ), for his worth.

213

Substitution of πονηρούς (C12) for κακοί (C10) is also a reversion to the πονηρούς of C5 for which κακοί had been a substitute. Varying the terms used for the same idea is part of dialectical pacing.

214

Polemarchus’s φαίνεται (D2) denotes the restricted sense of mere appearance, to be distinguished from “dialectical” φαίνεται.

215

οἵ γε ἀγαθοὶ δίκαιοι (D3), γε causal. Goodness in the relation of man to man has been identified with justice, for purposes of the present conversation, ever since Cephalus’s casual assertion at 331A4. Socrates relied on it at 331C1ff.

216

δίκαιοί τε καὶ οἵοι μὴ ἀδικεῖν (D3): τε καί is illative, linking ground and inference (cf. n.ad 330D7). The inference is almost tautological but lays the suggestion that the question is about to be begged. μή rather than οὐ for the essential nature rather than the fact.

217

ἀληθῆ (D4) the truth of the proposition is independent of the context, in the manner of the minor premise.

218

κατὰ τὸν σὸν λόγον (D5), reminding him again.

219

μηδέν (D5) brought forward from μή (D3). The concept of the enemy is exactly that he has done or will do me some harm; and it has only been on this basis that one felt justified to treat him ill. οἱ μηδὲν ἀδικοῦντες are people from whom one can expect no harm, and are therefore non-enemies.

220

At the same time that he reduces Polemarchus’s position to paradox (note the emphasis he achieves by juxtaposition ἀδικοῦντας δίκαιον, D5), Socrates skirts a petitio principii, since regardless what the good of justice and the evil of injustice are, it cannot be right to return evil to someone who does you no evil.

221

μηδαμῶς (D7), as if he felt the sting of the μή's Socrates had been using.

222

πονηρὸς γὰρ ἔοικεν εἶναι ὁ λόγος (D7-8): he means of course that it would be πονηρόν rather than δίκαιον to mistreat persons who aren’t unjust, and by a loose inference πονηρόν rather than δίκαιον to assert the opposite. Just as at 332E12 he refused the implication that the δίκαιος should be ἄχρηστος as being distasteful (cf. n.188, 172), he here allows his moral sensibilities to settle his mind absent the logic, the way most people do. Another person might say, “That conclusion is false; one of the premises or inferences must have been wrong.”

223

ἄρα (D9) so invites him.

224

τοὺς ἀδίκους (D9) stand in as the opposite of τοὺς μηδὲν ἀδικοῦντας just above (D5).

225

οὗτος ἐκείνου καλλίων φαίνεται (D11): Again he chooses what suits him better.

226

With another ἄρα (D12).

227

Reading αὐτοί (E2) with D (and the corrector of F apud Slings), the friends here spoken of being the ones they are mistaken about, far preferable to the αὐτοῖς of AFM read by edd., though it is, indeed, construable (cf. Adams, Jowett/Campbell ad loc., though one would prefer paroxytone accentuation of εἰσὶν under their interpretation), but misleading (cf. Stallb. ad loc.). Chambry does not report this variant.

228

τοὐνάντιον (E3): in sum, the position implies either that one may treat the good badly (inherently absurd), or that one may harm one’s friends (the very opposite of Simonides’s assertion).

229

μεταθώμεθα (E5), perhaps a term from the placing of draughts on the board (cf.333B1-2), and so mildly suggesting that Socrates is his κοινωνός in the “setting down” of his position (θέσις) about justice. In this phase of the argument they are conducting a σκέψις ἐν κοινῷ, with one playing answerer and the other questioner: hence the first plural. In acknowledging the consequence (συμβαίνει) and in proposing to revise the premises (μεταθώμεθα, E5), Polemarchus accepts the need for logic after all. He may change either the Simonidean definition of justice, or his empirical “definition” of friends.

230

φίλον εἶναι (sc. θέμενοι, E8). Originally he thought their settled attitude (ἡγεῖσθαι, C4) was sufficient to make them friends; now he sees that asserting that this made them friends was a matter of taking a position (θέσις) in his own mind. It will not be their attitude but his own that he will now change, by substituting a different position (μετατιθέσθαι).

231

334E10-335A2. His first definition was empirical but insufficiently thought through; this one is only a congeries of words. To say “I only seem to like my seeming friend” borders on nonsense. Polemarchus is moving into the area between opining and thinking.

232

προσθεῖναι τῷ δικαίῳ ἢ ὡς τὸ πρῶτον ἐλέγομεν (335A6-7): the construction is awkward (“to posit a supplement to what the just is, [more] than our original position”) but that does not quite warrant Faesi’s deletion of ἤ.

233

εὖ ποιεῖν (A7) replacing ὠφελεῖν; κακῶς (sc. ποιεῖν, A8) replacing βλάπτειν.

234

ἀγαθὸν ὄντα (A9): the burden of Socrates’s restatement of the position is borne by the circumstantial participles ὄντα (also with κακόν, A10), which are causal. As above he is scrupulous to note what the unamended position is (cf. 334E7 with the λέγοντες phrase at 335A7-8) before confirming the emendation (cf.334E9 with νῦν δὲ κτλ, 335A8-10).

235

Shifting back to βλάπτειν (B2), from κακῶς ποιεῖν.

236

βλαπτόμενοι δέ (B6). The question lacks an interrogative particle (cf.333A13): again he relies on his interlocutor to know he is being questioned and that he is to play answerer.

237

ὁντινοῦν (B3).

238

γε (B4) twice, sputtering.

239

τε καί (B4) linking ground and inference.

240

The false alternative makes the true more attractive (B8).

241

ἀνάγκη (B12): cf. 333D9 with n.

242

δή (C14) of the target case.

243

συλλήβδην ἀρετῇ (D1): the human virtues collected together. He had used ἀρετή above for the “virtue” of the horse and dog in his analogy, and so there needed a more specific term for the (inherently moral) ἀρετή that is human. The term most commonly used for this notion is “justice” (cf. n. ad 331A4, and Phdrs.276C3, 277D10-E, 278A3-4; Polit.295E4-5; Prot.327B2). Now that he is done with the analogy he re-appropriates the term ἀρετή to its normal moral meaning.

244

The concept of opposites is often instantiated with physical properties as they arise in the world of change, in the Ionian manner (cf. 380E3-4 and n., Leg.889B6-8, 892B2-3, 897A6-B1; Lys.215E5-8; Phlb.14D1-3; Phdrs.270A5 [where read ἀνοίας with BT], Symp.186D7-E1; Tim.82A8-B2). In such a context Tim.50A2-3 can call one pole an opposite.

245

δή (D7), of the target case.

246

δέ γε (D9), of the minor premise.

247

οὔτε φίλον (D11-12): to this much Polemarchus had agreed from the beginning.

248

τὰ ὀφειλόμενα ἑκάστῳ ἀποδιδόναι φησίν τις δίκαιον (E1-2), the original language, with ὀφειλόμενον (cf. 331E3-4). Simonides for all his authority is now no better than a τις.

249

νοεῖ (E2) redoes διενοεῖτο, used during the attempt to discover Simonides’s wise undermeaning (332C1), the prefix dropped as is usual in all IE languages (cf. n.1567; Adam ad Prot.311A); but now it is just τις that is the subject: it is not the person but the argument that will be the authority for our belief.

250

This is what defending Simonides’s position drove Polemarchus to assert at 333B7-9.

251

Socrates moves from the present φησὶν (E1) back to the imperfect ἦν (E4) on the force of the intervening recapitulation of what happened.

252

σοφός (E4): it is the uncritical use of this term in unknowing praise that Socrates presses to criticize: we must expect the wise at the very least to know the truth, and we need to know something in order to have an inkling whether they do.

253

μαχοῦμεθα ἄρα (E7): the battle is of course argumentation, with its “rough and tumble” that might bruise opinion, as Polemarchus has lately seen. The language recalls and redeems the idea that the just man will help in battle (332E5) as μεταθώμεθα above (n.229) had recalled the language of his helping in draughts. Often the argument itself repays the strain on the intentionalist consciousness one spends to follow it carefully, by luminously coming round full circle; conversely the dramatic context can be made to provide a concrete instance before theory treats it abstractly (“drama precedes dogma”). In the pendant to his reductio (333E3-334A10,ff) Socrates had used κλεπτοσύνη to reach the conclusion that the just man is a thief (cf. n.206); and earlier, Cephalus’s clever repartee provided an embodiment of the belief and the attitude that the way to treat enemies is tit for tat.

Self-reference and self-instantiation of this sort is one of Plato’s favorite literary devices and deserves a monograph. It has an obvious use in transition, as here and as at the end of several dialogues (Ion closes [541D] with Socrates commenting that his criticism of Ion’s answers as ἄνω κάτω στρεφόμενα prove that he is a good general after all. Lysis closes [223B] with ‘We friends don’t know what friendship is!’ Phaedo closes with Socrates undergoing περὶ οὗ ὁ λόγος [cf.73B6-7]. Protagoras closes [361A] with the logos laughing at Socrates and Protagoras for having exchanged positions).

He uses it with a philosophical purpose to remind us that method is to be kept in balance with message, that the philosophizing is taking place in a world that preceded it and will survive it unchanged, or in the largest terms that the search for truth and reality paradoxically takes place within, and is an event within, reality. We may say that the device serves Plato in his writing, as irony served Socrates in live conversation. Instances are to be found everywhere in the corpus (indeed, it is in its nature to pop up anywhere):

Charm. the interlocutors variously exhibit σωφροσύνη or fail to: 155E3 (Socrates’s μόγις: cf.156D1ff,155A5), 158C5-D6 (n.b.D7), 159B1-2, 162D2-3 (paradox of sobriety as ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν, vis à vis Critias’s impatience with Charmides), 164C9-D3 (Critias’s definition as γνῶσις ἑαυτοῦ founders when he doesn’t know what he is talking about), and 166D1-2 (Socrates’s reply to Critias’s personal attack [166C7ff] on the grounds that he is investigating the matter to improve his self-knowledge).

Crat.384C3ff (Hermogenes’s name fails to work κατὰ τὴν φύσιν), 388A2-7 (etymological induction).

Crito 48A7-10 (Crito’s improper εἰσήγησις in the dialogue belies his criticism of the improper εἴσοδος at the trial: 44E3-4), 50B8 (The Laws have the same blind spot as Crito: cf. δικαὶ δικασθεῖσαι [50B8] with δίκαια ὄντα [49E and 50A3]).

Euthyd.286B7 (Ctesippus forced to disagree in silence), 286E9 (the brothers show ἀμαθία though they say it doesn’t exist), 287E2 (they err but deny error’s existence). In general, the sophistic trickery is words in action.

Gorg.456A-458B (Gorgias says the φιλονικία of students should not be blamed on their teachers and Socrates shrinks from pointing out that Gorgias has contradicted himself), 467A8-10 (How can you say rhetors are powerful if you can’t prevail upon me to believe it?), 475D4-6 (Socrates reassures Polus he will not be hurt by his answer about pain), 494D2-6 (Socrates shames Callicles into being unashamed about his position), 501C7-8 (Socrates elsewhere won’t accept an answer like ‘I’ll say yes to please you,’ but here, where the topic is flattery, he does), 505C3-4 (neither man nor λόγος will persist), 517C4-7 (the argument is moving in a spiral)

H.Maj. (on beauty) The ubiquity of the expression καλῶς λέγεις, vel sim.

H.Min. The entire dialogue instantiates its doctrine: Socrates is ἀμαθής and therefore gets the wrong answer ἄκων (broached at 373B4-9). The characters themselves are more aware of self-instantiation in this dialogue than in others whose authorship is more certainly Platonic, as at 368D6-8 (cf.369A4-8), 369E5, 370E10-11, 373B4-9(cf.372D4-7), etc.

Lach. 193D11ff (the λόγος / ἔργον contrast in Doric speech [188DE], but are we brave enough to engage in discussion? We must obey what we are saying!), 196A4ff (acknowledging aporia bravely [γενναίως]), 197A4 (being daring enough to make assertions cf.B4,C5 and 193B1)

Leg. 626B5 (γεγυμνάσθαι on gymnastics), 629A1-2 (Cretan’s love of war militates against Socrates), 662B2 (the disagreement about music is an instance of ἀπᾴδειν ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων), 722Cff (sudden discovery that what they’ve been doing all along is a προοίμιον to the laws), 891E7 (ψυχήν which will be the earlier thing placed later), 897D5 (προσλαμβάνειν in relation between interlocutors, but cf. 897B1), and 965B4.

Phdo 72E3-3A3 (Cebes reminded of ἀνάμνησις), 73A5 (Simmias’s request to be reminded of ἀνάμνησις – παθεῖν περὶ οὗ ὁ λόγος, B6-7), 77A1-2 (ὁμοίως presaging the affinity argument), 77C7 (συντιθέναι presages fragility of compound), 96A6-100B9 (Socrates’s “autobiography” discovers a new method in the very questions motivating the search), 96B9 (ἄνω κάτω μετέβαλλον, studying μεταβολή: cf. φερόμενος, 98B7), 97D7 (κατὰ νοῦν), 103A5f (the opposite said about the opposites).

Phdrs. Socrates’s guess that the logos is under Phaedrus’s cloak. Lysias’s speech is designed is to convince by the very action of speaking. Socrates’s shame drives him to speak. 243E7-8 (Where’s that παῖς? Right here!).

Phlb. 58A (The knowledge we are looking for is the science we are looking with).

Polit. 260B7-8 (search for the πολιτικός will require only ὁμονοεῖν [cf. Campbell ad loc.]). In other passages one begins to see the aridity of self-referential intellectualism: 277D9ff (παράδειγμα παραδείγματος) 283B6ff (treating the proper length of treatment), 286DE (conversation about conversation).

Prot. 312A2 (Hippocrates blushes), 333A6-8 (οὐ πάνυ μουσικῶς referring to Protagoras’s theory of education), 333C1 (αἰσχύνομαι instantiates Protagoras’s theory of knowledge: cf. νουθετεῖ 341A8-B1), 341A7-B2 (Socrates commenting on Protagoras’s use of δεινόν at 339A1), 361CD (Socrates resembling the savior Prometheus from Protagoras’s Myth).

Rep.336C1-2 (Thrasymachus unbeknownst to himself sounds like Cephalus at 329A4-B3), 340A4-B8 (Thrasymachus legislates [τιθέσθαι] a position against his own advantage), 344D3-4 (the “stronger” compel Thrasymachus to stay), 350D2-3 (Thrasymachus blushes), 402A7ff (presentation of the Theory of Ideas right after a reference to the arrival of rationality in the young), 433A, 439E-40A (proving the difference between thumoeidetic and epithumetic by invoking the feeling), 487BC (Adeimantus’s charge against Socrates becomes a charge against the bad φύλαξ), 504BC (Adeimantus must emulate the φύλακες by taking the longer road—which is the exercise of the Line Passage and Advanced Education), 506A6 (cf. n.3158), 533A (what the power of dialectic really is can appear only to those who have gone through the preliminaries we have just gone through).

Soph. Generally: the evasiveness of the subject matter (the sophist) is replicated by the sophist popping up here and there, e.g. 223C, where he eludes them before they reach him.

Symp. Generally: Alcibiades’s speech attributes to Socrates the attributes the symposiasts had attributed to eros, proving thereby Socrates’s thesis that eros is both ἐνδεής and the cause of good. (cf. Bury [ed.] lx-lxiv).

Tht. Much play on perception and appearance, the theme being knowledge (151E2 [φαίνεται νυνί], 152C7, 154C10-D2, 155A2 [φάσματα], 155D10, 155E3, 156C6, 157C2-3, 157D10, 157E4,158C8, 185E6-6A1, 186E11-12, 187A9-B1); Theodorus’s changing perception of Theaetetus (144D-5C5, 148B3-4, 148C9ff, 155D1, 185E3-4 (Theaetetus is καλός because he λέγει καλῶς); 160E5 (midwifery has brought to birth [ἐγεννήσαμεν] the theory that brings sensibles to birth [γεννᾶν αἰσθητά, 159C14]); 183A4-5 (πάντα ῥεῖ: even the answers are in flux: cf. A8-B5).

254

σοφῶν τε καὶ μακαρίων ἀνδρῶν (E9) recalling σοφὸς καὶ θεῖος ἀνήρ (331E6), with μακάριος used climactically as often (Euthyd.273E6, Soph.233A4, Pind.Pyth.10.1-2 and Bundy ad loc.[SP 2.38], Rep.419A9 trumping the εὐδαίμων at A2; 561D7; and cf. the specifically Thrasymachean use, 344B7 [and n.]), and therefore effecting closure. Simonides has been topped by two of the Seven Sages.

255

ἑγὼ γοῦν (E10) evinces his inward, very personal sense of commitment to the cause.

256

ῥῆμα (336A1): cf. Prot.342E7, where it is used with φθέγγεσθαι, which makes it an utterance; and its use with ἐκβέβληκας, 473E6 infra.

257

Περιάνδρου … ἢ Περδίκκου ἢ Ξέρξου ἢ Ἰσμηνίου τοῦ Θηβαίου ἤ τινος ἄλλου μέγα οἰομένου δύνασθαι πλουσίου ἀνδρός (A5-6) linked by ἤ and generalized with ἤ τινος ἄλλου, Socrates copies the form, at least, of his list of wise people above (335E8-9, using ἤ and ἤ τιν’ ἄλλον). The first, the tyrant Periander, himself came to be a member of the canonical Seven Sages (Demetr. apud Stob.3.1.172 [= Diels-Kranz 1.65.15-66.3]), but the personnel of the list was not stable: cf. D.L.1.40ff (= DK 1.61). Muson rather than Periander appears in the (early) list given by Protagoras at Prot.343A. The choice of Periander here may have the role of a transitional case between those of 335E8-9 and these.

Though the list is parallel in form with the list above, including its use of ἤ τινὸς ἄλλου for closure, the concluding item of the list, μέγα οἰουμένου δύνασθαι πλουσίου ἀνδρός does not generalize the specific cases of powerful men but complicates things by introducing the type of the rich man who believes and vaunts the power he has by dint of his wealth. Indeed, ἄλλος is adverbial (on which cf. n.1494); and Socrates deftly closes the argument with a passing back reference to the man who willed the argument to Polemarchus thinking another sacrifice to the gods would be more efficacious for his own piece of mind than exploring issues with Socrates. Every decade has its men who think they are important because of their wealth, and other men who secretly think so for them so they can envy them and petulantly complain about them: there is no need therefore for Socrates to name names; but the surprise the drama holds for us at this moment is that we are about to meet the Master of Envy himself.

258

ἀληθέστατα (A8).

259

ἐφάνη (A9) with participle is dialectical (cf.334A10 and n.). When Cephalus left, the λόγος survived a change in answerer; now it has survived failure; all that has survived is the question.

260

ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι (B2) of interrupting the speaker with a question: 495D3, 505A1, Gorg.506A2, Soph.239D1. The force of ἀντι- is that of taking up the opposite end of the rope and pulling back. It is not always belligerent, as it (and most everything else about Thrasymachus) is, here. At H.Maj.287A Socrates confides to Hippias that he is only good at ἀντιλήψεις, so would he please hold forth for him. πολλάκις indicates there were several moments in the conversation at which he wished to intervene. Despite the questionable logic of the argument, those who eavesdropped on it (παρακαθημένων, B3) found it interesting because of the sense it made at every step, as we have taken pains to notice by watching it close up.

261

Continual use of the prefix δια-, with διακοῦσαι (B3) as well as with διαλεγομένων (B1) and διεκωλύετο (B3) before it and with διεπαυσάμεθα (B4) and διαρπασόμενος (B6) after it, evinces the audience's sense that the conversation between Socrates and Polemarchus has a life of its own worth allowing to play through to the end: tension is mounting because of Thrasymachus's utter disregard for this value.

262

οὐκέτι ἡσυχίαν ἦγεν (B4-5).

263

διεπτοήθημεν (B7), another δια-. The first plural gently reminds us, at this transitional moment, that the event is being reported to us by Socrates.

264

εἰς τὸ μέσον φθεγξάμενος (B8). The first inconcinnity in his behavior is duly noted: though his remark portrays itself as an address to Socrates and Polemarchus (ὑμᾶς) he noisily delivers himself of it into the midst of the entire group.

265

τίς ὑμᾶς πάλαι φλυαρία ἔχει (B8-C1): The prolepsis of πάλαι expresses, or feigns, that he is sick and tired of their conversation, that he has been wanting to interrupt for some time, and that that time is now over. πάλαι refers not to a remote past but to a time that present events now threaten to supersede. Cf. 392B9 and n.1414.

266

ἀπόκριναι (C5): For all the sputtering, what Thrasymachus actually says is that if you want to ask about something you should give your answer about it.

267

μοι (C6): with the loose ethical dative he somehow appropriates Socrates’s attempt to learn as an event to be tailored to his own enjoyment.

268

ὅτι τὸ δέον … μηδ’ ὅτι τὸ ὠφέλιμον μηδ’ ὅτι τὸ λυσιτελοῦν μηδ’ ὅτι τὸ κερδαλέον μηδ’ ὅτι τὸ συμφέρον (C6-D2): The relentless anaphora of μηδ’ ὅτι τό expresses (or feigns) enervation in advance, but it is unclear what argument foul he means these examples to instantiate. The combination of unclarity and vehemence is a rhetorical device for challenging assent, affecting the audience (and even the exegete!) upon whom in the meanwhile it devolves to construe the general complaint. Shall I make his case for him by guessing that he is objecting to the manner in which Socrates characteristically isolates and deals piecemeal with ideas (cf. ἀπολαμβάνειν, H.Maj.301B4, cf. H.Min.369B9), which in common speech and thinking tend to slide through (cf. εὐχερές, Tht.184C), as for instance the way he isolated δικαιοσύνη as a subject (331C1-2, n.b. αὐτό) and ἀποδιδόναι ἄν τίς τι παρὰ του λάβῃ as a predicate (C3), out of the flow of ideas that constituted Cephalus’s speech (δίκαιος, 331A4; ὀφείλοντα … χρήματα, B2-3), what Shorey calls “collecting a definition,” citing Gorg.453A as a parallel (WPS 558, ad 331C)?

The speaker may hardly remember what words he used, and so may perceive Socrates’s “selection” of the item as taking Cephalus too literally (cf. Gorg.489B8; HMaj.284E1-2; Ion 540B6ff [where Socrates treats the elements of Ion’s generalizing polar doublet as though he meant them singly]), or as nitpicking (HMaj.301B2-4, Rep.340E3), or as making large things out of small (Gorg.486C8, 497B6-7; HMaj.304AB; Prot.328E3-4 [where he anticipates this objection]; Rep.487B), or as illiberal and uncultured (Gorg.461C4, 485C7, 508E-9A).

In the course of barring Socrates from giving an abstract answer, Thrasymachus in fact cannot resist revealing by degrees what will be the essence of his own answer. His list moves from a likely but generic answer (τὸ δέον), through an answer like the one Polemarchus and Socrates have been considering (τὸ ὠφέλιμον), to a debasement of this answer (τὸ λυσιτελοῦν), to an absolutely impossible debasement even of this (τὸ κερδαλέον, never approbatory, absent even from the list in ps.Plat.Cleit. that imitates this one [409C]), and finally to what will be his own answer (τὸ συμφέρον, cf.338C2)!

In the course of the conversation an actual reason behind Thrasymachus’s objection (as opposed to the guess his method has forced us to contrive for him in the interim) will become clear: cf. n.553 ad 348E5-49A2, infra.

269

ἐγώ (D3) emphatic because expressed. The context requires ὕθλους to mean the opposite of the σαφές and the ἀκριβές—hence “smoke.” Its sense, like that of φλυαρία (B8), is largely onomatopoetic (cf.337B3-4). ἀποδέχομαι is not here absolute: its object, ὕθλους τοιούτους, is “incorporated” into the ἐάν clause (cf. Smyth §2536-8). Indeed Thrasymachus’s rhetoric is a little like Cephalus’s (cf. ὀλοφύρονται, ὀδύρονται, ὕμνειν [cognate with ὕθλος]: 329A4-B2); or more exactly Cephalus’s is a little like his.

270

ἑωράκη (D6), the pluperfect, used in contrafactual conditions “when stress is laid on ... the continuance of the act” (Smyth §2306a).

271

προσέβλεψα αὐτὸν πρότερος (D8): from Thrasymachus’s words the essential point that Socrates gathers is that he is being attacked. He alludes to the superstition about encountering—or more exactly being encountered by—a wolf. Pliny NH 8.34 explains (cf. Verg.Ecl.9.53, Theocr.14.22): The moment one discovers he is in danger (the wolf has spotted him) he discovers also, by inference, that he has been in danger (the wolf has been watching); and then realizes his opponent has not yet attacked. The reflex to defend oneself is therefore short-circuited by an inner reflection that the proper strategy is to ascertain why the attack has been delayed. A particularly trenchant account of the feeling is René Girard’s “mimetic rivalry.” It is to avoid the escalation of violent feelings (like those of Thrasymachus) that, according to Girard, Jesus looks down and doodles in the sand when confronted by the crowd that wants him to sanction stoning the prostitute, rather than raising his eyes to their spokesman (R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning [New York 2004] 54-61). The dialogical encounter is subject to the same derailments as any other human encounter, including the invidious dynamics of the evil eye (cf. Phdo 95A4-6B8), and to the extent that Plato is presenting it “live” it devolves on the reader to recognize when such things are happening.

272

ἐξαγριαίνεσθαι (D8), the opposite of κηλεῖν, used in the context of hunting prey at Lysis 206B2, the other Platonic occurrence. Socrates is referring to the behavior he described above (B2) as ὥρμα ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι.

273

ὅδε (E3): By his first-person demonstrative Socrates commemorates and preserves the sense that he and Polemarchus have been working together and indeed have become “allies in battle.” It is this that so bothers Thrasymachus. He blames Socrates rather than both of them for their success because he envies Socrates, as Socrates has indicated to us with his reference to the invidious evil eye.

274

τιμιώτερον (E8) suggests that Socrates is vying for honor in his conversation after all, the honor of learning, and neutralizes thereby Thrasymachus’s accusatory φιλοτιμοῦ (C3).

275

ἔπειτα (E8) cf. 331B3 and n.

276

οὕτως ἀνόητος ὑπείκειν ἀλλήλοις (E8), a tamer version of Thrasymachus’s εὐηθίζεσθε ὑποκατακλινόμενοι ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς (C1-2). εὐηθής is a favorite term in the cynic’s vocabulary (e.g., 343C6); Socrates replaces it with the vocabulary of philosophy (νοῦς and ζήτησις). οὕτως is a “second person” demonstrative.

277

φανῆναι (E9) dialectical.

278

The construction of E4-9—μὴ οἴου (negative command) ~ irreal present condition (μέν) ~ simple present condition (δέ) ~ οἴου σύ (positive command)—swiftly commands our attention despite the inflammatory remarks of Thrasymachus.

279

ἀκούσας ἀνεκάγχασέ τε μάλα σαρδάνιον (337A3): The noise he makes from his throat draws our attention to his face on which we see fixed a sardonic grin: the subplot of first looks continues.

280

αὕτη ’κείνη (A4): the second person demonstrative as predicate of third person demonstrative subject (“there you have it”), since Thrasymachus is again addressing his remarks about Socrates to the others present, but he uses the third person demonstrative as subject (“the good old irony”) as if he had already warned his audience about it before, as he goes on to assert (A5-7). Will we ever catch up with him?

281

ἐθελήσοις, εἰρωνεύσοιο δέ … ποιήσοις … ᾿ἀποκρινοῖο (A6-7): with rare future optatives (governed by the imperfect, προύλεγον, A5) Thrasymachus stresses his foreknowledge.

282

σοφὸς γὰρ εἶ (A8). The term is often less than approbatory in Socrates’s mouth. In the Apology it serves as a grounds for prosecuting him (23A3) and also a grounds for criticizing those who condemned him (38C3-4)! The generally approbatory εὖ λέγειν might also mean less to Socrates than it does to others (cf. n.311).

283

ᾔδησθα, προείποις (A8,9): Socrates mildly taunts Thrasymachus by borrowing the verbs from his unsolicited self description (ᾔδη, προύλεγον [A5]): that προείποις is used in a different sense (prohibit rather than predict) improves the taunt.

284

μὴ ὅτι … δὶς ἓξ μηδ’ ὅτι τρὶς τέτταρα μηδ’ ὅτι ἑξάκις δύο μηδ’ ὅτι τετράκις τρία (B1-3): Socrates closely imitates Thrasymachus’s prohibition (336C6-D4), including the tedious anaphora of μὴ ὅτι and the gratuitous plethora of examples; but with ἀποδέχομαι (B3) he forgoes the arrogant ἐγώ and in redoing ὕθλους with τοιαῦτα φλυαρῇς forgoes Thrasymachus’s swift “incorporation” of the object into the ἐάν clause (D4, cf. n.269).

285

Reading ἀποκρίνοιτο (B4) of AFDM, against the perispomenon scribitur of the Monacensis, read by edd. The future is not needed. The leading construction is oratio obliqua in secondary sequence with ὅτι. Owing partly to the morphology of the verb, the logical significance of the optative ἔροιο in the ensuing protasis is therefore maximally plastic. It can represent an imperfect indicative (an original aorist would have been kept), a present or aorist subjunctive with ἄν, or an original optative in either tense, and so it can constitute the beginning of a contrafactual, present general, future more vivid, or future less vivid condition. In the event, however, the protasis is so long that Socrates restarts the sentence (δῆλον οἶμαί σοι ἦν ὅτι) rather than moving on to an apodosis, and then generalizes, with οὐδείς and with the re-characterization of the questioner—no longer Thrasymachus (this would require dropping τῷ, which three of four mss. have [Chambry saw it in the fourth in superscript])—as a person seeking information (for πυνθάνεσθαι [B5] cf. 328E2 and n.). The present indicative may therefore stand as part of the generalization.

286

ὡς δή (C2) ironic. Most of the time one will understand Thrasymachus by assuming he means the opposite of what he says. But this raises the question, Why does he speak?

287

Reading ἀποκρίνεσθαι (C5) with AFM, rather than the future with D and edd. Cf. B4 and n.

288

τὸ φαινόμενον ἑαυτῷ (C5): dialectical φαίνεσθαι.

289

Scrupulously Thrasymachus avoids the give and take of conversation (C7-8).

290

δείξω (D1) promises something more than a mere statement, and suggests a display (ἐπίδειξις).

291

ἑτέραν … παρὰ πάσας ταῦτας (D1-2). ἑτέραν instead of ἄλλην indicates this new answer is of an alternative type. Cf. n.2214 and also n.1224.

292

παθεῖν (D2). That Socrates should be required to pay a penalty for failing to answer reveals, even if only in play, that Thrasymachus feels that the evasiveness he has been accusing Socrates of is essentially unjust behavior. According to Attic legal procedure (and as occurred in Socrates’s actual trial), once the jury finds the defendant guilty the defendant proposes a penalty alternate to that preferred by the prosecution, to be suffered or paid (παθεῖν ἢ ἀποτίσαι is the formula). Thrasymachus’s remark therefore presumes that in breaking down and giving an answer himself, Socrates will have succeeded in his evasion and be guilty enough in succeeding that he must propose a penalty. At the same time of course, eager to give his answer, he fails to see his own role as accomplice in the unjust act. That he should forgive injustice when it helps himself and enforce it when it harms others might come as no surprise.

293

μαθεῖν (D4): In the penalty phase of his trial (Apol.36Bff) Socrates likewise proposed to suffer (παθεῖν) a reward as his penalty, making there the same play on the etymology of the verb ἀξιοῦν (cf. esp. 36D1-3). In his own mouth, many years before his execution, the play is γέλοιον; for Plato to put it there many years after is σπουδαῖον. To a great extent Socrates’s condemnation can be attributed to people undergoing the irksome “irony” of which Thrasymachus accuses him here. Plato achieves dramatic irony also, having Socrates unwittingly allude to the apothegm πάθει μάθος.

294

ἡδὺς γὰρ εἶ (D6), echoing 337A8, another insincerity of Thrasymachus distasteful to translate. He failed to secure a physical penalty (παθεῖν) and so now proposes to settle for the alternative, a financial one (ἀπότεισον, D6). In this there is dramatic irony, for in being on the verge to perform his song-and-dance as a teacher it will convene with his habit of being paid for doing so. He is a sophist.

295

Glaucon’s intervention (D9-10) continues the allusion to Socrates’s trial, during which our author among others (38B6-8) intervened to stake him thirty minas. But Glaucon’s reason is that he wants the conversation to continue, whether to hear Thrasymachus’s answer or Socrates’s response to it or both. That it is Glaucon who here intervenes, rather than Polemarchus, the host and Socrates’s new ally, is noteworthy. The interest of the onlookers is something Plato’s new genre of dialogue has some difficulty depicting unless the interlocutors provide him an opportunity, as this byplay between Thrasymachus and Socrates does.

296

διαπράξηται (E1): The prefix and the voice imply success by hook and crook. Thrasymachus tells us something about the relation between Socrates and Glaucon by interpreting Glaucon’s interruption as indicating less interest in Thrasymachus’s answer than in Socrates’s response to it.

297

εἰ (E5) in all strictness goes with τι καὶ οἴεται so that ἀπειρημένον εἴη, the true optative protasis that goes with the foregoing apodosis, lacks an εἰ. In the event, however, the hypothetical thing he fancies he knows (the τι that is the subject of οἴεται) is “also functioning” as the subject of ἀπειρημένον εἴη (more exactly, it is “incorporated” into the εἰ οἴεται clause: cf. ὕθλους at 336D4).

The sentence got off on the wrong foot when Socrates found himself unable to pass up an opportunity to interpose an avowal of ignorance, according to his habit. He adopted the strategy of employing the idiom of the participle with ἔπειτα (on which cf. 331B3 and n.107) to interpose this avowal which was going to end up being inconsequential to the entire sentence anyway since what is actually inconceivable is that a person would answer at all when he has been barred from doing so.

298

ἡγεῖται (E7), of the sort of belief that a person acts upon without a second thought. Compare the crucial role this kind of attitude played in Polemarchus’s argument at 334C4, in Thrasymachus’s eagerness to answer just below (338A6), and in Cleitophon’s attempt to inoculate the ruler against error at 340B7.

299

ὑπ’ ἀνδρὸς οὐ φαύλου (E7): ἀνδρός for ἀνθρώπου or τινος makes the litotes all the stronger. Thrasymachus certainly wants to come off as an ἀνήρ.

300

εἰπεῖν (338A1), drawn out of λέγειν before and avoiding the term ἀποκρίνεσθαι. Socrates is referring to Thrasymachus’s claim to have an alternative type of answer and his mincing offer to “exhibit” it (δείξω ἑτέραν, 337D1), and yet he persists in asserting the presumption that this λόγος is the result of knowledge (εἰδέναι), exactly because this is what will give him the warrant to interrogate the “exhibitor” (and make him “answer” after all).

301

μὴ οὖν ἄλλως ποίει (A1-2): now it is Socrates’s turn to use this formula in suasive peroration (cf.328B1 and n.), and fill it out with amplitudinous reference to Glaucon and the others (τε … καί and hyperbaton of τοὺς ἄλλους), so as to impose an ineluctable incumbency on Thrasymachus to comply.

302

With τόνδε (A3), “first person,” Socrates acknowledges his special closeness to Glaucon that Thrasymachus had assumed above; but with διδάξαι he attributes to Glaucon a different motive from the one Thrasymachus deduced from it.

303

ἡγούμενος ἔχειν ἀπόκρισιν παγκάλην (A6-7). The adjective reveals that it is the other meaning of ἀπόκρισις that Thrasymachus has in mind, the answer-performance or ἐπίδειξις of the sort that was part of Gorgias’s advertised repertoire (cf. ἐπαγγέλλει, Gorg.447D7, 448A2, 449B2; and compare δείξω, 337D1, with ἐπεδείξατο, Gorg.447A6).

We get a full picture of this skill at the beginning of both the Gorgias and the Protagoras. Callicles recommends people ask Gorgias a question (Gorg.447C5-8, saying οὐδὲν οἷον τὸ αὐτὸν ἐρωτᾶν), and Gorgias takes up the position to answer by saying οὐδείς μέ πω ἠρώτηκε καινὸν οὐδὲν πολλῶν ἐτῶν (448A2-3: cf. Meno 70B6-7). From these remarks we may infer that answering is nothing but impromptu oratory. We here learn also that the measure of a professional answer is its degree of beauty (Gorg.448A9-B1, cf. ῥητορικὴν μᾶλλον μεμελέτηκεν ἢ διαλέγεσθαι, 448D9-10 [and Meno 70B6-7], as embodied in the answer Polus finally gets to give at 448C4-9 [compare Meno’s answer, also inspired by Gorgias, at Meno 71E1-72A6, and Protagoras’s self-advertising early answer at Prot.316C5-317C5]), rather than its adequacy (e.g., ἱκανῶς, Gorg.448B1) to the question. Measured for its adequacy to the question, the rhetorical pretensions of the performance-answer render it liable to the charge of μακρολογία by Socrates (Gorg.449B4-8, C5; Prot.334A2-C6), while for the fully accomplished rhetorician brevity in answer is another ability he is ready to display (Prot.334E4-5A1). There is therefore a distinction and a tension between the plain (cf. φαῦλον at Tht.147C3-6) shortness of pertinence and the brevity of wit, which is sometimes misunderstood by scholars, as for instance in the treatment of Gorg.449B7. The audience response to a professional answer is applause (e.g. Euthyd.276B7, Prot.334C7); when the applause subsides the sophist calls on the next questioner; after a while he retires.

This performance situation, with himself doing the talking (εἰπεῖν, 338A6), is what Thrasymachus desires so much to move on to that he is willing to let Socrates off the hook. Like Polus in the Gorgias, who has to tolerate a certain amount of question and answer in the usual sense of the term (448B7-C3) before he gets the opportunity to unfurl his rhetoric (448C4-9), Thrasymachus tolerates a certain amount of Socratic elenchus (338C4-343A10) before he presents his own “answer” in full dress (343B1-344C8).

304

προσεποιεῖτο δὲ φιλονικεῖν (A7) the imperfect and its present infinitive point to an effort being made that Socrates does not deign to include in his narrative for us: he emphasizes his decision not to include it by placing the important fact, that Thrasymachus would in fact be holding forth, in the (essentially concessive) μέν clause (A5-7: cf. 342D2-3, 350C12,ff). φιλονικεῖν indicates it was more of what we have already seen: rivalry for its own sake; having the cake and eating it, too; and getting the last word.

305

κἄπειτα (B1).

306

αὑτὴ δή … ἡ Σωκράτους σοφία (B1), Thrasymachus finally gives in to winning the opportunity to speak by reverting to the formula he used at 337A4, now to accuse Socrates not of irony but, with irony, of the wisdom that Socrates had with irony accused him of (337A8). With αὑτή (second person) he again seeks to capture the sympathy of his audience (cf. n. ad 337A8), since now he is about to address them.

307

διδάσκειν (B2), pres.inf. Thrasymachus calls it teaching rather than answering, which he had accused him above of avoiding (337A5-7), since he, following Socrates’s flattering suggestion from above (διδάξαι, A3), is now, in his way, announcing that he is about to hold forth.

308

περιιόντα (B2), another allusion to Plato’s Apology in the form of the complaint that he is a busybody. Cf. ἐπ’ ἄλλον ᾖα, 21D8; πλάνην, 22A6; ᾖα A8, C9; περιιών, 23B5; and περιεργάζεται, 19B4; and the implication these uses have for περιέρχομαι at 30A7: “my meddlesomeness consists of nothing but trying to elevate your thought.” Cf. also 31C5, συμβουλεύω περιιὼν καὶ πολυπραγμονῶν (reading T rather than BW). The charge is a mob-tactic, by which one member of the mob can acknowledge to the others that “he did to me what he did to you” without admitting it himself or forcing them to, either.

309

χάριν ἀποδιδόναι (B3), a euphemism for paying a wage. Thrasymachus is used to being paid, though of course he does not expect to be in this casual gathering.

310

The strained expression χάριν ἐκτίνειν (B5) calls Thrasymachus on his euphemism. He had first identified his fee for teaching with a juridical penalty due (a τίσις, 337D1-10); now he identifies being paid with being thanked. Socrates will not allow his own inability to pay to be mischaracterized as ingratitude.

311

εὖ λέγειν (B8) and εὖ ἐρεῖν (B9) draw attention to the ambiguity of the expression. Of course for Socrates it means to give a good argument; but the test of a good argument will be how it survives under dialectical scrutiny, i.e., how it survives as an answer (whence ἐπειδὰν ἀποκρίνῃ, B8-9).

312

οὐκ ἄλλο τι ἤ (C2): the definiens should always tell us nothing else than the definiendum, neither more nor less than what it is, so that the protestation “is nothing else than” or “is nothing more than” is strictly gratuitous. Then as now, however, such phrases are used, as when one asserts that emotions are “nothing but” neurological discharges. The stipulation adds a tone of tendentiousness that betrays that the statement is not meant to be the “definition” that it purports to be after all. Thrasymachus likewise expects his audience to be moved by what is tendentious in his formulation.

313

τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμφέρον (C2). He had forbidden Socrates to give an answer like τὸ δέον or τὸ ὠφέλιμον for being too vague (the opposite of σαφῶς καὶ ἀκριβῶς λέγειν: 336C6-D4). His own answer makes the scandalous point – there is no justice, only power -- by mocking the Socratic form: “The advantageous as you might say – to the strongman, that is!”

314

οὐκ ἐθελήσεις (C2) picks up the charge of μὴ ἐθέλειν at B2 above, carelessly.

315

τοιόνδε (C7), first person demonstrative adjective of quality.

316

ἡμῶν (C7): it is striking that Socrates should suggest he and Thrasymachus are the weaker rather than hope to be the just man!

317

βδελυρός (D3), another sonic slur from Thrasymachus’s harp. Of course whatever sort of incompetence he means to accuse Socrates of is removed by his ensuing charge of clever ill-will.

318

κακουργεῖν (D4) of the questioner seeking to vitiate an argument by intentionally misconstruing it as at Gorg.483A2.

319

σαφέστερον (D5): Socrates immediately imposes on Thrasymachus the first standard for proper answering that Thrasymachus had threatened to impose on him (σαφῶς, 336D2). The second, ἀκριβῶς (336D3) will make its appearance at 340E2.

320

εἶτα (D7) feigns impatience. He will indeed tell us something σαφές, but not without deriding Socrates.

321

Ton poleOn (D3): With the plural Thrasymachus introduces an empirical argument.

322

τὸ ἄρχον (D10) is as abstract as can be, while κρατεῖ is as concrete as can be (cf. 339A2).

323

δέ γε (E1) introducing the minor premise.

324

His meaning has to be that the various laws are designed to preserve the respective form of government, including both the power elite and the order it protects. His formulation with ἀρχή leaves this distinction undrawn, and his figura etymologica stresses a self-referential relativism in the several sets of laws instead, to the point of suggesting arbitrariness.

325

ὡς παρανομοῦντά τε καὶ ἀδικοῦντα (E5). The τε καί is illative. Thrasymachus’s point is that the ruling elite makes the argument (ὡς expressing their grounds) that breaking the law is eo ipso an unjust act. He avoids asserting that the required behavior is required because the rulers deem it just, in order to assert instead that it is just because it is required. His argument is different from that of the Laws in the Crito, who simply identify τὸ δίκαιον with a δίκη δικασθεῖσα, just as our law counts a man innocent until proven guilty but guilty upon conviction regardless of the truth. For Thrasymachus there is no legitimacy in the ruling element, but only power (κράτος), a power that makes resistance futile. This much is contained in his original formula, κρείττονος συμφέρον, to which his use of κρατεῖ here is meant to advert etymologically.

326

τῷ ὀρθῶς λογιζομένῳ (339A3). In place of λόγος the realist uses λογισμός, and gets the answer that is right (ὀρθῶς) because it is right everywhere (πανταχοῦ). Thrasymachus suggests by the generalization over space that he has isolated the essence of things, but his position is true everywhere only because it is tautological, and cannot be false anywhere.

327

σμικρά γε ἴσως (B1), “ironic.” This “small” supplement about the largeness of their power ends up being the only basis for the conclusion that their συμφέρον is justice, and so the addition contains the entirety of the meaning. Again Thrasymachus is saying the opposite of what he means.

328

συμφέρον γέ τι (B3), somehow advantageous: Thrasymachus’s προσθήκη specifies the τι.

329

ἐγώ / σύ / ἐγώ (B4-5): Socrates’s repeated use of personal pronouns, always emphatic in the nominative, is striking. The ensuing elenchus will be serious and trenchant.

330

καί … μέντοι (B7-8): “also,” i.e. in addition to asserting that the just is the κρείττονος συμφέρον: μέντοι responds to ὅτι μέν (B2) after the interruptive back and forth (B3-7).

331

τιθέσθαι (C7) middle, as used by Thrasymachus above (338E1, E3), to emphasize their conscious intention.

332

ἃ δ’ἂν θῶνται (C10): Socrates uses what we have come to call a “general” condition (ἄν plus subjunctive in the protasis), but despite our nomenclature the force of the subjunctive is anticipatory. Thrasymachus agrees to the proposition without noticing the trap he is stepping into, not because he unguardedly allows Socrates to generalize, but because he anticipates the direct and unthinking compliance of the ruled as something that appeals to him.

333

τί λέγεις σύ (D4), the unnecessary nominative pronoun again emphatic, and derogatory, expressing impatience. The expression according to Aristophanes is a commonplace in eristic argument (Nub.1174, the scholium to which says one uses it to knock his opponent dumb [καταπλῆξαι]).

334

ἃ σὺ λέγεις (D5): Socrates returns the nominative pari passu.

335

ὡμολόγηται (D6) perfect, of an agreement already reached (to be preferred 339E2, infra).

336

προστάττοντας (D7), the simple act of commanding, replaces τιθέσθαι νόμους, lawmaking, with which Thrasymachus identified it, above (338E3-6).

337

The superlative (βελτίστου, D7) makes error more likely, and therefore makes the proposition that they sometimes err harder to rescind.

338

προστάττωσιν οἱ ἄρχοντες (B8): the subject of προστάττειν is restated to firm up the grounds for the assertion that they must obey.

339

οἴου τοίνυν (E1): again Socrates re-uses Thrasymachus’s words (cf. σύ, D5) but τοίνυν adds an edge: Thrasymachus must agree.

340

ἄρχουσί τε καὶ κρείττοσι (E2), τε καί linking illustration with idea: Socrates reverts to the original definition (τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμφέρον, 338C2), for which the ruling group (τὸ ἄρχον, 338D10) was merely an illustration as Thrasymachus himself said at 339A2 (cf. n.ad loc.).

341

φῇς (E4), subjunctive, with Burnet (Chambry prints it baritone and therefore as an indicative, with a correspondingly strained translation). The construction in μέν / δέ pre-empts any interpretation by which the two clauses should not be parallel, and therefore requires the subjunctive regardless of the slight inconcinnity in the character of the two conditionalities. Adam is concerned about ὅταν being appropriate with only the first, but the indifference of the matter is revealed by the facts that ἐάν would have been appropriate with both and that we commonly say “When x is 2, 2x is 4,” without thereby committing ourselves to having asserted that x has ever been 2.

342

At 331D4-5, where just as here (340A2) he uses γε to justify his intervention.

343

μάρτυρος (A4). Cf. σμικρά / μεγάλη (339B1-2); λέγεις (339D4-5). Polemarchus’s use of καί here, instead of an adversative, shows he believes he has the upper hand.

344

Similar sub-squabbles take place in the Protagoras (335C8-336D5: Callias for Protagoras, Alcibiades for Socrates) and in the Gorgias (448A6-C9: Chaerephon for Socrates, Polus for Gorgias).

345

Cleitophon’s γάρ (A7) derisively mimics the γάρ of Polemarchus, at the expense of being so elliptical that, like many of Thrasymachus’s retorts, it approaches meaninglessness.

346

ἔθετο (A8): is lightly ironic (the verb has hitherto been used, saliently, of the ruling lawmakers: cf. 338E1, E3, 339C7; and nn.331 and 336): it broaches the idea that Thrasymachus’s own attempt to rule the conversation with his thesis of the advantage of the stronger might have been formulated in a way disadvantageous to himself.

347

κελευόμενα (A7): He speaks as if substituting κελεύειν for προστάττειν makes the contents of the commands moot. For him, as for Thrasymachus at 339C10-12, the focus is on the relation command-obedience (cf. n. 332, supra; and note the use of the term at 327B5, where Polemarchus’s slave speaks as though the mere act of κελεύειν requires obedience, which for him of course it does).

348

καὶ γάρ (A9). The γάρ, besides its mocking echo of Cleitophon’s γάρ, accepts the truth of the answer in order to deny its relevance, as at 333A2. The brunt of Polemarchus’s rhetoric is in the mocking repetition of Cleitophon’s words δίκαιον εἶναι ἔθετο (B1: cf. A8).

349

θέμενος (B1): cf. n. ad A8.

350

κελεύειν (B2): He accepts and uses Cleitophon’s new term since it has been neutralized.

351

ἥττους τε καὶ ἀρχομένους (340B3) Polemarchus shows how acutely he has picked up the identification Socrates had made (339E2) between the “rulers” of the illustration and the “stronger” of the original definition, by now adverting to the fact that, conversely, the ruled are functioning as an illustration of the weaker.

352

Polemarchus’s exactness in rehearsing the expression of the argument is Socratic (cf.331C8 and n.). Thrasymachus posited that justice is the advantage of the stronger at 338E1-9A4, and that justice is obeying their commands at 339B7-8. It was after these posits that he agreed, in turn (note Polemarchus’s αὖ), that the rulers sometimes make disadvantageous commands (339C1-9).

353

οὐδὲν μᾶλλον (B4) the expression alludes formally to a type of refutation (e.g. Democritus DK68B156) that was to become one of the skeptical tropes. Cf.487C3 with n.2839, 538D9, 609B3-4.

354

ὃ ἡγοῖτο (B7). For the verb denoting settled opinion, cf. 334C1,2 and n. By using optative for indicative in secondary sequence Cleitophon prefers to allude to the time of Thrasymachus’s talk, as opposed to the present moment when things in fact appear to have changed.

355

ποιητέον εἶναι (B7-8), shifting away from the ἔλεγεν construction to an infinitival construction without a leading verb, the indicative portraying the meaning Thrasymachus intended by his words (ἔλεγεν) and the infinitive the “propositional content” of the formulation (ποιητέον).

356

ἐλέγετο (B9), appropriating Cleitophon’s term (ἔλεγεν, B7) to his own purposes, with ἐλέγετο, now denoting “what was said”: for the shift to the passive to distinguish the proposition itself from what the speaker might have “meant” cf. Gorg.475B3-4 and 479E6-8 (where Socrates drops ὑπ’ἐμοῦ, to emphasize the impersonality of the truth reached by dialectical agreement). The shift is only more emphatic when the indirect discourse is represented, since with the passive it wil shift into the infinitive from the active where it would be done with ὅτι or ὡς (or else λέγω would mean “command”: Smyth §1997).Hence when Thrasymachus below comments on the meaning of an expression (λέγομεν τῷ ῥήματι … ) he introduces the expression with ὅτι (D5).

357

ἀποδέχεσθαι (C2) means, for the questioner, to accept an answer as meeting enough of the rudimentary criteria of competence to make it worthy of dialectical scrutiny (as here); and for the answerer, to accept a proposition as worthy of defense. Cf. the extensive discussion of the matter in Phaedo 91E,ff. When Thrasymachus barred Socrates’s one-word answers (οὐκ ἀποδέχομαι, 336D3), he was claiming such answers were categorically inadequate for consideration; but for Socrates the only criterion for such adequacy is that the answerer really believes it, and this only because it will motivate the answerer to defend it, and therefore help Socrates test its veracity through question and answer (337C3-6: cf. Gorg.495A5-C2; Meno 83D; Prot.331CD, 333C5-9; Soph.246D [and Campbell ad loc.]; Tht.154C-155A).

358

ἀλλά (C6): Thrasymachus feigns to try to conceive how he could think this. His reason for finding his rulers infallible is not to retreat to an idealist defense against Socrates’s refutation but to continue the conversation unscathed by shifting the ground of the conversation toward his main idea, his “killer answer,” that the strong are the only people that matter anyway, since the others are foolish enough to give them power in their belief that there is something called justice according to which they feel they must do so, or would be benefitted by doing so. His admiration for the strong is not rational, and so it does not need us to rationalize it.

The moment a strong man makes a law, obeying that law becomes justice. Now it comes into view that the strong man who makes that law becomes a strong man only after he makes a law, since it is the law that will make him stronger—if, that is, the others obey—and that in doing so these others become the weaker. Not only does the strong man not err: he is strong only because and only when he does not err.

359

ἀναμαρτήτους εἶναι ἀλλά τι καὶ ἐξαμαρτάνειν (C9): Socrates, as often. restates the language of the previous passage in its idiomatic particularity, as if to recall the very moment it was said to his interlocutor’s mind (e.g., the phrase τι καί at 340C9 repeated from 339C2: cf. 392B1-4, 394B9-C1, 427D4-7, 490D3, 503A6-7, 504B5, 607B2, 612B1 and n.5210, 613C8; Phdrs.272D2 [cf.260A1-3]; Prot.311D4 [cf.310E1-2], 313B7 and C1 [cf.310E4], 313C1 [cf.311E4], etc.). On the other hand his repetition is not slavish: he omits the adjectival supplement οἷοι (C2), and he shifts from ἁμαρτάνειν to ἐξαμαρτάνειν, as a nod to what Thrasymachus has just now said, ἐξαμαρτάνοντα ὅταν ἐξαμαρτάνῃ (C6-7).

360

συκοφάντης γὰρ εἶ (D1). Thrasymachus’s responses have ranged from mild impatience to snide misdirection to bald derision (336B8-Cff, 337A4, 337C2[ὡς δή], 337C7-8[ἄλλο τι οὖν], 337D6, 337E1[γε], 338B1-2, 338D2-3, 338D7[εἶτα], 339B1[γε], 339D4, 340C6[γε]). He has by now called Socrates three names (with peremptory γάρ : ἡδὺς γὰρ εἶ [337D6]; βδελυρὸς γὰρ εἶ [338D3]; συκοφάντης γὰρ εἶ [340D1]). When he is not derisive he is boastful (337D1-2 vaunts that he has a killer answer and 338C1 commands Socrates to hear that answer). Yet he is able to introduce the steps in his argument without the edge, and does respond to Socrates’s elenchus politely—at least, until Socrates concludes he has contradicted himself (τί λέγεις σύ, 339D4).

The sycophant acts honest and simple for devious and dishonest reasons. In argument this might consist of making an innocent-looking allegation that Thrasymachus’s argument should be held to a standard which Socrates knows all the while it does not need to meet (cf. the use of the term in Arist.Top.157A32; 139B26, 33). Thus for Thrasymachus Socrates’s sycophancy is just an aspect of his irony, his strategy of playing dumb and asking questions, and thereby defeating persons by holding them to a higher standard than he himself could sustain as answerer.

361

ἐπεὶ αὐτίκα (D2), as when a speaker starts with “first of all” to indicate he could have started elsewhere at the same time that he promises he’ll get there in good time. Cf. Gorg.472D1 (and Dodds ad loc.); Lach.195B3; Phdrs.235E; Prot.359E3 (and Stallb.,“ne longe hinc abeam”); Tht.166B; Adam on Crito 44D; Riddell, Digest §143.

362

καλεῖς (D2), as opposed to λέγεις (340C8 and before) broaches a distinction between the word and the meaning.

363

κατὰ ταύτην τὴν ἁμαρτίαν (D4-5): The argument depends on the meaning of κατά, “in respect to,” and therefore “by looking at.” When we call him a doctor even though he errs, we are looking at something other than the error; conversely when we focus on the error (cf. κατ’ αὐτὸ τοῦτο, D3) we would not call him a doctor.

364

λέγομεν (D5): to prove his charge of sycophancy – i.e., that Socrates is holding him to too high a standard – Thrasymachus needs to have Socrates make the same minor error he does; but to save his position he needs to have everybody speak this way, and so he shifts from the second singular (καλεῖς, D2) to the first plural. He softens or hides the transition by avoiding to use any verb at all in the intervening and transitional case of the accountant (D3-5).

365

ὅτι ὁ ἰατρὸς ἐξήμαρτεν καὶ ὁ λογιστὴς ἐξήμαρτεν καὶ ὁ γραμματιστής (D5-6). The γραμματιστής is new. Last minute additions are a typical way of confirming a point (cf. 333B8-9 and n.). What is casual in their being added without warning is here underscored by his dropping of the verb in this third case.

366

οἶμαι twice (D5, D7), feigning humility. He is beginning a vaunt.

367

τὸ δέ (D7), “but in truth” (as often), here meaning not just in fact but in essence or in reality.

368

ἕκαστος (D7), as the superlative of ἑκάτερος, insists on superlative specificity; as such it is one of the expressions Plato uses for the ideas (cf. n.4753).

369

κατά (D7) now used with quantitative ὅσον (ἔστι paroxytone).

370

προσαγορεύομεν (E1), more technical than καλεῖν (D2) or λέγειν τῷ ῥήματι (D5).

371

δημιουργός (E4): Thrasymachus suddenly introduces the term to serve as a generalization from his three examples of the doctor, the accountant and the grammarian: the question is whether he means it also to cover the ἄρχων for the sake of whom these three examples have been adduced.

The semantic field of the word is complex. The δημιουργός is sometimes a mere craftsman (Leg.850B1, C3; Prot.312B1-4; Rep.396A8) but sometimes on a par with the finer competencies (parallel with ἐπιστῆμαι at Charm.173C2, Leg.902E5,Tht.146C8-D1) Sometimes the range of use appears to be exhausted by manufacturing trades (e.g. Apol.22D [and Riddell ad loc.]; Charm.173C2; Euthyd.280C8; Rep.415C2, 466A8-B2, 468A6-7 [where the γεωργός is not a δημιουργός]; ἄλλων is ambiguous at 371C2], 552A9-10, 598B9; Soph.219AC [esp.C4]), including the production of graphic art works (Rep.401A1-4 [but contrast 597D11]); but sometimes it extends beyond them, perhaps by metaphor although without apology, to approach any competency whatever (Crat.429A4-B9; Gorg.452A2-3, 503E; Rep.421C1-2, 466E5-6, 552D4-6). Rep.433D2-4 needs to be treated separately. In all cases competency is present.

The etymology of the word, its use in distinction from ἰδιώτης (Ion 531C5-6, Prot.312B1-4, and cf.Thg.124B5-7), the parallel use of the term δημοσεύειν in a context like Gorg.455B3 (cf. Thompson and Dodds ad loc.), and its ready availability for the approbatory uses of Timaeus and of Eryximachus in Symposium (186D4-5 [and Dover ad loc.], 187D3-5, 188D1), all suggest that the value of the competency lies in the public’s reliance upon it. This perhaps explains Glaucon's denial that a painter of a bed is as much a δημιουργός as a bedmaker (597D11-E2).

372

δημιουργὸς ἢ σοφὸς ἢ ἄρχων (E4-5): The list is rhetorically bold at the same time it is strikingly ambiguous. It may consist of three nouns, “a specialist, or a wise person, or a ruler,” but the logic of such a triad is obscure, the fact that he expatiates only on the third item needs to be explained, and the subsequent elaboration with ἰατρός and ἄρχων appears to leave out the middle item, the σοφός.

σοφός in particular is new in the present context. Logically it stems from ἐπιστήμη (E3); as such it should modify δημιουργός. In this case ἄρχων, presumably parallel to it because also introduced by ἤ, should also modify δημιουργός. Thus the list means, “no specialist, whether working for the people as expert or as ruler ...” and the point of the list is to cast back through the σοφοί of the present paragraph (the γραμματιστής, the λογιστής and the ἰατρός), so as to return us to the explicandum they were introduced to explain, namely, the ruler. Such a list-configuration, in which a general term is followed by a pair of specifiers, is well established (Euthyd.271B4-5; Leg.766E1-2, 776D8-E1, 933A2-3; Phlb.17E4-5; Rep.411D3-4, 431B9-C1, 528A4-5; Soph.260C8-9); and linking nouns with modifiers as though syntactically coordinate is commonplace (Charm.161E12-13; Leg.665C2-3; Prot.319D2-4; Tht.175B3-4 [and Campbell ad loc.]).

373

ᾖ (E5) again existential (cf. D7), though diacritics cannot indicate so in the subjunctive.

374

ἄρχων (E6): or, “really is ruling.” The word may be a noun or a periphrastic participle, but it comes to the same. It is an index of his subliminal desires that Thrasymachus exploits the opportunity to expatiate on the last item in his list only (he says “when he rules” when he could or should have said “when he heals or rules”), just as, conversely, he had taken given shorter shrift to the last item in his last one, in which he is uninterested (γραμμιστής, 340D6). To generalize for all the items in terms that generalize the last only, cf. Alc.I 107B9 [A7-8]; Leg.631C4-5 [applying also to B7-C1], 906E10-12, 948E5-9A5; Phdrs.247D5-E2; Polit.288D7-E4 [esp.E2-4], 290B1-4, 307A8-B1 [where the solution to the coming paradox is broached with a generalization of the last item only]; Rep.526D2-5, 529E1-3.

375

ἀκριβέστατον (E8): The superlative is gratuitous and enthusiastic.

376

ἐστὶν (341A1) enclitic; or ἔστι, “really is ruler,” as at 340D7.

377

μή (A1), because the denial is based on the definition or nature of the ruler.

378

βέλτιστον (A2), the superlative, taking head-on the challenge Socrates had made with his superlative at 339D7. There is a note of triumph in the presentation of his conclusion.

379

He claims he has not shifted positions, but by adding ποιητέον (A2) he shifts the accent from the justness of the command to the justness of obeying it, from the paradoxical statement that whatever the strong want is eo ipso just, to the almost tautological view that obeying the law they impose by virtue of their position as rulers, is just. The former is controversial; the latter almost goes without saying, since in common parlance laws prescribe what behavior is “just.”

380

ἐρέσθαι (A8), present infinitive representing the imperfect.

381

He has not only seen through Socrates’s sycophantic ruse (λάθοις, B1) of holding him to a higher standard than Socrates himself could maintain, but has succeeded to meet that higher standard himself (so that Socrates’s ruse had no force [βιάσασθαι τῷ λόγῳ δύναιο, B2-3]).

382

With τοιοῦτον (B4) Socrates avoids dignifying the squabbling with a name, which besides would in all likelihood only extend the controversy.

383

ἀκριβεστάτῳ (B8), Thrasymachus’s enthusiasm reappearing (cf. 340E8).

384

ὄντα (B8) again “existential” (cf. A1, 340E5, 340D7).

385

κακούργει καὶ συκοφάντει (B9) invites Socrates to concatenate the two kinds of attack Thrasymachus has accused him of trying so far (κακουργήσαις, 338D4; συκοφαντής, 340D1).

386

γοῦν (C3) of “part proof:” whether he would is mooted by the fact that he already did.

387

καί (C6).

388

τῷ ὄντι (C6). The distinction between the loose and strict senses having been secured, Socrates can now refer to the strict sense with a variety of terms. Here he repeats Thrasymachus’s formulation with existential ὄντα (from B8) by varying τῷ ἀκριβεῖ λόγῳ (C4) with τῷ ὄντι.

389

κυβερνητής (C9): Socrates expands on Thrasymachus’s example, ἰατρός (E6), with κυβερνητής so as to instantiate not only expertise (like Thrasymachus’s supplementary cases: λογιστής, γραμματιστής [340D3-7]) but the sorts of expertise that we rely upon in life and death situations. Cf. 389C2-6, 551C3; Leg.709B2-3, 961E-962A; Polit.299BC; Prot.344D2-5.

390

ὀρθῶς (C9) replaces τῷ ὄντι in attributive position (cf. C6).

391

ναυτῶν ἄρχων (C11): Though he was triumphant in the by-play Thrasymachus’s answers now become defensively spare (cf. C8).

392

οὐδέ (D1) illative, as καί would be if the two clauses were positive (cf. 342A5 and n.).

393

κατὰ τὸ πλεῖν / κατὰ τὴν τέχνην (D2-3): Socrates closely imitates Thrasymachus’s expressions at 340D3 and D4-5.

394

τὴν τέχνην καὶ τὴν τῶν ναυτῶν ἀρχήν (D3): With his exegesis (καί) Socrates adopts and emphasizes the association between expertise and rule that Thrasymachus had relied on above and expressed with δημιουργός at 340E4-5.

395

ἑκάστῳ τούτων (D5): ἑκάστῳ may be neuter or masculine, but given Thrasymachus’s insistence on the distinct nature of the various τέχναι it, with τούτων, likely refers to the two sample practitioners, doctor and pilot, rather than to the pilot and the sailor (who moreover should have been in the plural). D.J. Allan’s flat assertion that ἑκάστῳ is masculine, on the grounds that there has as yet been no mention of objects or persons whose benefit the arts secure, merely begs the question. There is no warrant in the text by which we can intervene and remove the ambiguity: it is intended by Socrates.

396

If this ἑκάστῳ (D8) has the same reference as the previous one (D5), an inference we have at this point no warrant either to assert or deny, Socrates has now suggested that skills have come into existence to benefit their practitioners. This is Thrasymachus’s position exactly. The art of rule is for him identical with the ruler obtaining and maintaining power by the promulgation of laws the obedience to which redounds to his benefit, even though secured merely on the argument that, being laws, it is just to obey them.

397

ἐπὶ τούτῳ (D9): Thrasymachus’s reply is still spare and without affect, despite the fact that Socrates has finally and for the first time articulated exactly the controversial thesis Thrasymachus wants to thrill everyone with.

398

With ὥσπερ (E2), adverb, Socrates answers in kind Thrasymachus’s peculiar question, πῶς.

399

πονηρόν (E5): the diction is strained. But if we ask why a villain is called πονηρός it is because he is troublesome and burdensome to us or, as we sometimes say, a “pain.”

400

τί δὲ δή (342A1) with δή indicating a move to the target.

401

εἰς αὐτὰ ταῦτα (A4), ‘to move them in the direction of the ability (ἀρετήν) they each need.’ εἰς is used with ἀρετή exactly this way at 335B8, B10, and C2.

402

καί (alterum, c. δεῖ, A5) illative, as at Gorg.478D6-7; H.Min.366A2-4; Lach.197A8; Meno 76D4; Phdo 85E5-6A1, 86A2-3; Phdrs.229B8; Polit.274A2; Rep.382B2-3, 434C1-2, 465C7, 476A10, 488E4-9A1. Close and sometimes hardly worth distinguishing is καί designating the temporal consequence of items as Charm.156D1-3; Gorg.467D3-4; Leg.738D6-E1; Phdo 81B8; Phdrs.251A7-B1; Symp.206D3-5, D5-7.

403

ἤ (primum, B1) meaning “or else” (cf. 401B [bis], 504D, 598E4; and Phdrs.237C1; Tim.52C5), the first alternative having been refuted, and therefore eliminated, by the fact that it leads to infinite regress. Distinguish this use from ἤ for the “or else” of the unattractive alternative (e.g., 490A2, 574A3, 598E4; and Crat.426B2; Gorg.494A1; Lach.196E4; Phdrs.245D8).

404

ἐπὶ τὴν αὑτῆς πονηρίαν (B2): The language begins to raise τέχνη to a higher level and even to personify her.

405

οὔτε γὰρ πονηρία οὔτε ἁμαρτία οὐδεμία οὐδεμιᾷ τέχνῃ (B3): the language turns away from logical demonstration (ἀπόδειξις) toward praise (ἐπίδειξις), a praise of τέχνη that takes its cue from the enthusiasm that Thrasymachus had momentarily shown (ἀκριβέστατον, 340E8).

406

ἄλλῳ (B4): as with the dative ἑκάστῳ above (341D8) the reference and the gender are unascertainable.

407

οὗ (B5) continues the semantic obscurity of ἄλλῳ and adds syntactic obscurity: is the genitive objective or subjective? Does the τέχνη benefit the technician whose τέχνη it is (subjective) or the thing on which it operates (objective)? The former possibility was mildly suggested by Socrates at 341D5-8, perhaps a little perversely. That the latter might be the answer is however suggested by ἐκείνῳ, which as the demonstrative of the more remote reference would point back to the items τέχνη was said to seek the advantage of (341E6-7) before the talk about τέχνη needing another τέχνη (342A1-B2).

408

ἀβλαβὴς καὶ ἀκέραιός ἐστιν ὀρθὴ οὖσα ἕωσπερ ἂν ῇ ἑκάστη ἀκριβὴς ὅλη ἥπερ ἐστίν (B5-6): the heaping sequence of approbatory abstractions sounds Parmenidean! Among these terms Socrates has incorporated ἀκριβής (B6), which he borrowed from Thrasymachus, as he goes on to remind him (B7).

409

ἄρα (C1) without apology and without supplementary connective.

410

ἐκείνῳ οὗ (C5): The ambiguity of syntax and semantics is continued (cf. B5) and becomes all the more pregnant (unfortunately difficult to render in English: my “that” for ἐκείνῳ can be a person): the ambiguous phrase is starting to echo.

411

ἄρχουσι (C8), emphasized by γε.

412

ἐκείνου οὗπέρ εἰσιν τέχναι (C9): This phrase since it was first used at 342B5 was amenable to a misinterpretation advantageous to Thrasymachus, but now its true reference is ineluctably clear: the genitive is objective and not subjective and the antecedent of ἐκείνου is the object the art operates on. The skills belong to nobody; the world belongs to the skills.

413

ἄρα (C11), again (cf. C1), direct and bare, this time supplemented with γε after ἐπιστήμη: “knowledge, given what she is.” He reverts from narration back to quoting himself abruptly, without ἦν δ’ ἐγώ or ἔφην, as if we knew he would.

414

ἐπιστήμη (C11) is really what they have been talking about all along (cf.340E3), though Thrasymachus’s introduction of δημιουργός (340E3), which helped him bridge the analogy between the σοφός and the ἄρχων (nn.371 and 372, supra), deflected attention toward the bridging term, τέχνη.

415

ἐπιτάττει (C12) replaces ἐκπορίζειν (341E6, 342A4), its ἐπι- picking up the goal of τέχνη as done with ἐπί plus acc. at 342B2; but the root of the new verb recalls the language of the previous context, in particular the picture of the ruler giving commands to the ruled (προστάττειν: 339D6, E3, 4, E7, and 340A5, replaced with κελεύειν by Cleitophon at 340A7).

416

ἐπεχείρει … μάχεσθαι (D2-3): Compare his enervated behavior at 338A8-B3 (and n.). Again Socrates places the important fact, that he did agree, into the (concessive) μέν clause (cf. n.304). From this we get the impression he has taken an effort to spare us burdensome detail. Cf. 350C12,ff.

417

ὁ ἀκριβὴς ἰατρός (D6): another variation in the expression of Thrasymachus’s pronouncement (cf.341C6, C8 and nn.), this time incorporating the emblem of Thrasymachus’s proud enthusiasm (ἀκριβέστατον, 340E8, cf. 341B8).

418

ὡμολόγηται (D6), the perfect pointing back to an agreement previously secured (341C4-8). With this step he closes the door on the second meaning of ἐκείνῳ οὗ τέχνη ἐστίν at 342B5, which was there still ambiguous enough that he could still secure Thrasymachus’s agreement there.

419

οὐκ ἄρα (E2) abrupt and bare for the third time (cf. 342C11 and C1).

420

γε (E2).

421

σκέψεταί τε καὶ προστάξει (E3): Now that he has the instance of the pilot back in the picture he has a more natural example of an art that rules (since it rules the sailors), so that he can replace ἐπιτάττειν with exactly the original term, προστάττειν. The distinct uses he had in mind for the two examples he had given at the beginning, the medico who is not a businessman and a pilot who is not a sailor, have now been revealed and brought to fruition. We had been told that the essence of the example of pilot and sailor consisted in the fact that the pilot was also sailing in the ship (πλεῖν, 341D2); but the real purpose was to set up the image of an expert ruling others, which also was broached there (with the rather strained expression, ναυτῶν ἄρχων, 341C9). Now he cashes this image in, but only after a strain in expression that calls it back to mind, the expression σωμάτων ἄρχων (342D6). Socrates’s refutation is a consummate display of virtuosity.

422

οὐδέ (E6) was proleptic, announcing a large period, and is picked up here (οὐδ’ ἐπιτάττει, E8). The pair of negatives is then shuttled by ἀλλά (E8) into a series of positive statements linked by καί in “triumphant exuberance” (cf. England ad Leg.734D), building to a climax and then brought to a rest by the generalizing anaphoric doublet, λέγει ἃ λέγει καὶ ποιεῖ ἃ ποιεῖ (E10), capped with ἅπαντα (E11).

423

καί (E8) epexegetical, but ushering in a series of καί's in triumphant exuberance (342E9-11), of which the characteristic is that they come one after the other with different forces and different effects: 360B7-C3, 402C2-5, 475C6-7; Alc.I 105B4-7, 122C4-8; Crito 47B1-2, 51A7-C1 (the Laws speaking); Gorg.507E-508A; 511E1-3, 525A, C, D4; 527BE; Leg.734D, 892B3-4 (unswaying march to the goal), 942B4-5; Phdrs.239E5-6; Prot.325A6, 360B4-5; Symp.180B6-8, 185B5-6, 188D4-9 (all perorations: conversely, note conspicuous absence of καί in Agathon’s peroration: 194C1-E5). Compare καί in unremitting satire at 396B5-7, 425B1-4, 573D2-4; and Charm.161E11-13.

424

καὶ ᾧ ἂν αὐτὸς δημιουργῇ (E8-9): Socrates remembers to clean up a detail: Thrasymachus had brought in the δημιουργός so as to confuse his strong man with the strength conferred on a practitioner of an art (340E4 and n.). To make his point in English I have taken some liberty with the wording: τὸ τῷ ἀρχομένῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν αὐτὸς δημιουργῇ (342E8-9).

425

βλέπων (E9): Now it is Socrates’s language (rather than Thrasymachus’s: cf. 340D7 and n.) that approaches the terminology of the ideas!

426

καὶ λέγει ἃ λέγει καὶ ποιεῖ ἃ ποιεῖ (E10): Closure is often achieved by a complementary or polar doublet: 361B4-5. 412B3-4, 476B4-5 [χρόας καὶ σχήματα a doublet for the visible world] 580A3-5, 608E6-9A4 ; Crit.115A4-5; H.Maj.304B2-3; Leg.694E6-7 [πολλῶν πολλάς], 744B7-C2 [reading πενίαν with A and O2 vs. πενίας with O], 764C8-D3, 779D2-5, 836A6-B1; Phlb.11B7-8; Polit.267E7-8, 299D3-E2; Prot.315C2-5, 325A6; Tht.186D10-E1; and cf. Thg.124B5-7.

427

ἅπαντα (E11) achieves a climax that was postponed by Socrates’s choice to use simple relative clauses (ἃ λέγει and ἃ ποιεῖ, E10) rather than the generalizing formulation that he had just used (ᾧ ἂν … δημιουργῇ, E8-9).

428

ὅτι (343A7): Thrasymachus’s riddle about the nurse was meant to elicit the question, “What do you mean?” just as a “knock-knock” joke relies on eliciting “Who’s there?” Socrates did say τί δέ, but he went on to scold Thrasymachus for asking an inappropriate question. In order to tell his joke Thrasymachus has to ignore the remark and act as if Socrates did not say it. Thus Thrasymachus has to bring himself to answering a question Socrates did not ask.

429

περιορᾷ (A7) and δεόμενον (A8) reveal that Thrasymachus is parodying Socrates’s praise of knowledge as the savior of the weak. He chooses to confuse Socrates’s ardent admiration for knowledge with a sentimental or softhearted concern for people who need its benefits. As though supposing that Socrates “identifies” with them, he now treats Socrates as a helpless baby. We shall soon see that his impatience is not due to the fact that his position has just been refuted, but that what is dazzling and compelling about his outlook has not yet burst forth upon the scene so as to make all this pussy-footing conversation unnecessary.

430

αὐτῇ (A8): The dative is ethical and loose, parallel to his use of μοι at 336C6.

431

This third ὅτι (A10) ends the back and forth and becomes the opening word of his performance.

432

καὶ δὴ καί (B4) is the shoehorn Thrasymachus uses to make a transition to his main thesis from the example of the shepherd. Cephalus used it in a similar way (329B7, and n.).

433

οἱ ὡς ἀληθῶς ἄρχουσιν (B5). The expression echoes and imitates his own stipulation of a “strict sense” but the meaning as we shall see is now almost the opposite (“realistic” rather than “idealistic”: cf. τῷ ὄντι, C4).

434

ἡγῇ (B5), of settled belief (cf. 334C2 and n.211, 494A1).

435

διὰ νυκτὸς καὶ ἡμέρας (B7): The doublet vies with the doublet λέγειν / ποιεῖν in Socrates’s peroration (342E10).

436

τοῦ δικαίου καὶ δικαιοσύνης (C1-2): neuter adjective and abstract noun denoting practice and precept.

437

τῷ ὄντι (C4) continuing the realist tenor of ὡς ἀληθῶς. A

438

Polemarchus’s terminology of ὠφελία (C1) and βλάβη (C5) has now returned.

439

ἀδικία (C5), surprisingly, is the subject of ἄρχει (C6), in a virtual personification. It is a passion of Thrasymachus to see the concept personified in the person of the strong man—unless we prefer to say he sees injustice “embodied” in the strong man—so that ἀδικία for him is a metonymy for ὁ κρείττων.

440

τῶν ὡς ἀληθῶς εὐηθικῶν τε καὶ δικαίων (C6-7) an instance of “reverse καί” (or τε καί as often as not), as at 359A3, 376C2, 378A3, 392D8 , 409A2-3, 411A7-8, 411D3-4, 411D7, 431B7, 474D5, 503C4, 524B4, 564C10, 574B2, 579D10, 590B3-4; cf. Apol.19D2 [τε καί]; Gorg.461C6, 474A1; Phdo 80C7-8, 100B8; Phdrs.254C8; Symp.191A1, 209C3; Tht.162B4-5; Tim.73E2.

441

ἐκεῖνος (C8) repeated (cf. C7), shows his enthusiastic approval.

442

εὐηθέστατε (D2) echoing his εὐηθικῶν above. Thrasymachus carelessly identifies the ”weak” with those who disagree with his strong-man attitude.

443

πανταχοῦ (D3): Again we see Thrasymachus’s penchant for identifying the truth with the omnipresent (ἐν ἁπάσαις ταῖς πόλεσιν [338E6-9A1], whence πανταχοῦ (A3): cf. n. ad loc.), in order to avoid revealing that his argument is tautological: the unjust man has more simply because he takes more. In this case he goes further. What he presents as a proof by exhaustion (note the structure πανταχοῦ, 343D3, followed by πρῶτον μὲν ἐν X [A3],ἔπειτα ἐν Y [A6]) becomes for him a vehicle to praise injustice in all its venues one by one and thereby gradually to overcome his auditor’s resistance to his λόγος πονηρός. Again, απόδειξις becomes ἐπίδειξις (cf. 343B2 and n.).

444

συμβολαίοις / κοινωνήσῃ (D4): The terminology of business and partnership now reappears.

445

λήψεις (D8), “gettings” is obviously meant to stand in parallel with paying assessments (the parallelism prepared by corresponsive τε at D7). He plays down the technical term εἰσφοραί by burying it in the verb εἰσφέρειν, and then coins the term λήψεις, and in so doing gives legitimate-sounding voice to the sentiment “I give them all this money, but what do I get back for it?” Translators miss the rhetoric and supply a decent sounding term. “Distributions” [Shorey] and “retributions” [Leroux] are officialese; “anything to be received” [Jowett] and “quand il s’agit de reçevoir” [Chambry] are milquetoast passives; “when the city is giving out refunds” [Grube] combines both these vices; Allan (Plato.Republic I [London 1940] ad loc.) invents certain “exceptional distributions of land or money” for it to refer to. The idea that there is something to get is its own warrant!

446

πολλὰ κερδαίνει (E1): the term, with its connotation of excessive profit, reappears from Thrasymachus’s list of interdictions (κερδαλέον, 336D2).

447

καὶ γάρ (E1) introducing proof by focussing on specifics.

448

ὅνπερ νυνδὴ ἔλεγον (344A1), though there has been no depiction of the unjust man as such. Thrasymachus can now reveal that all along he has been talking about one and the same man, first as the κρείττων then as an ἄρχων and a δημιουργός and finally, just above, as the ἄρχων ὡς ἀληθῶς (B5), namely the fully unjust man. To reveal this is his rhetorical climax. The old dispute over whether to read ὅνπερ or to substitute the ὅπερ of the recentiores (Ast apud Adam ad loc.) is another attempt (cf. λήψεις, D8 and n.) to save Thrasymachus from himself—from saying what he really means—by blunting his expression.

449

His expression is ἐὰν ἐπὶ τὴν τελεωτάτην ἀδικίαν ἔλθῃς (A4), again (with its propositional phrase) entertaining the personification or embodiment of injustice in the unjust man; but ἔλθῃς almost suggests that his student or auditor is meant to entertain the notion and imagine himself going to these ends himself.

450

With ἡ (A4) Thrasymachus verges on epideictic personification, as Socrates had at 342B3ff.

451

τῶν τοιούτων κακουργημάτων (B4) a genitive of condemnation with pregnant τοιούτων (“condemned for committing the crimes by themselves being called by their several names”).

452

μακάριοι (B7) goes beyond εὐδαίμονες, toward a divine happiness (cf. n.254). Socrates will remember this hyperbolic and impious claim throughout the entire dialogue, starting at 346A3 (n.254) and ending at 591D8 (n.4719).

453

καὶ ἰσχυρότερον καὶ ἐλευθεριώτερον καὶ δεσποτικώτερον (C5): Thrasymachus like Socrates perorates with καί in confident fullness (342E9-11 and n.), but adds homoioteleuton into the bargain. The triad rhymes and reaches a climax in the surprising candor and intensity of its last term, but constellates no meaning or gestalt along the way.

454

ἱκανῶς γιγνομένη (C6). ἱκανός is always ready to be used in this superlative sense. The term is a favorite among men who are satisfied about being tough, like Callicles (cf. his ἐλευθερον καὶ μέγα καὶ ἱκανόν, Gorg.485E1 [cf. 484A2], 491B3, 492A1, noticed and corrected by Socrates at 489A6, 493C7, 495A8). Contrast its use in meiosis, as at Gorg.480A4 where it means basta.

455

ὅπερ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἔλεγον (C6-7), referring to 341A3. Thrasymachus’s speeches progress not in argumentation or logic, but in candor and intensity.

456

λυσιτελοῦν τε καὶ συμφέρον (C8): With the addition of λυσιτελοῦν Thrasymachus adduces for his own purposes the fourth (even in its participial form) of five definientia that he forbade Socrates to adduce in his definition of justice, predicating it, now, of injustice (compare ὠφέλιμον, brought back at 343C1; κερδαλέον, brought back at 343E1; and of course συμφέρον, passim). The τε καί is gratuitous decoration.

457

φοβούμενοι (C3): in order to achieve epigrammatic swiftness Thrasymachus has to stretch the meaning of φοβεῖσθαι to include shrinking from doing evil (this is why φοβούμενοι is in hyperbaton). Compare the distinction between δέος and αἰδώς in Euthyph.12AB. Again the translator must make his own decision how willing he is to try to talk like Thrasymachus (cf. on ἡδύς, 337D6 and n.).

458

Now we can understand why he could easily identify Socrates’s irony (337A) with a desire to learn without paying (338B) and with playing the sycophant (340D1 and n.). Thrasymachus envies Socrates for his ability to persuade his interlocutors to abandon their willful sense of superiority and follow him (and the logos) instead, which for instance took place in his conversation with Polemarchus.

459

Thus the only way for him to ὑπολαμβάνειν the λόγον is ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι (336B2 and n.).

460

τελέαν (341D11), ἐξαρκεῖ (E2, E5), and 342B3-6, esp. ὅλη (B6).

461

τελεωτάτην (A4), ὅλη (C2).

462

Now we learn how it is that Thrasymachus can think asking a question is the same as deciding an answer to it, as he had at 3366C2-7. Cf. n.ad loc.

463

343D8: cf. n.ad loc.

464

Laterally: i.e., from one species to another of the same rank, although with καὶ γάρ he portrays the transition as a focussing, as if public office were a species of λῆψις, which of course for the just man it is not (cf. the false promise of a focus in καὶ δὴ καί, at 343B4). Allan (ad loc.) takes the bait and invents the notion that ἀρχαί are to be included under λήψεις, which, like his attempt to domesticate that term itself, is an unconscious attempt to save Thrasymachus’s argument from its own concupiscence.

465

Illogic and inconsequence are symptomatic of excited discourse, and are therefore also found in the imitation of it and in the satire of it. When illogic is present in a text for these reasons, to emend it away is a misuse of learning. For instances of illogical order in the listing of items due to the speaker’s excitement or confusion, or the imitation of these in another person, cf. Alc.I 122B8-C2; Leg.661A5-B4 (desire), 687A6-B2 (desire), 734D7 (triumph), 896E8-7B4 (triumph); Rep.373A1-8, B5-C1, C2-4 (concupiscence), 561C7-D2ff (democratic man), 573A5-6 and D2-4 (concupiscence, bis), 586A8-B3 (concupiscence: cf. n.4586 ad loc.); Symp.183A4-7 (desire). For a sophist’s use of flooded kaleidoscope to bowl over his auditors, cf. Gorg.473B12-D2 and Symp.197D3-E5, to which the gratuitous use of ποικιλία gravitates: Prot.316D6-E4, 334A3-C6. In the depiction of things by their nature disorderly, the illogic or inconsequence might be classed as objective rather than subjective: Gorg.490C8-D1, 491A1-2 (both derogatory); Leg.669C4-D2 (imitation), 669E6-7, 842A5-B2, 842D3-5 (and Engl. ad loc.), 842D7-8, 890C4-5; Phdo.111A5-6; Rep.425C10-D6 (miscellaneous legislation), 516C10-D1 (cave images), 596E1-3 (imitation).

466

For εἰ βούλει (344A2) in priamel cf.P.O.1.3-4 and E.L.Bundy, Studia Pindarica 59n.55.

467

κρίνειν (E2) is common in the epideictic context of the priamel (the usual function of which is to select an item), but will reappear in the apodictic context of Glaucon's challenge to Socrates, in Book Two (360E1ff) and will return to play a very important role when Glaucon reassumes the role of interlocutor, Book Nine (576Bff: cf.n.4378).

468

He excuses what will be a detailed and lurid account on epistemological grounds with the teacher’s formula πάντων δὲ ῥᾷστα μαθήσῃ (344A3-4), which also has the function, by means of its superlative, of moving from foil to cap.

469

ἥ (relative, 344A4). His passionate tendency to personify Injustice leads him to the language and formulas of the kletic hymn.

470

Thrasymachus would have us believe that ἀδικία, like Pindar’s Zeus, τά τε καὶ τὰ νέμει (Isth. 5[4]52); cf. H.Od.6.188-9).

471

Within the ambience of the kletic hymn we move from one to the other avatar of the goddess.

472

The selection of fragments and testimonia in Diels-Kranz (2.319-326) is quite enough to reveal that outside Plato Thrasymachus was thought of as a rhetorician only; the long fragment we have from a speech of his in Dionysius Helicarnassus (Dem.3=DK, B1) evinces no theory (and the “assertion” reported by Hermias in Phdrs. [239 Couvrier, = DK85B8] contradicts, if anything, a theory that justice is bad) but only a hard and emotionally powerful use of balanced antithesis. As to the Platonic “evidence,” besides the vivid depiction in Rep. I we have a description of his oratorical “powers” in Phdrs.267C7-D2 where his claim of a redoubtable ability to arouse an audience with slander and then to charm their anger away is all that is said. In that context he is singled out from other teachers, and even satirized, for the violent forcefulness of his art (κεκρατηκέναι τέχνῃ, C8: cf. σθένος [C9] and κράτιστος [D2]). Here, his violent effect on Glaucon and Adeimantus is the problem.

473

ἐλευθεριώτερον καὶ δεσποτικώτερον (344C5).

474

πλεονεξία: “Having or getting more”—more, that is, than another. Likewise, his hero is not strong, only stronger (κρείττων); and the pinnacle of tyranny is only that everybody thinks he is. For Thrasymachus being first is all but he needs a second in order to achieve this. This is the “difference between the shepherd and the sheep” of which Socrates is so blissfully ignorant. Cf. πρότερος 336D5, προύλεγον, 337A5; βελτίω, 337D2; πλέον, 341A9; and within his big speech, his use of comparative (ἔλαττον, 343D3; μᾶλλον, 344A2; capping comparatives at 344C5) and μέν / δέ constructions (343C3-D1, D7-E7, and 344C7-8).

475

This impotence of power had already been broached in the case of the list of anti-sages to whom Socrates attributes the “doctrine” that justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies, above (μέγα οἰομένου δύνασθαι πλουσίου ἀνδρός, 336A6-7).

476

Shorey: “...in the case of many doctrines combated by Plato there is no evidence that they were ever formulated with the proper logical qualifications except by himself.” (WPS 8, quoted by Shorey in connection with Thrasymachus’s putative “doctrine” in his Loeb edition [I.xi.]).

477

Like a tub of water his logos was ἁθροός καὶ πολύς (344D2-3), a doublet of quality and quantity. The feeling of density is an index of how many places the listener might have wanted to ask a question and couldn’t.

478

His technique of bathing people is less gentle than that of the τίτθη. To administer the cold shower of realism is as much ministering as he will do for these trucklers: they’ll have to wipe themselves dry. From his own perspective his Great Answer is the end of the discussion since among other things he has now revealed that discussion is for losers. All along he has intended only to hold forth, never to converse.

479

ὑπομεῖναι (D4): The prefix denotes that he is to put himself at their disposal.

480

διδόναι λόγον τῶν εἰρημένων (D5) suggests that somehow his εἰρημένα were not already λεγόμενα. To make sense of the phrase we must recognize the difference between holding forth and conversing.

481

When Socrates reverts to narrative he reverts to the first person, we move into the position of the second person, and the others present revert to that of the third. The force of καὶ δὴ καί (D5) is to assert that Socrates’s response was consonant with and even representative of the reaction of the whole company. By infixing αὐτός within καὶ δὴ καί he balances his role as narrator against his role as participant. Parallels of such infixing are naturally few.

482

Of course his primary duty is to explain himself (cf. λόγον παρασχεῖν above), a job that Socrates now slightly overstates with διδάξαι (D7) so as to introduce the alternative, μαθεῖν. Hereby Socrates articulates the difference between τὰ εἰρημένα and their λόγος. The speech is a performance referred to in the perfect (εἰρημένα) because the performance is over. Its meaning (λόγος) is the enduring and separate precipitate or “aftermath” of the performance. Evaluation cannot begin until the performance is over. Just as Thrasymachus’s authority (διδάξαι) is called into question by μαθεῖν, οὗτος is called into question by ἄλλος. The binary cancellations leave standing only the notion of sufficiency (ἱκανῶς), the criterion of all dialectical conversation (cf. nn.491, 530, 691, 1541, 2141, 2207, 2736, 3420, 4951; and 435D7, 523B1, 603D5). Thrasymachus thinks he is finished but Socrates in effect asserts he has not begun.

483

ὅλου βίου διαγωγὴ ᾗ ἂν διαγόμενος ... (E1-3), a “lilies of the field” construction meant to amplify the topic, in contrast to thinking it σμικρόν. διαγόμενος represents an optative protasis. The condition (completed with ἂν … ζώῃ) is ideal in order to stress that how one lives one’s life is a matter for deliberation (whence βουλευόμεθα, 345B3 below). The shift from βίος to ζώη suggests a distinction between what we sow and what we reap.

484

τουτὶ ἄλλως ἔχειν (E4) refers to Socrates’s words εἴτε οὕτως εἴτε ἄλλως ἔχει (D7-E1). τουτί (“this thing you just heard [sc. in my speech]”), with its deictic iota suggests a gesture with the hand. What he said cannot “be otherwise” since for Thrasymachus it is not a theory but a fact.

485

ἔοικας ἦν δ’ ἐγὼ ἤτοι (E5): Socrates is suggesting (with ἔοικας) that Thrasymachus’s speech is not sincere but just a display meant to thrill and scandalize his audience. For otherwise (ἤτοι) he would be concerned that our taking him seriously would have a serious effect on the way we live our lives (E1-3, E5-7). Socrates brings to the surface that in lieu of a captatio benevolentiae for himself, what Thrasymachus’s rhetoric is meant to do is stir up envious resentment against others.

486

προθυμεῖσθαι again (E7: cf. n.33). Cf.Euthyphr.11B4, E3.

487

τοσούσδε (345A1) first person demonstrative, suggesting now that the whole company is on Socrates’s side (cf. 338A3, 336E3); but since it is quantitative (vs. τούσδε) it is reminiscent of Polemarchus’s remark to Socrates at the beginning of the dialogue (ὁρᾷς οὖν ἡμᾶς ὅσοι ἐσμέν; 327C7) about overcoming him with superior numbers. The τοι and the litotes οὔτοι κακῶς add to the mock-minatory tone. Now it is the strong man’s advocate that is being overpowered!

488

κερδαλεώτερον (A3), rather than the less crass λυσιτελές used at 344E2 and C8 (cf.336D2 and n.), to indicate he has understood that Thrasymachus is arguing “as a realist:” still, he does not agree.

489

ἔστω / δυνάσθω (A5): The third person imperatives hypothesize the scenario that Thrasymachus has just constructed, and the personification of injustice acknowledges the power with which he asserted the position (cf.344A4ff and nn. ad loc.). Socrates takes pains to indicate that he has indeed undergone the performance, but that he was affected otherwise by it than Thrasymachus had hoped (πέπονθεν, B1).

490

ἕτερός τις in place of ἄλλοι τινες, as well as ἴσως and the vague πέπονθεν, create an extended litotes. For πεπονθέναι describing the “effect” of a speech on a person, cf. Apol.17A1, Phdrs.234D1-2, Symp.215D3-E1.

491

ἱκανῶς (B2) the criterion of dialectical argumentation repeated from 344D7 above, which implies also that πεῖσον here means what “teach or learn whether it is thus or otherwise” meant there, just as βουλευόμεθα here (B2) repeats what was done with an ideal (deliberative) condition there (344E2-3).

492

καί (B4) impatient as at 340A4.

493

ἔτι γὰρ τὰ ἔμπροσθεν ἐπισκεψώμεθα (B9-C1) apologizes (γάρ) for bringing up the previous argument (τὰ ἔμπροσθεν) in order, by investigating it further (ἔτι), to illustrate the present issue.

494

ἐφ’ ὧ τέτακται (D2), perfect.

495

μηδενί (D7): μή of what is true (or false) by nature or definition.

496

ἐκείνῳ (D7) echoing ἐκείνῳ at 342E9 (cf.n.412), as this entire passage echoes that passage, at the end of which Thrasymachus saw no alternative but to deliver his long speech. As often ἐκεῖνος is used to designate an object notionally remote, here remote from the interests of the practitioner.

497

ταῖς πόλεσιν (E2): the plural again indicates he is making an empirical observation: cf. 338D7.

498

οὐκ (sc. οἶμαι, from οἴει, E3) ἀλλ’ εὖ οἶδα (E4), averring straightforwardly the same fact he had averred indirectly, at 344E4, with his ironic remark, ἐγὼ γὰρ οἶμαι τουτὶ ἄλλως ἔχειν (cf. n.).

499

ἐπεί (346A1), as often, provides the questioner a way to continue speaking so as to block the answerer from answering until the questioner can give the reason he asked the question, which reason comes in the form of a preliminary question he wants the answerer to answer first. With τοσόνδε he concedes that his former question may have asked for too much of a concession.

500

παρὰ δόξαν ἀποκρίνεσθαι (A3): the expression also suggests courting paradox (τὸ παράδοξον) for its own sake, which has been Thrasymachus’s constant practice in conversation. The give and take of conversation is, after all, a medium ill-suited to the display of his true message in all its glory.

501

ὦ μακάριε (A3), the highest characterization a man could have, now lavished on Thrasymachus, along with other honorifics, as if to keep him calm in the aftermath of his outburst (345B2, 345A5, 344E7, 344D6).

502

σύ (B2) as always is emphatic: Socrates provides him as wide a berth as he needs not to answer παρὰ δόξαν.

503

τήν (B8) makes μισθωτικὴν the subject (with ἰατρικὴν the predicate) of καλεῖς, both understood from the previous question. μισθωτική therefore plays a role parallel to that of κυβερνητική in the previous example, as οὐδέ confirms.

504

μισθαρνητικήν (B10), substituting unobtrusively for μισθωτική, in order to provide a berth for the phrase μισθὸν ἀρνυμένος below (C9).

505

οὐκ ἔφη (C1): the kappa makes οὐκ adhaerescent. Socrates is not quoting Thrasymachus’s answer as being “οὐ,” but asserting as our narrator that he denied the question without telling us what words he used to do so. Socrates’s ease in wavering between narration and quotation has subtle effects worth keeping track of.

506

τὸ μισθὸν ἀρνυμένος ὠφελεῖσθαι τοὺς δημιουργούς (C9-10) scrupulously replaces the nouns ὠφελία and μισθαρνητική with verbs (nominal infinitive and participle): the event that they are better off by earning money cannot be disputed, but once it is stipulated the analysis of how it happens can only be that the ὠφελία comes from a particular art (per 346A6-8), and the action of making money (μισθοὺς ἄρνυσθαι), which since beneficial must be by art, is by the τέχνη μισθαρνητική (B10: an etymological argument), or μισθωτική for which it was substituted, from B8 and B1.

507

ἡ τοῦ μισθοῦ λῆψις (D2) a new formulation of “being paid” that employs Thrasymachus’s crass term for the “haul” that the unjust man seeks from government service (343D8).

508

οὐδ’ (E1) continues the οὐ in οὐ φαίνεται: “Would you say it also (δέ) seems to be the case that he does not (οὐ) confer (in addition to not receiving) any benefit, in case he works for free?”

509

πάλαι (E5) means not long ago but in a previous phase or section of the argument (cf. n.1414 ad 392B9), in this case the argument before Thrasymachus’s big speech (341B4-2E11).

510

ἄρτι (E8): the converse of πάλαι (E5), during this section or phase of the argument (namely, 345E2-3). Cf. 395A5-6 and n.

511

μηδένα (E8) instead of οὐδένα, for emphasis.

512

τὰ ἀλλότρια κακά (E9) echoing and quietly mocking Thrasymachus’s ἀλλότριον ἀγαθόν (343C3).

513

τὸν τῶν βελτίστων μισθόν (347A10), as if this were a proverb like “noblesse oblige.”

514

τοίνυν (B4): Glaucon’s agreement (ἔγωγε) gives Socrates the warrant to draw his inference, which he naturally expresses with an “apodotic” chiasm (οὔτε χρημάτων … οὔτε τιμῆς, B5-6).

515

λαμβάνοντες ἐκ τῆς ἀρχῆς (B8): the verb is derogatory, again echoing Thrasymachus’s laudatory language use of λήψεις (343D8); for ἐκ cf. 343E4).

516

περιμένειν (C3) present.

517

In contrast to what Plato is here able to have Socrates say, I cannot resist mentioning the fashion, thriving even in local jurisdictions of my beloved country, according to which the electorate seeks to hobble the politicians they nevertheless continually re-elect by imposing “term limits” upon them. The actual effect is that these persons go on to run for offices they have not yet held in other departments of government, and are usually elected by dint of something the press calls “name recognition,” and defeat candidates who have sought to move up from staff positions within that department, inevitably more competent and inevitably less known to the nevertheless all-powerful and all-incompetent electorate. It is because the refreshing cold shower Plato can so easily toss off with a comment like this that we call him a classic. Moreover he will treat a version of this very problem in Book Six.

518

πονηρότερος (C4) a person deficient in comparison to themselves. The adjective is used as at 341E5.

519

ἐπεί (D2) expressing, as often, a new idea on the ordinate rather than the subordinate level (cf. 346A1 and n.). To hear an allusion by “Plato” to the “ideal” state that Socrates and Glaucon and Adeimantus will construct in the coming books is an overstatement deaf to the drama that is being played out here and now, in which Plato is not even a speaking character. It is true that those guardians would prefer not to rule (520Dff), but the basis for persuading them is still that otherwise they would be ruled by their inferiors (520B6-7). The “ideal” city they construct is not a city consisting of ideal men.

520

With τῷ ὄντι ἀληθινός (D4-5) Socrates appropriates and concatenates two of the expressions for the Thrasymachean strictness (cf. n. ad 341C6), and then caps them with πέφυκε (ibid.).

521

πᾶς ὁ γιγνώσκων (D6): For the absolute use cf.476D5.

522

ὠφελῶν πράγματα ἔχειν (D7-8), a telescoped construction where the expected parallel, ὠφελεῖν, is demoted to a participle so as leave open a syntactic berth for what the parallel entails, πράγματα ἔχειν.

523

εἰς αὖθις σκεψόμεθα (E2). To search among the Dialogues for a passage to which a further treatment of this question is postponed, takes too seriously what is only a formula of dismissal placed in a concessive μέν clause, and ignores Socrates’s point, which is that this captious “definition” is hardly as serious a matter as the showy declaration (φάσκων [E4], like pouring water over the audience) that one ought to dedicate one’s life to injustice. For dismissal with reference to another time cf. 506E1 (and n.3177); for dismissal by reference to other persons cf. 400C7 (nn.1580, 1957, 492A6-7 (and n.2925), 583B5-6 (and n.4507); for dismissal by reference to other arguments cf. 611B9-10 (and n.5173).

524

κρείττω (E4): In his peroration he had said ἰσχυρότερον καὶ ἐλευθεριώτερον καὶ δεσποτικώτερον ἀδικία δικαιοσύνης (344C5-6). That Socrates should summarize these adjectives with κρείττων is substantively correct but uncharacteristically imprecise. Still, by repeating κρείττων he introduces a point of comparison between the two concepts that brings them close enough together that the great difference in their importance becomes salient. “Yes, Thrasymachus loves to extol the strong; but when he says injustice is stronger than justice, I have to draw the line.” Cf. οὐκ ἀπεσχόμην, 354B8.

525

τὸν τοῦ δικαίου ἔγωγε λυσιτελέστερον βίον εἶναι (E7): Glaucon ignores Socrates's squinting use of κρείττω and reverts to the original language of Thrasymachus’s thesis (λυσιτελέστερόν τε καὶ συμφέρον, 344C7-8) preferring indeed the finer expression (λυσιτελέστερον) to the crass language Socrates had used to restate it (κερδαλεώτερον, 345A3 and A7).

526

ἤκουσας (348A1): the asyndeton is abrupt, and Glaucon answers by repeating the word.

527

With τοίνυν (A7) Socrates expresses a little impatience with Glaucon’s echoing answers. “If you agree with me, what shall we do?” There is a choice to be made what method to use, as the initial ἄν, taking up the already indefinite protasis (n.b. πῃ, A4) of the previous question, and then being followed by μέν, shows.

528

δικαστῶν τινων τῶν διακρινόντων (B2). Not uncommonly the indefinite adjective plus attributive participle together do the work of an indefinite relative clause.

529

ἀνομολογούμενοι πρὸς ἀλλήλους σκοπῶμεν (B3): For the term and the idea cf. διομολογεῖσθαι at 350D4 and Phdrs.237C3. This method, which assumes nothing but checks itself at each step, is tantamount to the method Socrates expressed above with διδάξαι ἱκανῶς ἢ μαθεῖν εἴτε οὕτως εἴτε ἄλλως ἔχει (344D7-E1), where the answerer who upholds and teaches a thesis might end up learning from the questioner’s questions that what he is upholding is wrong.

530

δικασταὶ καὶ ῥήτορες (B4): Aristotle borrows the metaphor at de Caelo 279B11-12, where ἱκανῶς echoes the notion of dialectical adequacy implicit here.

531

ἴθι δή (B8), formulaic in dialectical discussion, for the questioner taking the answerer in hand. ἐξ ἀρχῆς is likewise a formula designating that the slate is wiped clean of ὁμολογήματα.

532

τὴν τελέαν ἀδικίαν (B9): Thrasymachus’s argument that injustice is better than justice began as a straight comparison (343C1ff) but this gave way to a praise of injustice, not injustice per se but injustice on a large scale, and in particular “perfected” injustice (343E7-344A4: τελεωτάτην, A4). He has left the possibility therefore that small injustice is not better than small justice; but Socrates leaves this weakness behind and posits a perfect justice which for Thrasymachus would be unmeaning or ridiculous. His question requires Thrasymachus to assert that injustice is, in principle or in the abstract, better than justice. Having thus begun he can continue the argument on the abstract or formal level.

533

καὶ δι’ ἃ, εἴρηκα (C1): With this second answer he has unguardedly and unnecessarily placed back onto the table all that he said (note the perfect εἴρηκα) during his long speech.

534

φέρε δή (C2) a formula like ἴθι δή.

535

αὐτοῖν (C3): With the dual Socrates secures for the argument the formal parity of ἀδικία and δικαιοσύνη as abstractions that he had gotten to with his previous question, although in all likelihood, for Thrasymachus, only ἀδικία has a real perfection or highest form.

536

πῶς γὰρ οὔ; (C4): The categorical response indicates he is viewing the opposites on a formal level.

537

οὐκοῦν (C5) as if this were a continuation of his previous statement; μέν / δέ continuing the pairing of concepts.

538

ἥδιστε (C7): With this and with γε Thrasymachus reverts to sarcasm (a step up from ἡδύς γὰρ εἶ, 337D6). He has no choice since his position can only be expressed derogatively. For him it is good to be bad and bad to be good.

539

ἀδικίαν μέν / δικαιοσύνην δέ (C7-8). The answer indicates he has accepted the method of inferring ex contrariis.

540

γενναίαν εὐήθειαν, C12. Both terms are sarcastic so the phrase is obtrusively inscrutable. γενναῖος is often ironic (414B9, 454A1, 535B2, 544C6, 558C2) though just as easily approbative (363A8, 372B4, 375A1-2, 496B2 [where its connection with γνήσιον is shown], 527B9); εὐήθεια he has used above of the δίκαιος (343C6), and of Socrates who prefers justice (343D2), with the same sarcasm by which he has here called him ἥδιστε.

541

ἄρα (D1) stressing even more strongly the underlying logic of an inference ex contrariis.

542

κακοήθεια (D1): Socrates continues the method ex contrariis by correlating a predicate “etymologically” opposite to εὐήθεια with the subject correlatively opposite subject, ἀδικία. For etymological fallacy in dialectical exchange, cf. 333B2 and n.

543

εὐβουλίαν (D2), “being good at planning,” as opposed to εὐήθεια, good at being too dumb to plan. Thrasymachus is continuing to answer within the confines of inference ex contrariis. The ingenuity of his answer reveals at the same time what is inexact in this method. Just as the knight in chess may move over and up or up and over, the argument ex contrariis may move from positing the positive (εὐήθεια) either to negating the positive (κακοήθεια) or to positing the negative (εὐβουλία).

544

φρόνιμοι … καὶ ἀγαθοί (D3-4): καί might imply that an inference is being drawn, without saying so, that it is their astuteness (φρόνιμοι, implied by εὐβουλία in contrast with εὐήθεια) that makes them able or “worthy” (ἀγαθοί). But at the same time ἀγαθός can be the adjective for ἀρετή (e.g. 381C2 [cf.B10 and C8], 588A9-10, 601D4, 618C7; Apol.30B4; Phdrs.253D2; Symp.196B5 [referring to ἄριστον at 195A7]) in which case it would better be translated “good;” and φρόνιμος can be the adjective of virtue's component σοφία (e.g., 381A3), in which case it means “wise” more than “astute.” Being essentially conservative, the conventional moral vocabulary will always waffle in order to maintain a connection between the good and the praiseworthy (witness the stock phrase καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός in which they are combined), though Socrates had just above found it easy to assert that οἱ ἀγαθοί are not φιλότιμοι (347B9).

545

σὺ δέ (D6), the pronoun emphatic.

546

λανθάνῃ (D8): For his attitude about being caught cf. 344B1-5. What makes perfect injustice perfect is that it does not need to hide: indeed it draws praise rather than blame (344B5-C2).

547

τοῦτο (E1): Second person demonstrative for the interlocutor’s idea (τοῦτο) and first person for Socrates’s own (τόδε).

548

ἀρετῆς καὶ σοφίας (E2), substantives corresponding chiastically to the adjectives φρόνιμοι … καὶ ἀγαθοί (D3-4 above) as we saw at the time (n.ad loc.).

549

ἐν τοῖς ἐναντίοις (E3): the construction is telescoped from ἐν τῶν ἐναντίων μέρει. For ἐν μέρει cf. 347A9.

550

ὦ ἑταῖρε (E5) Whether sincere or merely rhetorical, the vocative conveys the sense Socrates sees the two of them as partners (cf. n.3407). One of the functions of the vocative is for the speaker to characterize how he feels the argument is going: 351D8, 450D2, 453C6, 477D7, 504C9, 506D6, 522B3, 526A1, 527B9, 574B7; Crat.389D4; Lach.190C8; and L.Campbell, Tht. App. F, 283-4.

551

ἤδη (E5) marking a new phase or new regime and a point of no return, whether in the state of the argument or in the state of affairs (cf.348B2, 407A8, 411B2, 510D1, 540A6, 565C1, 569A8, 569B7, 574D2, 605A8, 605B2, 609B6, 612B7).

552

στερεώτερον (E5) perhaps belongs to the field of metaphors as ἀπορία and εὐπορία.

553

ἐτίθεσο (E7): In the language of dialectical debate the θέσις is the leading answer that is to be tested, and ὁμολογήματα are subordinate statements granted or conceded by the answerer, that might imply his thesis becomes tenable. For instance in order to persist in holding the thesis that justice is helping friends and harming enemies Polemarchus had to accept it was useless in peacetime; but if so then justice would not be the serious thing (σπουδαῖον) we think it to be. The answerer agrees to the subordinate statements since they are generally assumed to be true (here, νομιζόμενα; in the technical vocabulary of Aristotle, ἔνδοξα).

Socrates’s meaning is that Thrasymachus has taken a position where the usual ἔνδοξα cannot be brought into play by the questioner. From the very beginning Thrasymachus has held the “thesis” that injustice is the advantage that justice gives to the unscrupulous, and that good is good only for the bad. The motive of his original attempt to keep Socrates from using the νομιζόμενα ἀγαθά in his discussion of justice (336C6ff), and the meaning of his assertion that such talk is claptrap, has finally become clear. Such revelations are characteristic of real conversations.

554

κακίαν μέντοι ἢ αἰσχρόν (E7) representing the negation of the conventional expression for value, ἀγαθὸν καὶ καλόν.

555

ὥσπερ ἄλλοι τινές (E8) is not meant to send us away from the text to find names to name, but to locate the position somewhere in between the idiosyncratic (παράδοξον) and what is commonly held, in public at least (ἔνδοξον).

556

καλὸν καὶ ἰσχυρόν (E10): καλόν, a general term of approbation (cf. E7 and n.), supplemented by ἰσχυρόν, which is more closely tailored to Thrasymachus’s own outlook.

557

προσετίθεμεν (349A1), imperfect of customary action, standing in contrast with the prospect of Thrasymachus acting otherwise in the future (προσθήσεις).

558

ἐν ἀρετῇ … καὶ σοφίᾳ (A1-2): cf. 348E2 and 348D3-4.

559

τὰ δοκοῦντα περὶ τῆς ἀληθείας (A7). Several times he has portrayed his speech as a cold shower of truth, e.g., 343B5 (ὡς ἀληθῶς), 343C1 (πόρρω εἶ), 343C3 (ἀγνοεῖς), 343C4 (τῷ ὄντι). Here the gratuitous pleonasm τῆς ἀληθείας expresses a sort of incredulity or abhorrence (cf. ἀποκνητέον, A4), as when one is moved to speak of the real world in conversation with an idealist, as if there were an unreal one.

560

οὐδέν (B1) is not only dismissive rather than literal (Shorey ad loc.): the positive reason for its use is to defuse a fight, a method of presentation that Thrasymachus always prefers. Cf.472B7 and n. ad loc.

561

τόδε and τοῦτο (B1), again (cf. 348E1-2 and n.): With τόδε Socrates warns Thrasymachus that he will need to distinguish between what he wants to say (over and over) and the new line of questions Socrates now has in mind, which Thrasymachus does not yet know about.

562

ἀστεῖος ὥσπερ νῦν καὶ εὐήθης (B4-5): ὥσπερ νῦν refers to 348C12, γενναίαν εὐήθειαν: Thrasymachus enjoys recalling his clever improvisation, and then varying it with bathetic καὶ εὐήθης.

563

ὅς γε πάντων (C6): γε indicates he infers the part from the whole, that he sees the inference as a fortiori.

564

οὐκοῦν (C7), purporting to continue the thought of the interlocutor.

565

γε (C7), emphasizing the inference Socrates needs, for which Thrasymachus had just suggested an a fortiori warrant that he had not explicitly asserted.

566

ὡς ἁπάντων πλεῖστον αὐτὸς λάβῃ (C8-9): With Thrasymachus’s concupiscent term (λάβῃ, cf. λήψεις, 343D8 and 346D2, 347B8), augmented by the superlative πλεῖστον (while the argument only needs πλέον, C4) and the intensive ἁπάντων (while the argument needs only πάντων, C6) Socrates caters to Thrasymachus’s preference to overstate, rather than merely state, his position.

567

μέν / δέ (C11-12) for the just man but τε / καί for the unjust (C12-D1). The former draws a distinction whereas the latter masses all others together.

568

εἴρηκας (D2) the perfect for the complete articulation of a result.

569

δέ γε (D3) recalling a previous agreement here translated with the Thrasymachean slant (348D3-4 and n.), and adducing it into the position of the minor premise.

570

φρόνιμός τε και ἀγαθός (D3), repeated from 348D3-4 (here translated with the Thrasymachean slant: cf. n.).

571

καλῶς (D10) ominously echoes Thrasymachus’s adverbs εὖ (D5) and ἄριστα (D2).

572

ἕτερον (D13) is essentially comparative.

573

μὴ ἰατρικοῦ δέ (350A3), μή designating a man essentially unqualified.

574

ὅρα (A6), present imperative, of scanning across the entire field.

575

ἀλλ’ ἴσως … ἀνάγκη τοῦτό γε (A10). He attempts to depreciate the inference (ἀλλ’ ἴσως) by asserting it is only logically true (ἀνάγκη), but grants it all the same.

576

ἴσως (B2) echoes ἴσως at A10.

577

σοφός (B3) straddles the Thrasymachean and the Socratic meanings (cf.348D3-4 and n.), and Thrasymachus laconically agrees (φημί, B4).

578

ἀγαθός (B5) likewise straddling; Thrasymachus laconically echoes his φημί (B6).

579

μέν / δέ (B7-8) of the discriminating man and τε / καί of the indiscriminate, as above (349C11-13 and n.).

580

τε / καί (B14).

581

μέν / δέ (C1-2).

582

ὡμολογοῦμεν (C7), imperfect of citation (cf.n.135, 352C4, 374A5 and B6, 392B9, 429E8, 472D9, 485A4, 511A3, 543C9 [with n.3699], 572C1 [with n.4268], 572C1, 580D10, 590D3, 605C7 [restored by Ast], 607B2, 612C8, 613C8; and cf. 559E4, 562B7, and 588E3 and n.4643).

583

ἀναπέφανται (C10) dialectical, in the perfect, taking the participial (sensory) construction. The prefix and the perfect tense marks the complete reversal of the previous position.

584

ἀγαθός τε καὶ σοφός / ἀμαθής τε καὶ κακός (C10-11): chiasm for closure: cf. 370E2-3, 428D6-7, 463C5-7, 491D1-2, 510A5-6, 619E4-5; Leg.626C11-12, 665C2-3, 779D2-5; Phlb.11B8, 25A6-B1; Polit.299B3-4; Prot.343A1-5; Tht.175A3-4; Tim.38E10-40A2. It blends with the chiasm of opposites used in a list of opposites, as at Gorg.474D1-2; Phlb.32C1-2; Rep.410D1-2.

585

342D2.

586

ὡμολόγησε μέν (C12): μέν is concessive and suggests a division within him between what he grants, as dialectical partner, and what he really believes, or wants to believe, or wants to say he believes, or wants to get others to believe. We will learn which, below (cf. n.592).

587

All along we have presumed that Socrates is presenting the events of the previous afternoon and evening as they “actually” occurred. Above, as here, he allows himself to describe Thrasymachus’s behavior without quoting him (338A5-8, 342D2-3), and indicates the version he is giving us is streamlined. His continual placement of the important result into the μέν clause (cf. nn.416, 304)and the behavior he describes without quotation into the δέ clause continually indicates he is editing things only to spare us tedium. The purpose of such narrative interruptions surely is not to undermine our confidence in the version he has given us; it is a narrator’s way of announcing a transition.

588

More important than the logical impurities of Socrates’s argument is the effect it has on Thrasymachus. The power of his argument lies in the fact that his comparison of the master of injustice with an ignorant clown is deeply correct, and that he has been able to invoke the comparison objectively and without belligerence. Critics who infer from the course of the argument that their own command of logic is better than Thrasymachus’s or Socrates’s can supply Thrasymachus ammunition for fighting back, but he will still be Thrasymachus. To win the argument is not what he needs as his blushing indicates.

589

The δια- in διωμολογησάμεθα (D4) stresses that the conclusion was reached through a series of steps, and its middle voice that the steps were taken as a joint effort and together (cf. n.529).

590

τοῦτο μέν (D6): referring to the conclusion reached together at C7-8.

591

ἢ οὐ μέμνησαι (D7) is sincere and not a taunt. Thrasymachus’s basis for inferring that the unjust man is strong—namely, that he is competent and astute at getting his own way—has now been removed. If his mind were totally occupied by the thoughts that the dialectical process is moving through and were confined to its horizon, an assumption Socrates would easily make, Thrasymachus might at this moment find himself quite unable to remember what he had meant, as Polemarchus had at a similar moment (cf. 334B7, οὐ μὰ τὸν Δί’ ἀλλ’ οὐκέτι οἶδα ἔγωγε ὅτι ἔλεγον).

592

μέμνημαι (D9): By throwing Socrates’s word back at him, and then asserting that Socrates’s questions are actually an argument of his (ἃ νῦν λέγεις, D9), he abruptly dissociates himself from Socrates’s project of a σκέψις ἐν κοινῷ. In truth he was never the partner Socrates was taking him to be (and still took him to be even now in the narrative interlude, 350C12-D8, esp. ἡμῖν and φαμεν [350D6] and διωμολογησάμεθα [D4], and just before this ἡμῖν [C10] and ὡμολογοῦμεν [C8], and his own answer at 350C9). With ἔμοιγε οὐδ’... ἀρέσκει (non placit mihi) he blandly reserves the right to maintain his own view regardless of what he has himself said and regardless of logic, and by repeating λέγειν in καὶ ἔχω περὶ αὐτῶν λέγειν he treats his own manner of defense, the long speech, as equal in standing with the Socratic method of question and answer but only raises the spectre of logos set alongside logos, which as Socrates said will only postpone a decision (348A7-B4), as Thrasymachus realizes δημηγορεῖν, E1).

593

With ὅσα (E1) he threatens quantity, admitting his desire to hold the floor and harangue his audience: cf. ὅσα at 348A1 and A8, and ἁθρόον καὶ πολύν (344D2-3).

594

Even if Socrates succeeds at requiring him to converse, Thrasymachus at least gets to call him an old lady.

595

παρά γε τὴν σαυτοῦ δόξαν (E5): Socrates reiterates his one criterion (γε): cf. 346A3, 349A6-8.

596

λέγειν (E6): arguing, as opposed to answering (D10, etc.). But as things unravel there is dramatic irony in hearing Thrasymachus agree to say what he believes since Socrates will not let him talk.

597

δυνατώτερον καὶ ἰσχυρότερον (351A2): Socrates picks up where he wanted to pick up a moment ago (καὶ ἰσχυρόν, 350D7), adding δυνατώτερον. Thrasymachus made the assertion in his long speech (cf. 344A1-C2 [n.b.μεγάλα δυνάμενον, A1] and summed up at C5-6: ἰσχυρότερον … ἀδικία δικαιοσύνης.

598

νῦν δέ γε (A3) contrasts the current finding with what our position was before (cf. φαμεν, 350D6), as if Thrasymachus had been playing the “answerer” even during his speech. Socrates uses the optative εἴη, observing the secondary sequence of ἐλέχθη, to stress that positions change in the course of the conversation. Something else has since “happened” (ἀναπέφανται, 350C10), a reversal of the grounds on which we based that opinion. That reversal portends that it will come into view (φανήσεται, A4, dialectical) that justice is stronger than injustice.

599

οὐδεὶς ἂν τοῦτο ἔτι ἀγνοήσειεν (A6), for we have learned from the argument that injustice is lack of learning (ἀμαθία, A5)—i.e., the opposite of ἀρετὴ καὶ σοφία. Perhaps ἔτι refers back to Thrasymachus’s assertion at 343C3.

600

ἁπλῶς (A6): the “simple” movement he forgoes is to take one step further in the same direction. Without even referring back to the subject term, justice, he can say that as justice’s knowledge led qua knowledge to its competence, its competence would lead qua competence to its effectuality (i.e. δυνατώτερον). His less simple path of argument will take him back to the subjects of justice and injustice, so as to derive a new line of implication from their inner nature.

601

ἐπιχειρεῖν (B1) is dependent upon εἶναι. The καί before ἄλλας, like the καί that commonly follows ὅμοιος, is nearly otiose: “... unjust to move beyond its border to other cities and attempt to enslave them.” Thrasymachus had depicted the ἄδικος, a single man, mounting such an assault on the civilized world (344B5-C2). Socrates now asks him whether his vision would also fit a city.

602

τελεώτατα οὖσα ἄδικος (B5): with the superlative he refers to the τελεώτατα ἀδικία described in his long speech (344A1,ff).

603

ἡ ἀρίστη μάλιστα ποιήσει καὶ τελεώτατα οὖσα ἄδικος (B4-5) with his interlaced word order he tries to invoke, compendiously, the dramatic climax of his speech—whose illogic and lack of verisimilitude will finally become the subject of Socrates’s scrutiny.

604

μανθάνω (B6): cf. 372E2 and n.

605

οὗτος and τόδε (B6), again (cf. 349B1-2, 348E1-2): “There you go again, wanting to repeat your speech.” Thrasymachus’s speech did not assert that injustice was inherently powerful but praised injustice by depicting an unscrupulous man suddenly coming to power. Socrates now focusses on the process by which this seductively attractive result might, or might not, come about.

606

πάνυ καλῶς (C5): What is fine about Thrasymachus’s answer is that it reveals that his concern about justice and injustice at this point rests entirely on the question of astuteness (n.b., σοφία, C2), whether this is the disinterested knowledge of Socrates’s just expert or the unscrupulous cunning of his unjust tyrant-to-be.

607

σύ (C7) answering emphatic σοί, C6.

608

ἢ πόλιν ἢ στρατόπεδον ἢ λῃστὰς ἢ κλέπτας ἢ ἄλλο τι ἔθνος (C8-9): The list consists of two pairs (πόλις, στρατόπεδον; λῃσταί, κλέπται) followed by the generalizing term ἔθνος. The πόλις is the case Socrates has raised; the army is presumably the agency by which this πόλις would impress its will. These two singulars are then followed by a pair of plurals that shift from the city and its mechanism to pluralities of persons that serve as parallels to the city, groups that are likewise out to do some large act of injustice. In contrast to the city and its army that might adopt an unjust policy, these persons, pirates and thieves, are by definition unjust (according to the legal and conventional view), though for Thrasymachus their names designate only the narrow specialism of their injustice (344B1-5; cf.348D5-9). Socrates’s shift from singular to plural is made less noticeable by his use of the otherwise gratuitous specificity of the pair λῃσταί and κλέπται as if to balance πόλις and στρατόπεδον. The shift to the plural enables him next to depict internal dissension among them.

609

ἵνα σοι μὴ διαφέρωμαι (D7) Thrasymachus mocks Socrates’s question in the wording of his answer, as Socrates’s χαρίσαι had mocked his χαρίζονται (C7). Placement of σοι again adds emphasis.

610

ὦ ἄριστε (D8), a case of the vocative indicating the speaker’s feelings about the argument (cf.348E5 and n.550).

611

With ἐν ἐλευθέροις τε καὶ δούλοις (D10) Socrates has left behind the singular (πόλις), as well as the pluralities of the types of men that are unjust by definition. The phrase functions not only as a polar doublet so as to generalize the ἔργον of ἀδικία but also happens to present the very two sets of men into which Thrasymachus characteristically analyzes any human endeavor (cf. esp. ἐλευθεριώτερον καὶ δεσποτικώτερον [344C5] and the present example of the best city enslaving [351B7] all the others). This forebodes that his unjust men will not somehow be exempt from the facts of reality after all. Plato does employ this doublet elsewhere, as a way of to speak of men in general, but always in conjunction with other doublets. Cf. Gorg.514D, 515A7; Leg.665C2-3, 838D7-8; Meno 71E-2A; Rep.431C1-3 (οἰκέται for δοῦλοι), 433D2-4.

612

διοίσονται (E3), the same verb for disagreement or fighting that Thrasymachus used in his mocking answer above (διαφέρωμαι, D7).

613

ἀλλήλοις τε καὶ τοῖς δικαίοις (E4). The persons against whom the unjust are conceived to be plotting are here referred to as δίκαιοι, not because Socrates believes that the victim of injustice is eo ipso just, but according to Thrasymachus’s conception that the scruples of the just man are what enable the unjust to succeed (i.e., that justice is nothing but the συμφέρον κρείττονος).

614

δή (E6), moving to the target. A similar argument (from all to many to two to one) is made by the Athenian at the opening of the Laws (626B-D). Cleinias there remarks that as the focus narrows to the individual man the essential point becomes progressively clearer (τὸν λόγον ἐπ’ ἀρχὴν ἀνάγειν, 623D3).

615

οὐκοῦν (E9), spelling out the reason for the interlocutor’s agreement (cf.349C7).

616

φαίνεται (E9), dialectical, bringing forward what was agreed to at C7-D3.

617

εἴτε πόλει τινὶ εἴτε γένει εἴτε στρατοπέδῳ εἴτε ἄλλῳ ὁτῳοῦν (E10-352A1): In redoing the list from C8-9 Socrates switches out the items that were both plural and essentially criminal (cf. n. ad loc.) in order to emphasize how an inherently neutral (i.e. non-criminal) group (denotable therefore by a singular noun) is affected by the invasion of injustice.

618

ἑαυτῷ τε καὶ τῷ ἐναντίῳ παντὶ καὶ τῷ δικαίῳ (352A3). The list corresponds to ἀλλήλοις τε καὶ τοῖς δικαίοις above (351E4) and καὶ ἑαυτῷ καὶ τοῖς δικαίοις below (A8). What the middle term τῷ ἐναντίῳ παντί adds is the principle (παντί) according to which enmity to an unjust man is shared both by himself as unjust and by another man who is just: both become his opponent (ἐναντίῳ). Adam’s note on παντί: “i.e., whether just or unjust,” treats παντί as the noun and ἐναντίῳ as the adjective (i.e., πᾶσι ἐναντίοις οὖσι); Jowett’s translation: “becomes its own enemy and at variance with all that opposes it, and with the just,” is unclear without the exegesis of his note, “with all that opposes, and therefore (inclusively) with the just,” but the meaning thus clarified—that the unjust individual becomes inimical to all that opposes him—is mere tautology. Lee in the Penguin, “with itself and with its opponents and with whatever is just” seems to take παντί with both τῷ ἐναντίῳ and τῷ δικαίῳ by pluralizing the one and adding “whatever is” to the other; Grube “to itself and to what is in every way it opposite, the just,” and Shorey in the Loeb: “an enemy to itself and to its opposite in every case, to the just,” require καί to be appositive; Leroux in the Flammarion, “ennemie d’elle même et de tout un chacun qui est son opposé et qui est just,” and Chambry in the Budé, “ennemi de lui-même et de tous ceux qui lui sont contraires et qui sont justes,” import the inference that the victim of injustice is eo ipso just; Robert Baccou in the Garnier, “ennemi de lui-meme, de son contraire et du just,” leaves out παντί; and Allan Bloom’s “enemy to itself and to everything opposite and to the just” illustrates because of its ambiguity a limitation inherent in his decision to produce a “literal translation” of the sort that Aquinas had of the text of Aristotle from William of Moerbeke (cf. his “Preface,” init.). Tucker comes close with his note ad loc.: “to itself (i.e., inwardly), and to everything that opposes it and (consequently or necessarily) to the just.”. Cornford’s translation, “at enmity with itself as well as with any opponent and with the just” (cf. Davies-Vaughn and Lindsay), and Schleiermacher's “mit sich selbst verfeindet und mit allem entgegengesetzen und dem gerechten,” are clear, and I think correct, about τῷ ἐναντίῳ παντί, but fail to articulate how the just man fits in. Waterfield (1993) replaces the Greek with a sentence of his own that means something the Greek does not say. By my lights only Rufener's “es sich selbst und jedem Gegner un damit auch dem Gerechten zum Feinde wird” (Zurich 1973) is correct.

619

τοῖς δικαίοις (A8): reverting to the plural (as at 351E2) after the singular he employed with παντί to state the principle (A3), so as to prepare for the next step by bringing back the whole class of persons to whom the unjust is inimical.

620

δέ γε (A10) fits this unexpected assertion into the argument by immediately identifying it as a minor premise.

621

καὶ οἱ θεοί (A10).

622

εὐωχοῦ τοῦ λόγου … θαρρῶν (B3): his remark is directed at Socrates’s apparently gratuitous addition of the gods to the argument, as if he were heaping food onto his plate.

623

οὐ γὰρ ἔγωγέ σοι ἐναντιώσομαι ἴνα μὴ τοῖσδε ἀπεχθάνωμαι (B3-4). τοῖσδε means “our auditors:” it is a first person plural demonstrative, as it were (cf.τοιούσδε, “our kind,” 597A8). Once again the reason he gives for agreeing undermines and mocks the logical procedure of argumentation by imitating the subject matter (ἐναντιώσομαι / ἀπεχθάνομαι: cf. διαφέρωμαι, 351D7), which comports not at all with the feasting metaphor he throws at Socrates. Thrasymachus now toys with blaming the company for his giving in to him.

624

τὰ λοιπὰ τῆς ἑστιάσεως ἀποπλήρωσον (B5-6): Socrates plays along with Thrasymachus’s metaphor of the feast (εὐωχοῦ) but not his corrosive mockery of the content and method of the argument (ἀπεχθάνωμαι).

625

ὅτι μὲν γὰρ (B6): γάρ announces he will explain how this next step will complete the feast (τὰ λοιπά … ἀποπλήρωσον), with μέν suggesting that the explanation will consist of a summary of what they have already done (as if they have “finished” these plates), to be followed by a δέ clause expressing what still needs to be done (eaten). The μέν clause is then interrupted with a self-correction (C1-8) lengthy enough to require a resumption (with μὲν οὖν, C8-D2), giving way finally to the δέ clause at D2.

626

οὐδέ (B8), the δέ with μετ’ ἀλλήλων.

627

οὕς φαμεν ἐρρωμένως (C1), referring to 351C8-10. οὕς brings back the plural he there introduced (cf. n. ad loc.) but subsequently suppressed (cf. 351E10 and n.). He now retracts the hypothetical notion of unjust people banding together to do injustice on the grounds their injustice would pre-empt them even from banding together.

628

The more neutral κομιδῇ ἄδικος (C3-4) relies on, but also replaces, Thrasymachus’s extreme expression τελεώτατα ἄδικος (351B5), an essentially epideictic expression he drew from his speech (344A4).

629

ἀπείχοντο (C3): a noteworthy use of the present contrafactual construction to deny the truth of a presumption. In English we would say, “They would never have kept their hands off each other in the first place.”

630

ἐνῆν (C4), imperfect, directs our attention back to the moment before we envisioned the unjust group mounting an assault on the just (351B1-3). One may compare the so-called philosophical imperfect.

631

μήτοι and γε (C5) add a tone of self-ridicule for their failure to see this point earlier.

632

ἐφ’ οὓς ᾖσαν (C5), shorthand for the imperial aspirations of the unjust, repeated from 351C9.

633

ἡμιμόχθηροι (C7), a term vastly disappointing for Thrasymachus since for him being all-bad is best, but being half bad is not half good (cf.344A7-8, B2-5). The term itself, like almost all compounds in ἡμι-, is derogatory.

634

παμπόνηροι καὶ τελέως ἄδικοι (C7-8): Socrates reverts to Thrasymachus’s formulation (the adverb τελέως, though still not the superlative adverb: cf.351B5), now that the notion has been vitiated, so as to use that formulation against itself (τελέως … ἀδύνατοι).

635

ὅπερ τὸ ὕστερον προυθέμεθα σκέψασθαι (D3-4): Finally we revert to the original challenge Socrates brought against Thrasymachus’s long speech (345A2-B3). The question was postponed first by the digression into the rule either to use terms in the same meaning or to announce a change of use (345B3-347A6), which re-established along the way that true rulers never seek their own good, and it was then further postponed by Glaucon’s request for clarification of the principle noblesse oblige (347A7-D8), at the end of which Socrates and Glaucon agreed that the best method of testing Thrasymachus’s thesis was to revert to the method of question and answer they had been using before his long speech (348A4-B7). At that point Socrates began an entirely new line of questions (ἐξ ἀρχῆς, 348B8-9) designed to dismantle the image of the unjust man Thrasymachus had built up in his long speech, rather than attack the main point which it could reach only in its peroration, that the unjust life is better than the just life, which had been his original goal to impugn. The intervening argument has erased the picture Thrasymachus drew of an unjust man who with astuteness and competence developed his power to perfection; finally the original question, which had played the culminating role in his speech, and which regardless of his rhetorical strategy was always the most important question since it is the main question we face in life, can now be reached: whether the unjust life is in fact preferable to the just.

636

οὐ γὰρ περὶ τοῦ ἐπιτυχόντος ὁ λόγος (D5-6): this phrase appropriately recalls 344E1-3, where the great question was first broached. The end of this conversation is approaching.

637

τί δέ; ἀκούσαις ἄλλῳ ἢ ὠσίν; (E7): ears being the complement of eyes, the question borrows its content from the previous question, ἔσθ’ ὅτῳ ἂν ἄλλῳ ἴδοις ἢ ὀφθάλμοις; (E5), as also it borrows its grammatical formulation in the potential optative. Hence ἄν does not need to be repeated (exactly parallel to 382D11, which echoes D6-7: cf. n.1306). We can compare the omission of the interrogative particle when the questioner can rely on the interlocutor to know a question is coming (cf. 333A13 and n.).

638

καλῶς (353A4): Finally τὸ καλόν enters the argument! Having the right tool enables the craftsman to perform his job admirably.

639

κάλλιστα (A11), replacing ἄριστα in the original formulation (352E3).

640

οὐ γάρ που τοῦτο ἐρωτῶ (C5-6): The pacing of Socrates’s questions in this passage is noteworthy in several respects. Above, the list of tools inappropriate for cutting vines (353A1-2) might have brought to mind the δρέπανον by its very absence (cf.333D3-4); here Socrates by avoiding to name the ἀρετή of the eyes has brought that specific ἀρετή to Thrasymachus’s lips, but Socrates refuses to approve or disapprove this impletion of the question’s form or matrix, in order to insist that the matrix be recognized per se. We must wait to see why, in his presentation of the target case of this whole argument—soul.

641

τὰ ἐργαζόμενα (C7) internal or adverbial accusative, while ἔργον is an external or objective accusative.

642

μετὰ τοῦτα τόδε (D3): by the “persons” of his demonstratives the speaker distinguishes for his interlocutor between what the interlocutor already has taken in (ταῦτα) and a new point the speaker is about to make (τόδε). Above, the distinction has provided a way to impede Thrasymachus from repeating himself (351B6, 349B1, 348E1), but it can also serve to prepare the interlocutor for something quite new, as it does here.

643

τὸ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι καὶ ἄρχειν καὶ βουλεύεσθαι καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα (D4-5). I do not know what background list, if any, this triad is relying upon, nor the logical configuration of the three terms.

644

With αὖ (D9) Socrates intimates that the function of living (τὸ ζῆν) falls under a second heading rather than being another member in the previous category, which contained actions of a moral nature. Even so, given the biological context created by the examples of the eyes and ears, when he now brings up ζῆν as a function of soul we might assume a biological meaning and therefore not notice that he has arrived at the target question of this section, ὅστις τρόπος ζῆν, brought forward from before (352D6 and n.).

645

ἀνάγκη ἄρα (E4) of logical necessity, as usual.

646

εὖ πράττειν (E5): Context and parallelism (of κακῶς and εὖ) require us to construe πάντα ταῦτα (353E5) as an external or objective accusative, making εὖ πράττειν mean what εὖ ἀπεργάζεσθαι (et sim.) has been meaning (E1-2, C9-10, C6-7, B14-C1, A10-11); but εὖ πράττειν cannot fail also to carry the connotation of “faring well,” in accordance with which πάντα ταῦτα would be construed as an accusative of respect.

647

ἀρετήν γε συνεχωρήσαμεν ψυχῆς εἶναι δικαιοσύνην (E7), alluding exactly and only to διωμολοησάμεθα τὴν δικαιοσύνην ἀρετὴν εἶναι καὶ σοφίαν, 350D4, itself a restatement of the argument (349B2-50C11) that the just man in resembling the knowledgeable man (σοφός) shares also in his competence (ἀρετή) while the unjust resembles the ignorant and thus inherits his incompetence. The intervening second argument (351B1-352A8) had added effectuality or power to the side of justice and futility to the side of injustice, a conclusion Socrates already thought was implicit in the argument about σοφία and ἀρετή (351A3-6) but thought it worthwhile to prove by a more complex route (ibid., A6-7). The present, third argument uses the conclusion of the first to prove that the virtue the just man has, since it belongs specifically to his soul, enables his soul to do its job well, and thus enables it to give him a good life.

648

εὖ βιώσεται (E10) continues the same ambiguity we saw in εὖ πράττειν, namely, doing a good job of living and having a good life.

649

ἀλλὰ μήν γε (354A1) of the minor premise.

650

Socrates redeems these terms from their abuse by Thrasymachus (cf.344B7).

651

ἄθλιος (A4) is as much a descriptive term (“miserable”) as it is a term of derogation (“loser”). It was in its latter sense that it was given a role to play in Thrasymachus’s great speech (in the superlative, of course: 344A6), and Socrates intends to correct this here. Thrasymachus’s notion of happiness is likewise more a matter of others thinking the tyrant happy than of his actually being so.

652

ἀλλὰ μήν γε again (A6).

653

οὐδέποτε ἄρα (A8): The conclusion is a conclusion in principle regardless of circumstances. Thrasymachus’s speech on the other hand presented only a fabulous story of “successful” circumstances that was meant to be overwhelming in its appeal. Socrates had already declared himself immune of this attempt at persuasion (345A4-7).

654

ὦ μακάριε (A8), held out until the end. Socrates borrowed it from Thrasymachus’s speech (344B7) and has already used it twice of Thrasymachus himself (346A3, 345B2).

655

λυσιτελέστερον (A8) another reappropriation from Thrasymachus’s speech (344C8). κερδαλέον on the other hand, did not deserve to be redeemed.

656

ταῦτα δή σοι ὧ Σώκρατες εἱστιάσθω (A10): Thrasymachus has the last word by reminding Socrates he has now had his dessert (cf. τὰ λοιπὰ τῆς ἑστιάσεως, 352B5).

657

εἴτε κακία ἐστὶν καὶ ἀμαθία, εἴτε σοφία καὶ ἀρετή (B6), a “chiasm of before and after” (cf. n.14) that summarizes the last few moments of the argumentative feast: The notion that justice was a kind of viciousness (κακία) led to its being seen as ignorance (ἀμαθία) and incompetence rather than astuteness (σοφία) which turned out to be the province of virtue (ἀρετή).

658

σχολῇ (C1) idiomatically designates an argumentum a fortiori: cf. n.1459.

659

ἀπηλλάχθαι (357A1) denotes a release or respite that has been earned, and therefore alludes to the circumstances of Socrates’s presence, that he was compelled to join the group. Now, he thinks, they would let him go. His allusion connects the beginning of this Book to the beginning of the last, and the programmatic character of his remark approaches transparency.

660

λόγου (A1): The λόγος from which he hoped for release (note lack of article) may be argumentation per se or conversing: with Socrates the distinction does not amount to a difference for very long.

661

προοίμιον (A2): The first impression we get from the term is quantitative (“Long and toilsome as that conversation might have been, much more was yet to come”), but προοίμιον has this meaning only because of its true meaning, which is qualitative. Socrates swiftly intimates, under the guise of his characteristic irony, that the conversation invoked problems that only a fuller discourse could handle properly, and that the ensuing conversation did in fact achieve this. His comment therefore promises us that the conversation will become more substantial than it has been. By looking only backward Socrates indicates what we need to know about what is coming. What will make it more substantial? What will constitute the real beginning and turn the conversation so far into an only apparent beginning?

662

The ἀεί τε δὴ ἀνδρειότατος … καὶ δὴ καί construction (A2-4), akin to ἄλλως τε (…) καί, boils down to the praising Glaucon’s vigor for rising even in this very formidable occasion. For the sense of ἀνδρειότατος cf. 459C6.

663

ἀπόρρησιν (A4): The sense is given in a methodological passage from the Phaedo (85C1-D4).

664

βούλει δοκεῖν πεπεικέναι ἢ ὡς ἀληθῶς πεῖσαι (A5-B1) cannot help but remind us of Socrates’s constant refrain in the Apology, “He seemed to be wise but in reality he was not” (Apol.21C-23B). Socrates here reports an imitation of himself by Glaucon, without letting on to it. Apollodorus likewise imitates Socratic talk at Symp.C6-D3, and Aristodemus his barefootedness, as there reported by Apollodorus (173B2). Chaerephon in Gorg.448A6-C9 sounds just like Socrates, as Alcibiades does at in a similar “sub-squabble” (n.344) at Prot.336B7-D5. Cf. also n.2388.

665

τοίνυν (B4), as always, presses the interlocutor to own up to the implications of what he has just agreed to.

666

οὐ … ποιεῖς ὃ βούλει (B4). The paradox again imitates Socrates –e.g., Gorg.467B2 οὔ φημι ποιεῖν αὐτοὺς ἃ βούλονται, q.v. and cf. 577E.

667

λέγε γάρ μοι (B4).

668

Goods viewed per se and objectively are typically distinguished as external, bodily and psychic (cf. n.76 supra). The criterion of the present division is our (subjective) reasons for valuing things, an idea later to be thematized with τιμᾶν and its cognates (359B1, 359C6). Glaucon employs the distinction in order to draw Socrates into holding forth; whether it is a cherished belief of the dialogue’s author is extra argumentum and does not matter to the drama.

669

αὐτὸ αὑτοῦ ἕνεκα (B6): as we might welcome having an orange (αὐτό) for its flavor (αὑτοῦ ἕνεκα).

670

ὅσαι (B7) introduces a proviso (ἀβλαβεῖς [sc. εἰσιν]). καί is epexegetical introducing the negative μηδέν which will explain what is being denied by ἀβλαβεῖς. μηδέν is used instead of οὐδέν by a common kind of logical attraction according to which the explanation of a proviso might best itself be expressed as a proviso. But the construction squints: after a few words we have ταύτας, which indicates that the proviso is being explained by being commented upon rather than restated. The variants in F (καὶ μηδὲν] εἰ καὶ μηδὲν F : ταύτας] αὐτάς F) give the logically imperfect sense “as many as are harmless if in fact nothing else issues from them other then enjoyment,” and they do so with Greek syntactically faultless but less idiomatic. It is natural after all that an epexegetical remark should take on a constructio ad sensum.

671

ἔχοντα (B8) probably echoing ἔχειν (B5) but perhaps meaning “unvaryingly” in contrast with ἄλλο γίγνεται immediately before.

672

ἀγαπῶμεν (C1) varies ἀσπαζόμενοι (B6).

673

αὑτοῦ χάριν (C1) varies αὑτοῦ ἕνεκα (B6).

674

τῶν ἀπ’ αὐτῶν γιγνόμενων (sc. χάριν), C1-2, varies τῶν ἀποβαινόντων ἐφιέμενοι (B5-6).

675

διὰ (C3) inexactly varies the constructions in χάριν and ἕνεκα above; and ἀγαπῶμεν reverts to ἀσπαζόμεθα (C3).

676

εἶδος ἀγαθοῦ (C5), a categorical term fully motivated and justified by the accumulation of instances.

677

In this last case the examples (C5-7) are given before rather than after the general criterion is articulated (C7-D2). Such chiastic order is of course natural for closure (cf. 350C10-11 and n.584; and 547D4-8C2), but we may note in addition that hereby the listener is mildly “induced” (i.e., led) to formulate the criterion, himself. The list of examples is notable for its content and its form: τὸ γυμνάζεσθαι καὶ τὸ κάμνοντα ἰατρεύεσθαι καὶ ἰάτρευσίς τε καὶ ὁ ἄλλος χρηματισμός (357C5-7). The first two terms are formally parallel (articular infinitives) and in content are motivated by ὑγιαίνειν above. The third term is a surprise, drawn in content from the second as if it were the active instead of the passive but saliently different from it in form, being an abstract verbal noun instead of an articular infinitive. Immediately it is succeeded by a categorical statement of what it is meant to represent that is effected by the fourth term, χρηματισμός. ὁ ἄλλος by a common idiom means “the rest of” (in lieu of a plural) and indicates that χρηματισμός is a generalized element of higher logical rank than the other items. ἰάτρευσις therefore has what we may call an “ancipital” role in the list. What is noteworthy is how much care is given to ensure through the careful choice of examples that the movement from one idea to the next be made as smooth and continuous as possible. The thought of the Socratic epagoge, as well as Glaucon’s imitation of it, is εἰρομένη rather than κατεστραμμένη and “often proceeds by minute steps through linked synonyms” (Shorey ad Rep.338E [Loeb 1.48.note a]).

Given the καί before ἰάτρευσις, the τε after it is strictly redundant. Its special force is to announce there will be a connection between its own item (ἰάτρευσις) and the ensuing item that is more intimate than its item’s connection with the previous items. Compare 407B8-C1, 410D1-2, 412B3-4, 431B9-C1, 519B1-2, 568E2-3 (οἵ going with all three), 611B2-3; Crat.407E5-A2; Leg.733E1-2, 738D6-E1, 834A4-5 (cf. England ad loc.), 899B3-4, 950E5-6; Meno 75C8-9; Phdo 85E3-4; Symp.206D3-5, 213D3-4; Tht.146C8-D1, 156B2-6, 157B9-C2, 167C1-2, 176C3-4. Distinguish the force of γε, δέ, and δή in similar position, all of which distance their item from the previous rather than bringing it closer to the subsequent (Tht.149D1-3 has both τε and δή). Distinguish also non-redundant τε placed in lieu of καί, helping to effect closure, where it may or may not also indicate an intimate link (A καὶ B καὶ ... καὶ X, Y τε καὶ Z—and—A καὶ B καὶ ... καὶ X, Y1 τε καὶ Y2) as Alc.I 122B8-C2; Leg. 665C2-3, 735B1-2, 828B4, 842E1-3, 886A2-4, 896B10-C1, C9-D1, D5-7, 899B3-4; Phdo 59C1-2; Polit.288B2-4; Rep.547B3-4; Tim.24A7-8, 42E8-9, 43B2-4, 46D2-3, 87D1-2, 92C7-8. In the present case the especially intimate relation between the item (ἰάτρευσις) and its subsequent (χρηματισμός) is that of particular and universal (for which cf. the similar list at Tht.157B9-C2).

678

δεξαίμεθα ἔχειν (C8), repeated from the first division (B5).

679

Note the chiasm (D1-2): μισθῶν … χάριν (varying ἕνεκα immediately above) picks up ἰάτρευσις and τῶν ἄλλων ὅσα γίγνεται ἀπ’ αὐτῶν (a repetition of the formula at C1-2) picks up the salubriousness of exercise and medical treatment.

680

γὰρ οὖν (D3) grants the obvious and ἀλλὰ τί δή voices, or feigns, a little impatience.

681

The μέν solitarium (358A1) indicates some diffidence but more resolve.

682

ἐν τῷ καλλίστῳ (A1). Notably not τὸ ἄριστον, which would constitute a claim about the essence of goodness. To call something καλόν is often to express admiration, and τί τὸ καλόν; can mean “What shall we praise?” That we love (ἀγαπητέον, A2) justice for both reasons therefore makes it κάλλιστον in Socrates’s eyes exactly because in this case it affords us more grounds for praise. There is no deeper idea at stake; the tripartition has served its immediate purpose in that Glaucon has succeeded to warm Socrates to the task of praising justice in itself. To wonder about the doxography of this tripartition is to ignore its application in the drama, by which it is immediately exhausted.

683

μακαρίῳ ἔσεσθαι (A3): Socrates is remembering the climax of his argument against Thrasymachus, that justice is the virtue of the soul that enables it to do its job well, and therefore enables its possessor to have a happy life (352D8-354A9).

684

τοίνυν (A4): Glaucon marks the victory of his epagogic strategy. Glaucon’s signal “bravery” (ἀνδρειότατος, A3) is shown by his elevating the conversation to the Socrates’s own standard.

685

ἐπιτηδευτέον (A6): a new term denoting a “practicing observance” that (appropriate to the attitude being described) lacks the zeal of the terms used so far: ἀγαπᾶν, ἀσπάζεσθαι, and ἐφίεσθαι.

686

μισθῶν θ’ ἕνεκα καὶ εὐδοκιμήσεων διὰ δόξαν (A5). Despite the relative ubiquity of the verb from which it is formed (εὐδοκιμεῖν), the abstract noun εὐδοκιμήσεις occurs in Greek literature in these pages only (imitated twice by Adeimantus, below: 363A2, 6), apart from one late instance in Lucian (Pisc.25: τὰ δικαστήρια (sc. ἀπολείπειν) καὶ τὰς ἐν ἐκείνοις εὐδοκιμήσεις) and once, also late, in the singular, in Themistius (Or.29.347C: εὐδοκίμησις καὶ ἀρετή). The choice of the plural makes the abstract noun designate concrete instances of rewards coming from good reputation, and therefore might best be translated with the English plural, “favors,” in its concrete sense (cf. Gildersleeve §44). With μισθῶν it forms an hendiadys, and διὰ δόξαν by an artful figura etymologica sets into relief that such rewards can be the result of mere opinion, which is the burden of Glaucon’s present remark. The term represents a specific extension of “wages,” above (D1), and – for all purposes a coinage – finds a way to collapse into a single word both the reason others pay it (*δοκ-, which needed to be spelled out with διὰ δόξαν, and specifies ὅσα γίγνεται from above) and the reason the recipient wants it (εὐ). Adeimantus will imitate the pseudo-pleonasm, below (cf.363A1-5, esp. ἀπὸ τῆς δόξης [cf. n.782, and compare Socrates at 554C12]). Indeed in the next line justice is considered harsh not only αὐτό but also δι’ αὑτό.

687

ὡς ὂν χαλεπόν (A6) playing the opposite of ἡδύ. The term has a special career in the maxim χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά, where it is essentially approbatory (this theme will come up below, 364A1-4); elsewhere, and here, it is just negative. With ὡς Glaucon emphasizes this is the opinion of οἱ πολλοί.

688

Cf. 337A5-7.

689

ἐάν … δοκῇ (B1): The construction is, “Listen on the chance that you will agree” (Smyth §§2672 and 2354; cf. 427D3-4, 432C2, 455B1-2, 474C5-6; cf.Gorg.458C4-5, Lach.179E6), just as we say “Listen if you please,” or as an advocate says “If it please the court.” In effect Glaucon is asking leave to lay the entire thing out in a long speech, by suggesting such a speech will carry Socrates along (cf. a similar use of the construction at Phdo.64C where Socrates suggests a line of argument). The pronouns are emphatic as usual. Glaucon is making a “personal” request that Socrates hear an argument that he himself despises but cannot get out of his mind. He hopes of course that Socrates will remain “unteachable” but cannot in himself see how.

690

Socrates’s “stunning” effect on his interlocutor (ὥσπερ ὄφις κηληθῆναι, B3) does not consist of reducing his argument to self-contradiction, but his self. Thrasymachus stays stunned; his blush indicates that he realizes in full company that he has been shown not to be what he has been showing himself off to be; but he has no further stake in the conversation other than to win it. His involuntary behavior reveals that he was making his argument not because he thought it was true but because making it made him a somebody. Glaucon on the other hand desires the truth because he thinks the answer crucial to his own happiness.

691

οὔπω κατὰ νοῦν (B3) is his expression for the inadequacy of the account, an inadequacy that he feels in his mind and that leads him to ask questions. Conversely if his mind were satisfied and had no further questions he would find the account “adequate” (ἱκανῶς).

692

ἐπιθυμῶ (B4) reveals he has been feeling an intellectual hunger.

693

ἀκοῦσαι (B4): Notably he says he wants to hear an account rather than that he wants to learn. Cf. πυθέσθαι below (D3).

694

δύναμιν (B5) is meant to exclude such γιγνόμενα ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ as might accrue not because of the inherent power of the thing itself (αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτό) but because of people’s opinion about the thing (διὰ δόξαν).

695

καθ’ αὑτό (B5) means to focus on the immediate operation of the thing, used properly, in its essential relations, as for instance the sharpness of a knife’s blade that enables the knife to cut, disregarding what kind of handle the knife has, what the knife might used to cut, whose knife it is, and where the knife came from.

696

ἐᾶσαι χαίρειν (B6-7) expresses impatience with the importance characteristically according to such things.

697

τὸν Θρασυμάχου λόγον (C1): This Thrasymachean position is actually held by οἱ πολλοί (A4); Thrasymachus’s relation to it is like the actor’s relation to his role: like the actor his personal beliefs are of no importance.

698

οἷον εἶναί φασιν καὶ ὅθεν γεγονέναι (C2): “What sort of thing it is and whence it came to be” hides vagueness with parallelism. Was it that way before it came from there? or was its coming from there what made it what it is? If the former, what καί adds – where it came from – is superfluous; and if the latter all it is is what it became so that what καί is adds not a parallel second item but an epexegesis of the first. Cf. E2, infra, and n. ad loc.

699

ὡς ἀναγκαῖον ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὡς ἀγαθόν (C3-4): Glaucon has already abandoned his own tripartition. What was an ἐπίπονον ἀγαθόν of the third type there is here a necessity, and what was the first type of good there is here good simpliciter. In his division the second category had merely been a means to introducing the third, as the transitional example ὑγιαίνειν (357C3), leading to γυμνάζεσθαι, ἰατρεύεσθαι, and thence to ἰάτρευσις, revealed.

700

εἰκότως (C4) already suggests that their reasons are both shortsighted and justified, revealing Glaucon's ambivalence.

701

ἄρα (C5) is redundant after γάρ, itself is a compound of γε and ἄρα (just as μή was redundant after μῶν, itself originally a compound of μή and οὖν, at 351E6-7: cf. Smyth §2651c); but it is not entirely otiose. It marks the unexpectedness of their grounds. The question remains whether it expresses Glaucon’s surprise or that of οἱ πολλοί, and the answer is, both.

702

διατεθρυλημένος (C7), from onomatopoetic θρῦλος: Glaucon hears it everywhere from Thrasymachus and countless others, and unable to get away from it. Thrasymachus's position is not unique after all: it must only be persuasiveness that we might attribute to him.

703

With ἐπεί γε (C6) Glaucon indicates not the reason for the foregoing but his reason for saying it (cf. Smyth §2380), and with ἀπορῶ (C7) moves completely into confession. The movement of the thought is emotional and unpremeditated: these are indices of Glaucon’s sincerity and desire. ἀπορῶ gets no grammatical complement, but a cause instead (διατεθρυλημένος), which itself is given a cause (ἀκούων). With ὑπέρ instead of περί Glaucon shows which side he is on at the same time that he abandons the effort to do the praising himself (he has passed over saying ἀπορῶ λέγειν περὶ τοῦ δικαίου λέγειν), although he does know what needs to be done, and says what that is, and then expresses his sense that Socrates is just the person to deliver this message: πυθέσθαι replaces ἀκούειν as if he feels he can no longer trust his ears.

704

διό (D3) like οὑτωσί (B7) and ἐπεί … γε (C6) continues his confession under the guise of explanation. It is paradoxical and ironic that what Glaucon wants is a defense of justice but what he insists on doing is to castigate it. Somehow he feels he must do the only thing he can do – to re-enact the bad argument in all its parts.

705

κατατείνας (D3) echoes ἀντικατατείναντες (at 348A7): In his eagerness to confess his feelings to Socrates Glaucon has forgotten the point Socrates there made, that listing all the pros and cons is worthless unless and until a judge arrives to weigh them (348B2). It is as though he conceives that rehearsing the argument will prompt and stimulate Socrates to make the opposite argument.

706

ὅρα εἴ σοι βουλομένῳ (D6) the third time the student addresses a plea to his teacher, this time slightly more direct (εἰ instead of ἐάν), but still he does not directly ask Socrates to make a speech. The force of the idiomatic periphrastic construction with the dative is deferential (cf. Lach.187C1 and my n. ad loc.).

707

νοῦν ἔχων (D8), echoing Glaucon's κατὰ νοῦν (B3). For μᾶλλον πολλάκις cf.

708

χαίροι λέγων καὶ ἀκούων (D8). Compare the conversation between Echecrates and Phaedo at the beginning of the Phaedo, and in particular how Echecrates after testing Phaedo’s memory for details gingerly requests him to give him an eyewitness account of Socrates’s last conversation (58D2-3), the formula by which Phaedo agrees to do so (τὸ μεμνῆσθαι Σωκράτους καὶ αὐτὸν λέγοντα καὶ ἄλλου ἀκούοντα ἔμοιγε ἀεὶ πάντων ἥδιστον [D5-6]), and how Echecrates is then relieved by the answer (D7-9). The reversibility of roles is topical in the Greek concept of χάρις, but also is integral to the reciprocal process of dialectical conversation (cf. Prot.310A1-7). Thus pairing the verbs commonly denotes dialectical scrutiny by question and answer (432E5-6, 489E3, 605C10 [ἀκούων σκόπει], 608D6-12 and n.5102, Prot.347D6-7): Socrates agrees not to perform an answer for Glaucon (on πυνθάνεσθαι cf. n.46) but to engage in dialogue with him.

709

κάλλιστα λέγεις (E1), answering Socrates’s superlative (πάντων μάλιστα), followed directly by καί.

710

Whether we read τί ὄν τε καὶ ὅθεν (E2) with AM and Burnet (in which case ὄν is to be understood with τί and ὅθεν, both interrogative) or οἷόν τε καὶ ὅθεν with F (in which case again the two interrogatives are parallel) the important points are that, in contrast to the first putting of the matter at C2, γέγονε has become the only verb while te kai collapses the questions of the what and the whence into one question. Justice is something wasn't before it evolved. The final step will be taken with the bare expression πεφυκέναι, with which the argument will now begin.

711

πεφυκέναι (E3) now obliterates any distinction between the two questions by collapsing them into the verb: the φύσις of justice is nothing but the outcome of its γένεσις.

712

δοκεῖ (359A1): Glaucon shifts out of the infinitival indirect discourse as if this were his position.

713

ἄρξασθαι (A3): Now Glaucon shifts back to the infinitive of indirect discourse.

714

νόμους τιθέσθαι (A3): Adopting laws is presented as a logical extension of the concept of reaching agreements (συνθέσθαι ἀλλήλοις, A1-2). To list the extension of the idea before the basic idea places it into a kind of reverse exegesis of its own extension, often in the manner of a correction (“laws, which are, after all, compacts”). It is a species of “reverse καί” (343C6 and n.): cf. καὶ δόξα, Crito 47B1-2; ἐργασίᾳ (new) τε καὶ χρήσει (old), Euthyd.281A2; καὶ φύσεις, Leg.798A7-8; κηρυκικῇ (without καί, placed last although the “basic” item), Polit.260D11-E2; καὶ ἀληθεῖς, Tht.167C1-2. We may class here the καί that explains effect by adding cause, e.g., Rep.392D8 (γελοῖος διδάσκαλος καὶ ἀσαφής); Gorg.474A1 (γέλωτα παρεῖχον καὶ οὐκ ἠπιστάμην ἐπιψηφίζειν). Cf. also 381A4 and 381A7-9 with nn.

715

νόμιμόν τε καὶ δίκαιον (A4): The argument is etymological. The ἐπίταγμα is called νόμιμον because νόμος ἐπιτάττει. From here, we are to believe, it is a short step to δίκαιον, as if this were a synonym of νόμιμον. That the step is short is the burden of τε καί to gloss over.

716

γένεσίν τε καὶ οὐσίαν δικαιοσύνης (A5): We had been told we would hear what justice is and how it came to be (358C2, E2), but in the event we hear only how it came to be. What it is, is now being portrayed as just the outcome of the becoming (compare Thrasymachus’s expression οὐκ ἄλλο τι ἢ τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμφέρον [338C2] which likewise denies that justice has any inner meaning). Moreover, the definition (or evolution) of justice requires the essence (or existence) of injustice, and so the account is baseless or circular.

717

ἀγαπᾶσθαι ὡς ἀγαθόν (A8-B1) reverts to the language of the tripartition (357C1, 358A2) but does here carry the connotation of acquiescence.

718

ἀρρωστία (B1) means not weakness but a deficiency in the kind of overmastering power that would enable us, as described above, to ἐκφεύγειν the one and αἱρεῖν the other (358E6-9A1). The phrase ἀρρωστίᾳ τοῦ ἀδικεῖν τιμούμενον is therefore an oxymoron.

719

οἱ ἐπιτηδεύοντες ἀδυναμίᾳ τοῦ ἀδικεῖν ἄκοντες αὐτὸ ἐπιτηδεύουσι (B6-7) restates 358C3 (οἱ ἐπιτηδεύοντες ἄκοντες ἐπιτηδεύουσιν) in such a way as to sandwich in what the first point yielded (ἀδυναμίᾳ [359B6, cf. ἀρρωστίᾳ, B1]).

720

λάβοιμεν ἄν (C4): contrary to good empirical procedure the result of the experiment is revealed before the experiment is allowed to take place. It is after all within the διάνοια of Glaucon’s rhetor’s audience that the experiment is in fact taking place.

721

εἰς ταὐτὸν ἰόντα (C4) arriving at the same destination even though coming from different places.

722

νόμῳ δὲ βίᾳ (C5-6): the word order again stresses the complacent and superficial contrast of φύσις and νόμος (cf. πεφυκέναι, 358E3, and n.). The jarring juxtaposition of νόμος and βία is mitigated only slightly by the intervening δέ; the lack of καί makes βία a virtual synonym for νόμος in contrast with φύσις. Compare Aristotle’s division of motion into κίνησις βίᾳ and κίνησις κατὰ φύσιν (e.g. Phys.4.8.215A1-2). For the awkward juxtaposition cf. ἐπιμελείᾳ βίᾳ, at 552E2 (and n.). It is thus that though (natural) ἐπιθυμία can be said to ἄγειν (ἄξει, C3), νόμος is said to παράγειν (παράγεται, C6).

723

ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ ἴσου τιμήν (C6). τὸ ἴσον is here treated, with some cynicism, as mere political sloganry (cf.561B2, 558C5-6). To use τιμή relies in part upon the previous use of τιμούμενον at 359B1. In the natural case one honors what he thinks good, but we need to explain a psychology that grants honor to something that a person does not think good. From such behavior come such expressions as “empty pomp” and the “show of honor.”

724

Taking τοῦτον δὲ as redirecting attention from the corpse to Gyges and reading ἄλλο μὲν οὐδέν (D8) with ms.A (legit Burnet), as the lectio difficilior, rather than ἄλλο μὲν ἔχειν οὐδέν with the majority (mss. FDM). ἄλλο is proleptic with μέν in the manner of a second ἄλλως τε καί construction (after D5-6) as further narrative focussing, and waits for a construction it will share with the contrasting item in the δέ clause. As it turns out, that item, χρυσοῦν δακτύλιον, comes after δέ instead of before it since the storyteller wishes to depict Gyges’s attention moving toward the hand. Thus περί is made to initiate the construction of the δέ clause and the anticipated parallelism dissolves.

725

ὃν περιελόμενον ἐκβῆναι (E1), accepting the unanimously attested ὅν. The three words embody the swift λέξις εἰρομένη of an Ionian logographer like Herodotus, including abrupt and unwarned shifts of subject (mitigated by tense changes in the participles), which I imitate in my paraphrase (note also prepositioned connective in καὶ τόν rather than postpositive τὸν δέ [360A2], in change of subject). In this the rhetor adopts a style familiar in storytelling—indeed a similar story is told by Herodotus (1.64ff). Reversion to this archaic “objective” style happens to leaves out (or conveniently and naively hides) the inner psychic dimensions and processes of consciousness and conscience.

726

ὡς περὶ οἰχομένου (360A2). They said to each other “Say, where’s Gyges? He was just here a moment ago.” Notably Gyges discovers his “private interest” in the midst of his one public and corporate engagement, the monthly meeting. The rest of his life he spends alone with his sheep out in the fields. During the last few weeks he had perhaps already happened to fiddle with his ring, but the sheep did not notice he became invisible and so neither did he.

727

ἐπιψηλαφῶντα (A2): Note the jocular touch: We are to imagine the man who has become invisible to others becoming invisible also to himself.

728

πειρᾶσθαι, συμβαίνειν, γίγνεσθαι (A5-7): The present infinitives represent imperfect indicatives in the oratio recta (whence dependent optative ἔχοι, A5).

729

αἰσθόμενον (A7) is absolute: “he recognized the significance of what was going on,” an understatement conveniently neutral like Thucydides’s use of ἀναίσθητος.

730

γενέσθαι τῶν παρὰ τὸν βασιλέα (A8): cf.ἐξαγγέλλοιεν κατὰ μῆνα (359E2-3). διαπράξασθαι (A7) suggests he kept his motives hidden (cf. 576A2 and n. ad loc).

731

Our storyteller has taken us to Persia where, also, Solon once met Croesus. Croesus could not understand how somebody who was unknown could be the happiest man in Solon’s judgment and finally had to learn that Solon would call no man happy until he was dead. Our rhetor has similarly left out the final fate of the Lydian shepherd. Or on second thought, despite himself he has not. The shepherd who became king will perhaps be buried out in some field, something more than a mere man but naked in a hollow bronze horse with little doors, with nothing on but that ring.

732

ὡς δόξειεν (B4), “as it would seem,” the rather weak peg on which the entire argument is made to hang. But in all strictness the thought experiment is not an argument. It is a devil’s diversion whereby each member of the audience is for a moment given his chance to turn the collet inward himself, and to decide to do evil in hiding by condoning his own weakness through a condemnation of all mankind. Truly it is this moment that Glaucon meant to describe when he said of himself, ἀπορῶ μέντοι διατεθρυλήμενος τὰ ὦτα ἀκούων (358C7). During the moment that he finds himself falling silent (ἀπορῶ) his chance to jump up and object passes by, and a moment later, eo qui tacit, placuit.

733

τἆλλα (C3): Absence of a noun pushes this toward meaning τὰ λοιπά (cetera), since the foregoing items (B6-C2), though they do constitute a pair of two pairs, do not imply a genus fo us to supply. Syntactically τἆλλα is an adverbial or internal accusative with πράττειv; and for its broadly generalizing semantic sense compare ἄλλου at 368B1(cf. Leg.699C7-8 and Ast ad Leg.666B5): “and in general to do doings among men as if he were equal to the gods”.

734

Harming others in hiding he is unconcerned about doing harm to himself that only he could see, and conversely he sees no benefit to his hidden self (ἀγαθὸν ἰδίᾳ, C6-7) from doing good. The same is true of the storyteller, who tells the story of the Lydian instead of the story of Solon.

735

Reading ἀδικεῖν ἀδικεῖν (C8) with ADM and edd. (over the ἀδικεῖν ἀδικεῖ of F and d), maintaining the construction in indirect discourse initiated by φαίη τις at C5, by which Glaucon maintains distance from the position of the τὶς, at the same moment that with ἐπεί … γε he depicts the τὶς as presenting the ἐπεί clause less as a justification for the claim he has just made than his reason for presenting it (Smyth §2380), and as such stresses his subjectivity.

736

ὡς φήσει ὁ περὶ τοῦ τοιούτου λόγου λέγων (D2): After himself asserting that all men think injustice pays Glaucon adds this phrase both as a disclaimer (to distance himself from the argument) and as a confession (blaming the speaker for the effect the speech is having on him—in his διάνοια—as though to say to Socrates: “See what I mean?”). τοιούτου and the redundancy λόγου λέγων bring forward Glaucon's sense of having his ears flooded by the talk (358C7).

737

ἀθλιώτατος (D4), in the Thrasymachean sense of the “loser” (cf. 354A4 and n.).

738

αὐτήν (E1) vauntingly indicates that the universal prejudice against justice evinced by the experiment in thought will now be placed on an objective foundation. But in all strictness it was not all men who gave in to the opportunity but only the men imagined in the διάνοια of the person who engaged in the experiment. It was only he who knew no man made of such stern stuff as to resist the opportunity, or could not conceive of one, or would not, or chose not to. Nothing at all was proven except that he would find himself ready to hide in the shared conspiracy of lowered expectations. The rhetoric of the thought-experiment includes providing for the anonymity of the person engaged in the experiment; but it is obvious that that person is the man in the rhetorician’s audience. Thus the vaunt to put the thought experiment onto an objective basis is an invitation to that same member of the audience to conspire to close the door on justice forever. The powers and principalities are allowed to take over, and this is the heart of Glaucon’s concern. One may compare how the κρίσις between Barabbas and Jesus, by which his fate was finally sealed, was dignified by Roman procedure.

739

τὴν δὲ κρίσιν αὐτήν (E1): This formulation replaces the original description of the third point in his program, ὅτι εἰκότως αὐτὸ δρῶσι (358C4), i.e., that men choose injustice when they can since the unjust life is better than the just life. Glaucon now interposes an event: a judging (or trial) of the lives (κρίσις), to see whether (or show that) the preference for an unjust life is εἰκότως, “reasonable” (or justified).

740

ἐὰν διαστησώμεθα … οἷοί τ’ ἐσόμεθα (E1-3): The more “impartial” optatives that are customary in methodological announcements (e.g., 359B7-8) are now replaced with the more sanguinary subjunctive and future indicative, then hortatory subjunctives (E4, E6), and then imperatives (E7, 361A3, etc.). But let us stop to notice, amidst all of this being pushed around, that we are not being given to judge the lives by a criterion (κρῖναι, E3), but to compare them side by side (this is the purport of the need for a διάστασις); and that what is being placed side by side as if symmetrically is a life that has something (δικαιοσύνη) and a life that is deprived of that same something (ἀδικία); and that the something (τὸ δίκαιον) has been defined as being only as a ficta res contrived as a mechanism for avoiding that privation. So we are being asked to compare a non-entity with an anti-entity.

741

ἐπιτήδευμα (E6), a term mendacious in its neutrality, had entered the speech only to replace the language of ἀγαπᾶν and ἀσπάζεσθαι in order to account for “unwilling observance” (358A6 and then C3: cf. nn.). Now it becomes the measure of both men, both the just (who despite the attempt to define him out of existence still loves justice because he thinks it good: ἀγαπᾶν ὡς ἀγαθόν) and the unjust. The notion that both the positive and the privative, both ὁ δίκαιος and ὁ ἄδικος, can have a perfected or complete form likewise rests only on the dubious presumption of a symmetry between the two types. Socrates had already shown (in fact it was presented as a mere obiter dictum at 352C) that ἀδικία can become τελέα only through an admixture of δικαιοσύνη, in which case the best injustice would only be half bad.

A prudent reader knew that once this common terminology had been convened the horse was already out of the barn.

742

δεινοὶ δημιουργοί (E7): The ambivalent adjective already suggests expertise is to be pressed into the service of something nefarious; ἄκρος then drops all scruple.

743

ἄρα (361A1) with the second limb, of a backup alternative in case the first fails, imitated below (B1; cf. also 587A3), a usage not isolated by Denniston (but note his mention of an hypothesis or idea “not before recognized,” 37-8).

744

σφόδρα ἄδικος (A3): σφόδρα deftly avoids value-language—the presence of which would of course vitiate the fairness of the procedure.

745

ἡγητέον (A4): Glaucon now slips from setting up the διάστασις (hypothesizing a description of the unjust man) into telling the judge what to think about his counterpart: in other words, to admire the unjust man’s ability to evade being caught; and he vitiates thereby the fairness of the procedure he just sought to protect. His term φαῦλον replaces Thrasymachus’s ἄθλιος.

746

ἐσχάτη … ἀδικία (A4-5): like σφόδρα, ἐσχάτη avoids positive or negative connotation.

747

τῷ τελέως ἀδίκῳ τὴν τελεωτάτην ἀδικίαν (A6-7): τελέως (brought forward from 360E5) moves to the outer edge of language still neutral, a limit already tempted by σφόδρα and ἐσχάτη; but in adopting Thrasymachus’s redundantly hyperbolic superlative, τελεωτάτην (cf.351C5), which we saw Socrates eschew (352C7-8), Glaucon allows himself to wander across the line once again (cf. ἡγητέον above).

748

καὶ ἐὰν ἄρα σφάλληται (B1): With the repetition of ἄρα (from A1) we realize Glaucon is making a transition to the unjust man’s ability like a δεινὸς δημιουργός to recuperate, and therefore that the intervening lines (A4-B1) have constituted an improvement upon the λανθανέτω of A3. In the perfect case the unjust man must not only be hidden doing the greatest injustice but must be seen as perfectly just in the very act of, and in despite of, so doing.

749

λέγειν τε ἱκανῷ (B2-3): τε proleptically links λέγειν (ἱκανῷ) with βιάσασθαι (ἱκανῷ), not with ἐπανορθοῦσθαι (δυνατῷ), introducing an exegesis of the latter in apposition. To the extent that it looks backward at all, it may be called “explanatory τε” with England (ad Leg.809B4, comparing 654B3). Cf. Leg.809C7-8, 848A4-6; Prot.315E4; Rep.381A6 (and n.), 495A7-8, 552B9, 555A2; Soph.219D5-6; Symp.186A3-7; and Denniston 502.

750

λέγειν τε … καὶ βιάσασθαι (B2-3): implicit is the universal doublet, λόγος / ἔργον.

751

διά τε ἀνδρείαν καὶ ῥώμην καὶ διὰ παρασκευὴν φίλων καὶ οὐσίας (B4-5): the elaborate exegesis of ἐπανορθοῦσθαι (B2), starting with the balanced antithesis with paired protases and culminating in this list, constitutes a climax. The list includes goods of all three traditional categories, in the form διὰ A καὶ B καὶ διὰ C1 καὶ C2 (psychic: ἀνδρεία; bodily:ῥώμη; external: φίλοι καὶ οὐσία). The form, in which the final category is instantiated by two terms (the governing term [here διά] either repeated before the final category, as here, or not), is common (342E10-11, 400B2-3, 426E1-2, and nn.). Alluding to the categories undermines the thesis, however, since the ἀνδρεία in question is not virtuous, the semantics of ῥώμη suggests a power without internal strength (ἰσχύς: cf.410B7 and n.1790), and the selection of friends and money lacks the item or items, family and background (συγγένεια, commonly included among external goods, e.g., 491C1-4, 494C5-7; Alc.I 107B6-7; Charm.157B7-8; Lys.207C3; Meno 71B6-7; Prot.319C3-4; and cf. ὁπόθεν, 362B3).

752

ἱστῶμεν τῷ λόγῳ (B6): the metaphor is from statuary (cf.D5).

753

ἄνδρα ἁπλοῦν καὶ γενναῖον (B6-7): the adjectives are similar to those with which Thrasymachus paid lip service to virtue in Book One (γενναία εὐήθεια, 348C12) but they lack his snideness and the ἄνδρα is sympathetic (cf.372C, 376D10 and n., 408A8 [vs. ἀνθρώπῳ, 407D7], 412D9, 419A3, 425D7, 426D7, 465B6, 556D2, 565E6): Glaucon is somewhere in between.

754

The quotation (Septem, 592-4, the rest of it quoted below, 362A8-9) says, of Amphiaraus,

οὐ γὰρ δοκεῖν ἄριστος ἀλλ’ εἶναι θέλει,βαθεῖαν ἄλοκα διὰ φρενὸς καρπούμενοςἐξ ἧς τὰ κεδνὰ βλαστάνει βουλεύματα.

The language is from a different time when men watched and waited for the harmony of φύσις and νόμος. Only real goodness would think to plow the deeper furrows and derive from them the truer and more solid plans that burgeon thenceforth into the light. The distinction between seeming and being cannot fail, again, to evoke the trial of Socrates; so that the subsequent ἀφαίρεσις of τὸ δοκεῖν evokes the forensic effort of Socrates’s accusers.

755

ἀφαιρετέον (B8) proposes an absurdity, as if his appearing were “separable” from his being so: the appearance is after all in the eyes of those who watch; but in the experiment these are also the persons who know he is just. The use of the verb undermines Glaucon’s method, since he gave us to believe there would be no ἀφαιρέσεις (36E4-5). Moreover, the ἄδικος had conversely received the supplements of bravery, power, money and friends-from-who-knows-where.

756

εἴη (C3) optative in the secondary sequence of the man’s underlying (and therefore past) intention; but if by hypothesis he was a just man it could only be after he received the accolades that he might come to have an ulterior motive. Glaucon departs from his own method again – but why?

757

ἄδηλον (C2): to whom will it be unclear? We have just now posited him to be good. All that will be unclear is our own motive when we view the statue of the just man, in case at that moment of choice that we have served up to ourselves we should choose him over the unjust man. The lesson of the thought experiment about Gyges was to enable us to think this way; and now Glaucon has us apply it. It is envy that holds the good to an unreasonably high standard.

758

γυμνωτέος (C3), another term that undermines itself, reminiscent of but an inversion of what Socrates envisions at the end of the Gorgias (523A5-E6), where the proper κρίσις in the Final Judgment is assured by judging the souls naked, stripped of their bodies and vestiges of their external goods (cf. its use at 601B2), a provision that would be gratuitous if the soul were good, as this one is hypothesized to be, and necessary only if the soul be provided with external goods, as the hypothetical unjust man has been. At the same time the image is consonant with the notion of torture.

759

βεβασανισμένος (C5) specifies the κρίσις this candidate will be facing, unaccountably quite different from that of the ἄδικος. Only slaves could be tortured (Andoc.Myst.43): implicitly Glaucon’s just man has been degraded to being a slave.

760

τῷ μὴ τέγγεσθαι (C6), this metaphor of watering or moistening is elsewhere used of moderating the excesses of willful hardness and uncultured intransigence (e.g., Leg.880E3; cf. 853D3 [τήκεσθαι],D4 [ἄτηκτοι]); Aesch.Prom. 2008; Eur.Hipp. 303), just as much as the hardness of adamant serves as a metaphor for a brave resolution to be good (360B5, 618E4; Gorg.509A1). Glaucon inverts the usage: “adamancy” is for him too much to expect from a man (360B5), while the adamancy of the just man is an obduracy that must be tortured by the “mitigating” effect of ill repute and all it can do to a man.

761

ὑπὸ κακοδοξίας καὶ τῶν ὑπ’ αὐτῆς γιγνομένων (C6-7): ὑπό (alter, unsurprisingly misquoted by Eusebius and Theodoret as ἀπό) adds personification to κακοδοξίας. What a bad reputation can do to a man will presently be seen.

762

εἰς τὸ ἔσχατον (D8: sc. δικαιοσύνης or ἀδικίας): again medaciously neutral: cf. ἐσχάτη, A4. Glaucon may speak of them as if they were symmetrically extreme (cf. ἐπιτήδευμα, 360E6 and n., and παρ’ αὐτὸν ἱστῶμεν, B6) but the only thing extreme about the just man is that he does not change.

763

ἵνα … κρίνωνται (D2-3): The passive deflects our awareness away from the fact that it is we that are meant to judge and that we that are being prepared by all this to do so properly (κρῖναι ὀρθῶς, 360E3, active). If the question truly were Which is happier? then we would simply ask them. If we notice what is happening inside us during the preparation, we will see that Glaucon has turned the question into, Which will you envy less even though you should envy him more, and Which will you envy more though you should envy him less?

764

ἐρρωμένως (D4), not ἀκριβῶς vel sim., of an enthusiasm bordering on the obsessive, eliciting the distinctly Socratic ejaculation βαβαί (βαβαῖ), which in all Platonic instances express Socrates's consternation about the task that has suddenly come into view as lying before him (459B; H.Maj.294E7; H.Min.364C8; Lys.218B7; Phdo 84D9; Phlb.23B5; Phdr.236E4 [so it used by the Stranger at Soph.249D9]). The Alc.I, upon the authenticity of which we cannot rely, gives two instances to Socrates uncharacteristic both for their proximity (118B4, 119C2) and for expressing consternation on someone else's behalf.

765

ὡς μάλιστ’ ἔφη δύναμαι (D7) recalls κατατείνας ἐρῶ (358D3) and with it Glaucon’s effort to claim that he is divided, one part believing all this and another not wanting to.

766

οὐδὲν ἔτι … χαλεπόν (D7-8): The judgment is meant to have been made easy by creating images of them in the most extreme versions (D2-3).

767

ἀγροικοτέρως (E1): both formations of the comparative adverb are found (ἀγροικότερον, Phdrs. 260D3). With the comparative and καὶ δὴ καί (E1), Glaucon affects scrupulosity at separating himself from what he is articulating so forcefully, and does right before he reaches its (or his) climax. Despite his disclaimer it is he who is speaking: these feelings are within him, as they are in Polus at Gorg.473C (and within Apollo for that matter, at A.Eum.186-90); and like Thrasymachus – but for different reasons – he wants to arouse these feelings in Socrates.

768

τελευτῶν (362A1) cf. τὸ ἔσχατον, Gorg.473C4, of another coup de grâce.

769

μαστιγώσεται, στρεβλώσεται, δεδήσεται, ἐκκαυθήσεται τὠφθαλμώ, τελευτῶν πάντα κακὰ παθὼν ἀνασχινδυλευθήσεται (E4-362A2): It is not merely a “traditional list of tortures” (Emlyn-Jones ad loc.). Whereas future middles used with passive sense, perhaps as holdovers from “the earlier language,” tend to show durative aspect, the regular passive form derived from the aorist passive shows a punctual aspect (Gildersleeve SCG §168). After a session of whipping (μαστιγώσεται) and a session of torture (στρεβλώσεται) he gets bound up (future perfect middle-passive, the aspect given by the perfect reduplication), and, held in place thereby, has his eyes burned out and then for finishers gets impaled and put on display (ἐκκαυθέσεται, ἀνασχινδυλευθήσεται, future passives both punctual). Compare the sequence of abuses envisioned by Polus at Gorg.473C1-5: durative tortures (στρεβλῶται, ἐκτέμνηται) followed by the punctual burning out of eyes (ἐκκάηται, second aorist passive) and a coup de grâce (ἀνασταυρωθῇ ἢ καταπιττωθῇ). In comparison with the well settled list of judicial punishments (e.g., 492D7, 553B; Apol.37BC; Crito 46C5-6; Gorg.466B11-C1, 468B-9C, 480C8-D2, 508D1-3; Leg.847A6-B1, 855C2-6, 890C4-5, 949C6-7; Polit.309A2-3) Glaucon’s striking specificity, persistence and pacing reveal an affect that cannot be ignored. That ἀνασχινδυλεύειν denotes impalement on a sharp stick, not crucifixion or hanging or nailing up, is proven by the sources gathered by Susemihl ad loc. (Platons Werke 25 [Leipzig 1881] bd.1, 336), i.e. the scholiast, Tim.Lex.Plat. (followed by the Souda and Hesychius), and Etym.Mag.100,50. Impalement, recondite and oriental (though mentioned at A.Eum. 189-90 and Eur.Rh.517), is administered after all the other disfiguring tortures, not only to ensure death but also and more importantly to put the victim on display as if it were a proof of his own viciousness or of the fearsome power of the parties that had their way with him, or both.

770

But he will be dead. Glaucon—or the persons whose λόγος this is—will have “taught him to death:” this final statement is therefore a virtual taunt delivered to the dying man on the stick. Clearly, it is out of our sight that he must be put, or better, if he is in our sight, let us see him squirming to death on a pole. Compare the similar blind-spot in Polus’s orgy of tortures in the Gorgias: his victim will be forced to watch (ἐπιδεῖν) his family tortured after he has had his eyes put out (Gorg.473C4).

771

ἄρα (A4) recalls the argument at B7-8 and corrects it.

772

γαμεῖν ὁπόθεν ἂν βούληται, ἐκδιδόναι εἰς οὓς ἂν βούληται (B3) designate marrying one’s son into a family (i.e., taking a daughter “out of” it) and marrying one’s daughter into a family, respectively. The asyndeton and the homoioteleuton achieved by repetition of βούληται makes this set of benefits sound parallel to the tortures of the good man.

773

καὶ ἰδίᾳ καὶ δημοσίᾳ (B6) implies the ἀγῶνες are forensic. For the division of cases cf.365D4-5, 549D2-3.

774

θυσίας καὶ ἀναθήματα ἱκανῶς καὶ μεγαλοπρεπῶς θύειν τε καὶ ἀνατιθέναι (C2-3), the sacrifices measured by size (ἱκανῶς) and the objects by their decorative magnificence (μεγαλοπρεπῶς), an instance of the kind of distributive binary structure in which the modifiers (and also, here, the governing verbs) go with the respective items only, rather than all going with all (that is, [S1+S2][P1+P2][V1+V2] = S1P1V1 + S2P2V2). Cf. Rep.332D5-6, 370E2-3 (chiastic), 430A6-B2, 433E12-4AA1, 462B5-6, 476B4-5, 491D1-2 (chiastic), 515C4-5; also Crito 48D1-2, Leg.945C4-5. Contrast the non-distributive (n.2410).

775

ἄμεινον (C3), as an adverb with παρασκεύασθαι, rather than ἀμείνονα (adjective) with βίον, indicates, without Glaucon noticing, how “external” the account of happiness is.

776

αὖ (D1) indicates Socrates’s sense that it was now his turn, but μέν already suggests that his sense was wrong, as he learned in the event and reports to us today, a day later. Glaucon’s brother (δέ) chimed in, and what he says (οὔ τί που οἴει … ἱκανῶς, D2-3) reveals that he saw that Socrates was ready to speak.

777

ἀδελφὸς ἀνδρὶ παρείη (cf. Paroem.Gr.1.219, 2.16 for the interpretation: ὅτι προτιμητέον τοὺς οἰκείους). Socrates's reason for citing the proverb is not to approve that brother should help brother but to accept the natural impulse as a sufficient excuse for Adeimantus to interrupt: besides his remarks will enhance the investigation. Polemarchus likewise interrupted on behalf of his father to save the argument, whereas Thrasymachus interrupted, without warrant, to destroy the logos.

778

οὐδὲν λέγεις (E1): He continues (cf. D2-3) to rely on Socrates to recognize that he is joking.

779

καί (E2): To add these opposing arguments will make Glaucon’s meaning more clear (σαφέστερον, E4); but on the face of it making his meaning more clear can hardly constitute “what most needs to be said” (ὃ μάλιστα ἔδει ῥηθῆναι, D5). Adeimantus has something else up his sleeve.

780

εὐδοκιμήσεις (363A2), bringing forward Glaucon’s term (358A5).

781

οὐκ αὐτό … ἀλλά (A1-2): Such a generalization cannot but include a confession about Adeimantus’s own upbringing. We had been prepared to consider his family by the emphatic reference to the fact that he and Glaucon are brothers.

782

τῷ δικαίῳ (A5): There is a certain redundancy in Adeimantus's expression (ἀπ’ αὐτῆς [sc. δικαιοσύνης] εὐδοκιμήσεις / δοκοῦντι δικαίῳ εἶναι γίγνηται ἀπὸ τῆς δόξης / ἀπὸ τοῦ εὐδοκιμεῖν ὄντα τῷ δικαίῳ. , ultimatly borrowed from Glaucon (358A5: cf.n.686). At first out of (true) justice comes good repute, by the end out of good reputation come good things to the (truly) just man. In the middle, however, from opinion per se come good things to a man only because opined to be just. There is great care in the terminology: the three clauses are brought together for comparison by the repetition of ἀπό; εὐδοκιμήσεις (a complacent generalizing plural) is brought back by εὐδοκιμεῖν (describing an actual event); this notion of good reputation before and after is fleetingly recast as δοκεῖν simpliciter in the middle step, and held there with a figura etymologica (δοκοῦντι δικαίῳ … δόξης); and γίγνηται plus dative in the second step is replaced by ὄντα plus dative in the last. That good reputation arises from justice (step 1) is less important than that good things arise from good reputation (step 3); and luckily (step 2) the reputation is no less a matter of opinion than than the opinion that the man is just. The transition is effected in the patch of fog around the pregnant circumstantial participle δοκοῦντι, which technically has no antecedent, and at the expense of an extremely awkward juxtaposition of εἶναι and γίγνηται.

783

A satirical tone is introduced by the excess of ἐπὶ πλέον (A5), the arbitrariness of ἐμβάλλοντες (A6), the implicit conception of the gods participating in the world of reputation (εὐδοκιμήσεις, A6), the quaint cornucopiae (ἄφθονα) from Homer and Hesiod, and the characterization of Hesiod as γενναῖος (A8), that Adeimantus with some irony imputes to the κηδόμενοι: the word is no longer innocent (361B7, 348C12, and nn.).

784

τοῖς ὁσίοις (A7) designates the proper relation of man to god, as δικαίῳ (A3) designates that of man to man. Cf. 331A3 and n.

785

Hes.WD 232-4.

786

Od.19.109, 111-13, omitting line 110. Odysseus compares the fame of Penelope to that of a pious king (whence the opening genitive).

787

νεανικώτερα τἀγαθά … διδόασιν (C3-4). The comparative warns us that while the rewards just narrated were ridiculous for their quaintness, those to come are truly beyond the pale; and his colloquial formulation according to which the authors themselves give benefits to their characters rather than write stories in which they receive them (διδόασιν, C4) all with all that follows (ἀγαγόντες τῷ λόγῳ, κατακλίναντες, etc.), satirizes a failure in the poet’s verisimilitude by feigning the credulity his account requires if it is to be taken seriously.

788

ἡγησάμενοι (D1) of unconscious and uncritical certainty (334C2 and n.). Adeimantus criticizes both their belief there could be nothing finer and the fact that they believe it unconsciously, without himself saying what he believes or why he believes it.

789

The order in which the rewards are treated (C4-E4) is artfully chiastic: rewards in life to the just (A7-C2) and then in death (C3-D5); then punishments for the unjust in death (D5-7) and then in life (D7-E2).

790

ἄλλα δὲ οὐκ ἔχουσιν (sc. λέγειν) (E3): This pendant remark, abruptly brief after his elaborate and irrisory smorgasbord of rewards, resembles the critical remark he dropped at D1-2 (ἡγησάμενοι ...) in the way it damns the poets but withholds any attempt to say what is missing in their account. This time he begs the question more acutely. To say οὐκ ἔχουσιν rather than οὐ λέγουσιν is sharper than the indirect criticism of ἡγησάμενοι above: he claims not only that they did not but could not say anything more. Moreover, ἄλλα is ambiguous: is it a supplement or an alternative that he misses? Even the question whether there are any such rewards is begged! Shorey (ad loc.) takes Adeimantus’s bait and supplies an answer—a good answer, indeed (“communion with the good”)—and others may vie to supply others; but in finding such an answer have we supplied what Adeimantus himself wants?

His final remark by its structure (E3-4) perhaps suggests that he is dissatisfied that their praise of justice has nothing more to draw on than the topics of its dispraise, and that the anti-entity is the source for describing the entity, but why doesn’t he say so? Does he prefer an untested boast of superiority over taking the risk of suggesting an answer we might all profit from?

791

The pairing of ἔπαινος and ψόγος (E3-4) had suggested that the range of λόγοι had been exhausted; this announcement of an ἄλλο αὖ εἶδος (E5) catches our attention. Have we reached ὃ μάλιστα ἔδει ῥηθῆναι (362D5)?

792

ἰδίᾳ τε λεγόμενον καὶ ὑπὸ ποιητῶν (363E6-4A1): the λόγοι of the κηδόμενοι had included edifying citations from the poets (γενναῖος, A8); but the passive (λεγόμενοι) allows Adeimantus to make a transition away from the κηδόμενοι to other, unspecified advocates, leaving only the distinction between plain speech and poetry (ἰδίᾳ … ποιητῶν). He uses this passive again, below (λέγονται 364B3), to effect a transition from the unnamed πάντες (364A1) to the strange ἀγύρται καὶ μάντεις.

793

γάρ (364A1) is programmatic, as often. Here it warns us that Adeimantus will now be imitating the exponent of this other kind of talk.

794

ἐξ ἑνὸς στόματος ὕμνουσιν (A1): With the metaphor Adeimantus complains of the same saturation his brother did at 358C7 (ἀπορῶ μέντοι διατεθρυλημένος τὰ ὦτα ἀκούων), though he puts the accent on their unanimity and only implies he believes they are wrong, rather than on his own being overwhelmed by them.

795

δικαιοσύνη (A2) is expanded by σωφροσύνη, which is however placed first; the two are attached by τε καί. The expansion sets up a contrast, unfavorable to justice, between the self-denial that just behavior entails and granting free rein to desire, which in truth the speaker is advocating.

796

καλόν before μέν (A2) already suggests the wise old saw, χαλεπὸν τὸ καλὸν (cf. schol. ad Crat.384B), but since μέν is always concessive, we already sense that things are going in the wrong direction. According to the proverb it is the difficulty that is to be conceded, not the admirability (that is, we need χαλεπὸν μέν not καλὸν μέν)! For the problem of positioning μέν cf. Socrates's amusing analysis at Prot.343C7-D1ff. ὕμνουσιν, which already suggested a criticism of the speakers’ complacency, and even indicated that the universal avowal verges on ὕθλος, the cognate noun (cf. n.54, supra). Nobody will disagree, but will anybody do anything about it?

797

μέντοι (A3), in place of δέ, effectively cancels what has been conceded in the μέν clause; and ἐπίπονον adds condoning and negative tincture to χαλεπόν. It is clear where this argument is going.

798

ἀκολασία δέ (A3): the μέντοι did not answer the μέν after all!

799

δόξῃ δὲ καὶ νόμῳ αἰσχρόν (A4): That the vices are αἰσχρόν only δόξῃ καὶ νόμῳ, suggests that their opposite virtues were καλόν only by convention as well, but it is part of the strategy of this new kind of talking to leave such matters implicit, a strategy not unlike Adeimantus’s own, above. We see again how easily in usage τὸ καλόν can mean merely “the praiseworthy.” (cf. καλλίστῳ, 358A1 and n.).

800

ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλῆθος (A5): after the argument that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder comes the sober statistical observation.

801

πλουσίους καὶ ἄλλας δυνάμεις ἔχοντας (A6): πλουσίους is a first predicate and is then generalized by the participial phrase which suddenly requires ἔχοντας to have been placed after it. Call it zeugma or syllepsis.

802

In contrast to the persons described by Glaucon at 360C8-D7.

803

τοὺς δέ (A8) succeeds to omit referring to the subject as τοὺς ἀγαθούς or τοὺς δικαίους: baldly to assert that the good are bad is beyond the pale and in the end lip service is conceded to them (ὁμολογοῦντες, B1) and they are called ἀμείνους.

804

οἳ ἄν πῃ ἀσθενεῖς τε καὶ πένητες ὦσιν (A8-B1): postponement of the protasis and its insidious πῃ indicate that ἀσθενεῖς and πένητες are the excuses (i.e., reasons discovered after the fact) that they give themselves. The logic fails, but only at the end of the sentence; and he moves on.

805

τούτων δὲ πάντων (B2). By referring to the arguments he is about to introduce (the θαυμασιώτατοι) as already included in τούτων πάντων is another of Adeimantus’s ways to presume we know what he is thinking: we are supposed by now to have “gotten the drift” as to the εἶδος of these λόγοι (363E5-6), both their tone and manner.

806

λέγονται (B3): the shift to the passive prepares for his change of subject from “all the poets” (πάντες, A1), who make the arguments about human affairs, to the strange specialists (ἀγύρται δὲ καὶ μάντεις, B5) he will next introduce as authorities for the surprising statements about the gods. The transition from men as subject matter to gods repeats the transition above (ἐπὶ πλέον ... 363B5ff).

807

περὶ θεῶν τε λόγοι καὶ ἀρετῆς (B2-3): the position of τε indicates that the topic is the relation of the gods and virtue.

808

ἄρα and καί (B3) conspire to express, or feign, shock.

809

πολλοῖς (B3): Again a statistical statement postures, or is allowed to qualify, as a universal or essential truth.

810

δυστυχίας τε καὶ βίον κακόν (B4): Illative τε καί draws too strong a conclusion. The very notion of luck with a single stroke grants the reality of undeserved events and restricts them to the status of exceptional in an otherwise orderly world: one such event can indeed ruin what a life has been, but contrary to what Adeimantus is saying, does not thereby become the rule of its future.

811

τοῖς δ’ ἐναντίοις ἐναντίαν (sc. ἔνειμαν), B4-5: compare the aposiopesis in Pindar, Ζεὺς τά τε καὶ τὰ νέμει, Isth.5(4)52, and Nausicaa’s remark to Odysseus (6.188-9), which avoid the explicit statement that gods are the cause of bad things.

812

δέ (B5), colorless, as at A5. The rhetoric is cumulative rather than consecutive.

813

εἴτε τι ἀδίκημά του γέγονεν (B7-C1): Adeimantus now imitates the “sales language” of the priests: τι and του minimize their prospective client’s sin by avoiding to say whose it is, and γέγονεν finesses out of saying who did it. It is as if one is filling out a form.

814

ἡδονῶν τε καὶ ἑορτῶν (C2) echoes θυσίαις τε καὶ ἐπῳδαῖς with something a little more concrete and a little less liturgical, but at the same time it is a hendiadys: placating the gods is being slanted toward pleasing them and sugaring them up. At the same time that Adeimantus aspires to voice the truth he displays an estimable facility for imitating the liars.

815

ἐάν τέ τινα ἐχθρόν (C2): the indefinite adjective is again euphemistic.

816

τισιν (C4) again euphemistic and suggestive: what else in involved than the notion of pushing the gods around?

817

τοὺς θεοὺς, ὥς φασιν, πείθοντές σφισιν ὑπερετεῖν (C4-5): The syntax is roundabout but the solicitation is direct. In the end, as they boast (with σφισι), the gods turn out to be servants of men (ὑπερετεῖν, C5)!

818

μάρτυρας ποιητὰς ἐπάγονται (C5-6): these μάντεις or ἀγύρται are a strange bunch indeed, quoting poets for corroboration as if they were delivering a brief in court! It is the third time the poets have been adduced for corroboration in Adeimantus’s speech, first by the caregivers (363A7-8), then by Adeimantus himself (363E6-4A1), and now by Adeimantus’s μάντεις.

819

εὐπετείας διδόντες (C6). They cite the poets saying that evil is easily availed not in order to prove it so but to make it so. The citation therefore provides an index of the way in which the poets are taken to be teachers.

820

ὡς (C6): Mr. Morrissey notes that if this ὡς is read as part of Adeimantus's performance of the hexameter, then it scans (ὡς τὴν μὲν κακότητα, where Hesiod had τὴν μέν τοι κακότητα).

821

Hes.WD 287-9. In the gnomic rhetoric, evil is conceded (μέν) for the sake of highlighting (δέ) the good, quite the reverse of καλὸν μέν … χαλεπὸν μέντοι, above (A2-3). Hesiod will go on to say that the path of virtue becomes easy once you get to the top: the gnomic poet is being misused.

822

τινα (D3) natural in apologizing for the metaphor but carries also a hint of incredulity.

823

οἱ δέ (D3): Adeimantus speaks as if he were drawing a distinction among the μάντεις, but in substance it is the variety of poets (Hesiod and Homer again, and again as witnesses: cf. 363A8) and the range of their arguments that he means to catalogue, as the sequel shows (παρέχονται, E3, making no distinction between or among the παρέχοντες).

824

παραγωγή (D4) revealing what ἐπαγωγαῖς (C3) had succeeded to remain vague about: cf. παράγεται, 359C6. Cf. παρατρωπῶσ’ at E1, infra.

825

Iliad 9.497ff, adapted. Phoenix speaks to Achilles, persuading him to let go his rancor: ‘Even the gods show clemency to a man contrite.’ Again the poet is misused, for Phoenix makes the gods the measure of men not their servants, as in Hesiod good was the measure of toil rather than ease the measure of good. Moreover, ὑπερβαίνειν expresses contrition and even repentence in the aftermath of an error, while for Adeimantus’s argument the sin is contemplated in advance (a perverse interpretation of the subjunctives as anticipatory) and weighed against the uncertainty or manipulabiity of its consequences.

826

δέ (E3): again the cumulative rhetoric. The move from Homer and Hesiod to the more radical claims of Musaeus and Orpheus repeats the escalation in his narration about the caregivers (363C3ff: n.b. νεανικώτερα), and makes more explicit the extravagant claim of the divine authority of those poets.

827

τελευτήσασιν ἃς δὴ τελετὰς καλοῦσιν (365A1-2), an etymological connection between τελευτήκασι and τελετάς. I borrow the rendering into English from Shorey.

828

κακῶν (A2): The term now used not of the client’s evil deeds that deserve punishment, but of the punishments they will face unless they hire the μάντεις to ward them off.

829

δεινὰ περιμένει (A3). Cf.330D-331B. Adeimantus’s depiction includes even the scare tactic with which his μάντεις might seek to close the deal. Though his description explicitly distances himself from these assertions (λέγουσι at 364A6, πείθειν at 364B6, C4, E5 and ὥς φασι at 364E4) he does a little too good a job of presenting their brief. One may wonder, moreover, whether a visitor such as the one he has described, has visited the door of Cephalus once or twice (ἐπὶ πλουσίων θύρας ἰόντες, 364B5-6) or has Cephalus found his frequent private sacrifices sufficient? His fear would presumably decide this for him.

830

νέων ψυχάς (A6): Although the fate of the soul is meant to be the true subject of both the speeches (358B6) the soul has not been mentioned per se within either speech, not even in connection with the psychagogery of Musaeus at 363C and 364E. In turning to it in now, with solicitude, Adeimantus shows a hint of vulnerability; and with the vocative φίλε appeals to Socrates for empathy.

831

ἐπιπτόμενοι συλλογίσασθαι (A8). If with J.-C. the image is borrowed from bees (comparing Ion 534B), the metaphor (ἐπιπτόμενοι) is not. The gnomic and encomiastic topic of the bee as exploited for instance in Pindar has the bee moving from flower to flower to extract the honey, as the poet might pass over the details so as to focus on the gist of the matter. The term for harvesting the gist is δρέπεσθαι, but the term used, ἐπιπτόμενοι, connotes mere impetuosity. Likewise, συλλογίσασθαι —“adding it all up”—is likewise a disappointing pis aller for συλλέγειν. Cf. 401C2 where Socrates uses δρέπεσθαι instead, pointing back to this passage.

832

ποῖός τις (A8): he shifts from the plural of the group to the singular of the case—oneself—that each must think about in prospect. The numbers and persons of the pronouns Adeimantus employs in this section are hugely significant of his inner attitude: cf. nn.840, 841, 842, 868, 873, 883, infra.

833

ἐκ τῶν εἰκότων (B2) recalls Glaucon’s εἰκότως at 358C4. In both cases to say that a person “in all likelihood” will adopt an attitude is really no more than an attempt to exonerate him, but now Adeimantus goes further, imagining an inner self canny enough to “get the drift” and endowing it with the sophistication of an argument from likelihood. In truth of course he is arguing against himself; and he already knows he will win, and that in winning he loses.

834

πότερον δίκᾳ ... (B3-4): The passage from Pindar is quoted at greater length by Max.Tyre (12.1 = fr.254 Turyn, 213 Schneider): πότερον δίκᾳ τεῖχος ὕψιον | ἥ σκολιαῖς ἀπαταῖς ἀναβαίνει | ἐπιχθόνιον γένος ἀνδρῶν, | δίχα μοι νόος ἀτρέκειαν εἰπεῖν; and by Cicero in a letter to Atticus dubitating how he should treat a certain person; but later, Dion.Helic. can quote only the last line to express uncertainty on a technical question (comp.verb.21). Adeimantus’s truncated version seems to presume the theme of deep dubiety expressed in the fourth line of the fragment. The language of the portion quoted by Plato closely resembles Isth.5(4) 49-50: τετείχισται δὲ πάλαι | πύργος ὑψηλαῖς ἀρεταῖς ἀναβαίνειν, which suggests that the wall (there taking [with Dissen] ἀρεταῖς as dative of agent with τετείχισται and ἀναβαίνειν as epexegetical of ὑψηλαῖς) is a metaphor for social eminence. As such Adeimantus’s exegesis, ἐμαυτὸν οὕτω περιφράξας διαβιῶ shades the meaning away from eminence in virtue toward the unapproachable security of a battlement.

835

Reading ἐὰν μὴ καὶ δοκῶ (B5) with F (against ἐὰν καὶ μὴ δοκῶ with ADM).

836

θεσπέσιος (B7), gratuitously approbatory: cf. the use at Euthyd.289E. It recalls ἰσόθεον in Glaucon’s speech (360C3) and reveals the young man’s “buy in.” Thrasymachus has promised superhappiness with μακάριος, definitively more than mere humans have. The desire is essentially “pleonexic.”

837

τὸ δοκεῖν ... (C1-2): a quote from Simonides according to the attribution of schol. in E.Or.235 (=fr.93Page [PMG 598]): τὸ δοκεῖν καὶ τὰν ἀλάθειαν βιᾶται.

838

οὐκοῦν (C1) always has some interrogative force in Plato (Denniston, 436; cf. des Places, Quelques particules de liaison [Paris 1929], 158 and 188). The parts of the self in conversation with each other challenge assent by putting a question: cf. D7 below.

839

ἀλώπεκα (C5): Archilochus (fr.185 West) alludes to the fable of the crafty fox (ἀλώπηξ κερδαλῆ … | πυκνὸν ἔχουσα νόον) that tricked a monkey into a trap, out of envy for his being acclaimed king by the other animals for his prowess dancing – as retold by Aesop (Fab.81, Perry).

840

φησί τις (C6): The objector within has been put outside with the third person, so that the two persons within become a “we” (φήσομεν, D1) that it is addressing.

841

Warming to his task Adeimantus joins the chorus of 364A1-4, and perverts the gnomic wisdom: τὰ καλά become τὰ μεγάλα and χαλεπόν is redone with a litotes, οὐκ εὐπετής, the expression striking a clumsy and false note since εὐπετής had there been used to seduce. Now the taunting counsel is bravery, with γάρ (C7) answering γάρ (C6) tit for tat, and the verbal adjectives ensuing in boastful resolution.

842

φήσομεν (D1): Just as the opponent is cast out into the third person, the part of the self that had opposed the scandalous position now comes on board to hear the exhortations of the other part of the self. It has become idle to ask which one is Adeimantus, but all-important to recognize that he does not notice the shifting reference of his pronouns.

843

τὰ ἴχνη τῶν λόγων (D2) adduces to the devil’s argument even the open faith in reason, a favorite metaphor of Socrates as when he follows the λόγος through a dark thicket or rides it like a raft through waves of paradox in hopes of reaching the harbor of truth. Cf. 394D, etc.). That radical reliance on reason is here perverted into grasping at the merest threads of rationalization.

844

γάρ (D2) immediately supplies reasons supplied by our young man’s cunning fox.

845

συνωμοσίας τε καὶ ἑταιρίας (D3): Aristotle quotes a typical club-member’s oath at Pol.5.9: καὶ τῷ δήμῳ κακόνους ἔσομαι καὶ βουλεύσω ὅτι ἂν ἔχω κακόν (1310A9-10).

846

εἰσίν τε (D4). Our young man remembers the argument of 361B2 and, with slovenly but serviceable τε, cobbles it together for himself, in reverse order. This is συλλογίζεσθαι instead of συλλέγειν (cf.365A8 and n.). Compare the use of at

847

τὰ μὲν πείσομεν τὰ δὲ βιασόμεθα (D5): Adeimantus expatiates upon the first statement of this pair of solutions (persuasion and force, 361B) by first mentioning the resources available (συνωμοσίας τε καὶ ἑταιρίας // πειθοῦς διδάσκαλοι, D3-4) and then their employment (τὰ μὲν πείσομεν τὰ δὲ βιασόμεθα) ordered in apodotic chiasm.

848

ὡς (D6) rather than ὥστε, with infinitive for natural result, rare in Plato (e.g.Symp.213B2) but commoner in Xenophon (several passages in Smyth §2263-8), as if to say the young man, following Pindar, keeps his eyes on the goal (ἀεὶ τέλος ὁρᾶν). πλεονεκτοῦντες however lays bare the true motive.

849

ἀλλὰ δὴ θεούς (D6): Adeimantus now dispenses with saying who is speaking, but in his favored manner requires us to buy in and infer who it is (cf.363D1-2, E3 and nn.). Presumably it is the τις again (since again the respondent is “we,” D8), who now makes the transition, a transition we have already seen twice, from the human to the divine level (cf.364B2ff; 363A5ff).

850

οὐκοῦν (D7), again (cf. C1).

851

μέλει (D8) of the gods’ concern for men, stands for ἐπιμελεῖσθαι, and that is the meaning we give it; but in the next line we see that this reduced term was adduced merely to a foundation for a tit for tat argument (see next note).

852

μελητέον (E1) answering μέλει (D8-E1): note correlative καί presuming that men were on a par with gods the way Euthyphro does when he says (6A5) περί τε τῶν θεῶν καὶ περὶ ἐμοῦ: cf. also 378B2-4 and n.

853

τοι (E2) Adeimantus adeptly imitates the oleaginous familiarity of the coaxing cynic. Cf. ὦ φίλε below (366A6).

854

οὐκ ἄλλοθέν τοι αὐτοὺς ἴσμεν ἢ ἀκηκόαμεν (E2). Though the first sense of ἴσμεν is to “know,” its inherent optical sense is brought to the fore by its collocation with ἀκηκόαμεν, so that a statement is being made about the evidence of the eyes and the ears. Adeimantus is applying the statistical empiricism he learned from others 364A5 and B3; and the argument includes a new kind of tendentious sophistication that we can only attribute to himself. But also it is drawn out of the characterization of the poets as “witnesses” to certain assertions, as 364D5.

855

Reading λόγων (E3) on the superior ms. authority of ADM (instead of νόμων with F and edd.): the phrase redoes ἰδίᾳ τε λεγόμενον καὶ ὑπὸ ποιητῶν (363E6-4A1 and cf. n. ad loc.), repeating τε … καί.

856

τῶν γενεαλογησάντων ποιητῶν (E3): i.e., Homer and Hesiod: cf. Hdt.2.53. The characterization explicitly depicts them as authorities about the gods, though they have, twice above, only been presumed to be (364C5-E2; 363A7-8).

857

εὐχωλαῖς ἀγανῇσιν (E4), quoted (perhaps θυσίαις is, too, θυσίαισι replaced with θυσίαις τε, which preserves the dactyl as well as the caesura) from the passage quoted above from Iliad 9.

858

καὶ ἀναθήμασιν (E5): In one and the same breath he quotes the Iliad and he throws in the pairing of θυσίαι and ἀναθήματα from Glaucon’s speech, 362C2-3.

859

παράγεσθαι (E5): cf.364D4 and παρατρωπῶσ’ in the quote from Homer below it (E1).

860

ἀναπειθόμενοι (E5), as a nominative participle in hyperbaton, recalls λισσόμενοι in the Homer quote, though it is unrelated in sense and different in voice. In everyday speech ἀναπείθειν means to bribe (Ar.Pax 622; Eq.473; V.101), an undermeaning by which our young man now segues into a mercantile analysis.

861

οἷς ἢ ἀμφοτέροις ἢ οὐδέτερα πειστέον (E5-6): with each question our young man unrelentingly pushes himself (or enables himself) to disown another resource for his own redemption. To decide which it is requires us to know where Adeimantus himself stands, and everything in this long speech indicates that like the young man, he can argue the bad position better than he wants to.

862

δ’ οὖν (E6) dismisses the alternative as if it were not an alternative after all.

863

Reading μόνον (366A1) with FDM (om. A : μὲν ci. Muretus): Adeimantus is virtually quoting Thrasymachus’s καὶ εἰ μηδεμία ἄλλη ζημία at 343E2-3: μηδεμία ἄλλη is tantamount to μόνον.

864

λισσόμενοι (A3) continues the reference to the quotation from Homer, with the two subsequent participles quoting his subsequent protasis, ὅτε κέν τις ὑπερβήῃ καὶ ἁμάρτῃ, but now the sins and the prayers for forgiveness are slapped together, syntactically coordinate, as if they were all one act culminating in the result, πείθοντες (A4). These “improvements” on Homer are the work of Adeimantus himself.

865

ἀζήμιοι (A4): The moral cost-benefit analysis into debit (ζημία) and credit (κέρδος [A2]) is another innovation of our young man, and again with every advance in his argument he leaves behind a greater mess while his outlook becomes simpler by becoming more empty. By now the only good he can look forward to is κέρδος and the only evil the thinks he has to avoid is ζημία, which by now for him means only monetary debit: τίσις he has left out.

866

Again the objector uses ἀλλὰ γάρ (A4, cf. 365C6), “elliptical” in Denniston’s classification: “But (sc. I can’t agree with what you say) since ...” At each step the imaginary objector remembers what part of the truth the advocate is forgetting, but since his own grasp of the truth is only conventional the advocate continually gainsays him.

867

παῖδες παίδων (A6): The article is often dropped in family relations: cf. 363D3 and 571C9 with n.

868

φήσει (A6): The play with the pronouns continues: the reluctant part of the self has become the “we” (A5), and now the devil’s advocate has shifted into the third person (φήσει, A6), addressing “us” with the singular vocative ὦ φίλε (for which contrast ὦ φίλε Σώκρατες, 365A4: cf. n.), to assure us that he does after all have our best interests in mind. He has won.

869

λογιζόμενος (A6) might be taken to resume συλλογίζεσθαι (365A8) in peroration (dropping the prefix being characteristic in repetition), but it is the characteristic of this speech that words tend to slide into crasser meanings. The young man’s λογισμός has usurped his λόγος, his justification for so characterizing the argument being the cost-benefit analysis the young man has just offered. Cf. the immediately suspicious use at Lach.193A4.

870

With his ἀλλά (A6) the young man answers the objector’s ἀλλά (A4), and with αὖ treats this last step as even more ready-made than the previous, though it is the most perfidious step he has taken.

871

The phrasing (366A7-B2) repeats the assertions about the μάντεις (364E3-5) in more confident terms. There the μάντεις sought to persuade the cities πείθοντες, E5), and now the cities testify to it (λέγουσι, B1); there the poets were said to be the offspring of the gods (ἐκγόνων, E4) but only here the insinuation that they qualify thereby to be their spokesmen is made (οἱ θεῶν παῖδες ποιηταὶ καὶ προφῆται τῶν θεῶν γιγνόμενοι, B1-2).

872

οἵ … μηνύουσιν (B2): restating the content of the ordinate clause in a clause that is subordinate to a subordinate clause is a distinct type of illogical idiom especially useful in closure. Still, the restatement is not innocent: μηνύουσιν is “more than λέγουσι” as Tucker says (ad loc.). It was last used of laying an information against an ἄδικος whereby he no longer λανθάνει ἀδικῶν (362B3): our young man has capped his speech by asserting that the gods’ injustice has not escaped our notice, a claim novel in its content and even more enormous than the remark of Adeimantus’s μάντεις that they can persuade the gods to serve them (364A4-5).

873

κατὰ τίνα οὖν ἔτι λόγον (B3), aporizing over the grounds for a contrary view in peroration: cf. 501D (and Shorey ad loc., 2.74 note a), 589B8, 591A5. Adeimantus continues to debate with himself; the paragraph break belongs not here (with edd.) but at B7, where Adeimantus’s vocative announces he is turning to Socrates (on this use of the vocative cf. my nn. to Lach.180B7 and 181B5). His first plural now designates the victor in the argument speaking on behalf of both parts of the soul.

874

μεγίστης (B3): still, and again, injustice per se is unattractive and needs μεγίστη to distract us from the fact.

875

ἣν ἐὰν μὲν ... (B4): this double subordination, followed by the balanced pairs καὶ παρὰ θεοῖς καὶ παρ’ ἀνθρώποις, ζῶντές τε καὶ τελευτήσαντες and πολλῶν τε καὶ ἄκρων, achieves a stately elevation of style—a momentary one.

876

The syntax (B3-7) is telescoped: the initial potential optative (αἱροίμεθ’ ἄν) turns out to be the apodosis (note repeated ἄν, B3 and 4) of a mixed condition whose protasis is presented in a relative clause in the future indicative, itself containing a protasis in the form of a proviso (ἐάν … κτησώμεθα, B4-5). How can there be a reason not to be unjust when practicing such injustice constitutes the intelligent life?

877

ὁ τῶν πολλῶν τε καὶ ἄκρων λόγος (B5-6), a pairing that would be oxymoronic anywhere else in Plato. Our young man has remembered ἄκρος in the meaning it was given 360E7, though in a very different connection, but refers immediately to the widespread belief of the cities alongside the expert testimony of the prophetic poets (B1-3), and brings forward ἰδίᾳ λεγόμενον καὶ ὑπὸ ποιητῶν from 363D6-4A1; moreover it recalls Aristotle’s definition of ἔνδοξα as τὰ δοκοῦντα πᾶσιν ἢ τοῖς πλείστοις ἢ τοῖς σοφοῖς, καὶ τούτοις ἢ πᾶσιν ἢ τοῖς πλείστοις ἢ τοῖς μάλιστα γνωρίμοις καὶ ἐνδόξοις (Top.100B21-3). Insofar as Adeimantus has improved their arguments in this last section he has himself become the man to refute.

878

ὦ Σώκρατες (C1): The vocative along with δή (B7), recalls the plaintive tone Adeimantus momentarily adopted above (ὦ φίλε Σώκρατες, 354A4). His shift is sudden but distinct: the optative construction with ἄν is replaced by τίς μηχανή; the mood changes from that of the peroration in which the orator’s case has been made beyond conceivable cavil to that of an interlocutor desperate to find a way to avoid that conclusion. Soon Adeimantus imagines himself forgiven by a wiser man (C3-D1: n.b. συγγνώμην), but then again, only a moment later, he blames Socrates and people like him (i.e. exactly the wise persons he imagines) for failing to have removed his own perplexity before it had a chance to settle into him (366D7-367A4)!

879

τιμᾶν (C3): Honoring justice was the response that Glaucon’s inductive division of “goods” had evoked in Socrates (cf. ἐν τῶ καλλίστῳ, 358A1, with n.). The burden of the brothers’ speeches has been praise and censure, and the results that praise and censure achieve are honor and dishonor.

880

δύναμις (C2, cf. also D2-3 below) brings forward Glaucon’s notion of ἀδυναμία (359B6, cf. ἀρρωστία, B1): Adeimantus begins to bring the points his brother made alongside his own.

881

ψυχῆς ἢ χρώματος ἢ σώματος ἢ γένους (C2-3), again the traditional three categories of good, but in looser array and slanted to correspond with the uses to which one’s storehouse of ὑπάρχοντα had been applied above, the use of the soul being wisdom (365C5, and cf. λογιζόμενος, 366A6) and bravery (implied at C7-D2); the use of money to hire persuaders (D4-5); of family, the συνωμοσίαι τε καὶ ἑταιρίαι (D3); and of body, the readiness to use force (βιασόμεθα, D5). His lexeme δύναμις ψυχῆς, moreover, brings forward the ψυχαί of the εὐφυεῖς from 365A6-7, to which he new returns, slanting εὐφυής toward δυνατός (contrast his use of θεία φύσις, below, C7).

882

γελᾶν ἐπαινουμένης ἀκούοντα (C3): Adeimantus commemorates Glaucon’s ἀθλιώτατος (360D4).

883

With first plural perfect εἰρήκαμεν (C4), Adeimantus treats the position he has articulated as complete (as he did with the perfect εἰρημένων at B7) but also very saliently treats it as a position he has reached in concert with Socrates – a further confusion evinced in the pronouns.

884

ἔχει (C4): With his simple condition in indicatives (C4-D3) Adeimantus expresses neither a hope nor a generalization, but is speaking about Socrates, who, he flatly presumes, will forgive his canny presentation of the bad view and his inadequacy (n.b., ἱκανῶς) to gainsay it, and will declare these arguments to be false.

885

θείᾳ φύσει … ἢ ἐπιστήμην λαβών (C7): The distinction invokes the triad φύσις, μελέτη, ἐπιστήμη (on which cf. Shorey TAPA 40(1909)185-201, Meno init., Phdrs.269D4-6, Rep.374B10-D6, 606A7-8; nn.937, 1490, 1838, 2054, 3698). To say therefore, as here, that only knowledge or a divinely granted nature can enable a person to abstain from injustice unconsciously and unintentially implies that inculcation (μελετή) is impotent, and that nothing less than expert knowledge will suffice to overcome the present state of the young man’s faulty inculcation by praise and blame. Adeimantus also does not notice that the inborn talent he easily assumes his young man possesses (with εὐφυεῖς) is somehow far below the θεία φύσις he here assumes they lack – as when one exonerates himself by saying “I’m no saint.”

886

ἀδικεῖ (D4): repetition of πρῶτος indicates the meaning is that as soon as he acquires the δύναμις he uses it abusively. Understand τοῦ ἀδικεῖν with εἰς δύναμιν. Adeimantus repeats Glaucon’s assertion from 360C7-8.

887

ὅσοι ἐπαινέται (E1): Again, it was the purpose of Glaucon’s epagogic division of goods to lead Socrates to say that the kind of good we love not only for its effects but also in and of itself is the κάλλιστον, and thereby to put him on record as a praiser of justice, enabling Adeimantus now to make it incumbent upon him to answer the challenge. The sudden shift in the vocative from singular to plural mixes prayer with deprecation just as in the Muses’ address to Hesiod Th.26-28: n.b. με, 24). Immediately however Adeimantus will shift to the third singular with his emphatic οὐδεὶς πώποτε (E7).

888

Οὐδεὶς … ἄλλως ἤ (E4): As with πάντων ὑμῶν ὅσοι, prolepsis and self-interruptive frontloading are the leading rhetorical tropes of the complaint Adeimantus herewith impersonates, conferring upon it a boast of indignant recrimination. This manner is extenuated in the prolepses τῇ αὑτοῦ … ἀνθρώπους (E5-7) and οὔτ’ ἐν ποιήσει … λόγοις (E7-8), themselves facilitated by the speaker’s reversion to οὐδεὶς πώποτε at E7. The speaker is that better part of Adeimantus, which had lost the debate within his self just above.

889

δόξας τε καὶ τιμὰς καὶ δωρεάς (E4): The plurals are derogatory. For ἀπ’ αὐτῶν γιγνομένας cf. Glaucon’s τὰ γιγνόμενα ἀπ’ αὐτῶν (358B5).

890

For δυνάμει and ἐνόν (E5-6) cf. Glaucon at 358B5 and cf. n.694.

891

καὶ λανθάνον (E6): Omit editors’ comma before καί. λανθάνον is complementary to ἐνόν, contrasting the outer appearance to the inner fact, in a chiastic ABBA construction.

892

οὔτ’ ἐν ποιήσει οὔτ’ ἐν ἰδίοις λόγοις (E7-8): He repeats his distinction, again, from 365E2-3 and 363E6-4A1 (itself referring back: cf. n. ad loc.), but this time the order is reversed: it is a λόγος after all that Adeimantus and Glaucon want from Socrates.

893

τὸ μέν (E8): The “privative” idea, injustice, which had up to now been an element prerequisite even to defining justice, is finally passed over unnamed as if it were foil, though in the frontloading manner of the speech its predicate is presented in extenso (μέγιστον κακῶν … αὑτῇ); conversely, justice is presented with its longest of names and the predicate is climactically abbreviated, eschewing even the partitive genitive (ἀγαθόν rather than ἀγαθῶν). The order ψέγειν / ἐπαινεῖν just above (366C3-4, going back to 358D5 [contrast 362E3]), prepared this reversal.

894

ἐκ νέων (367A1): Again Adeimantus emphasizes the importance of inculcation (cf. n. ad 366C7).

895

With σύνοικος (A4), the better part of Adeimantus now climactically expresses the treasured notion of justice working invisibly within the self (ἐνόν, E6) through the image of one’s homelife, the polar opposite of the public prominence Thrasymachus promises for the perfectly unjust man. Compare Socrates's use of συνοικεῖν at Gorg.479B8.

896

With ταῦτα … ἴσως δὲ καὶ πλείω (A5), Adeimantus finally steps fully out of the persona of the objector and dismisses the need to load Socrates down with more material to oppose.

897

ὑπὲρ δικαιοσύνης τε καὶ ἀδικίας (A6-7): With ὑπέρ Adeimantus continues to insist on both the inadequacy of the defense of justice and the monstrosity of any defense of injustice, as the immediate sequel indicates. Socrates notices: cf. 368A7.

898

αὐτοῖν (A7), dual, suggests or indicates a reciprocal or paired relationship.

899

οὐδέν (A8) adverbial. For οὐδὲν δέομαι cf. 579A2-3.

900

κατατείνας (B2) echoing Glaucon’s use of it at 358D3: Adeimantus begins a recapitulation of Glaucon’s opening argument, using so much of the same language that it seems the two of them are “speaking with one voice.”

901

ἀκοῦσαι (B1) recalls Glaucon’s πυνθάνεσθαι (358D3): Adeimantus joins Glaucon in wanting Socrates to hold forth rather than engage them in a dialogue.

902

κρεῖττον (B3), the Thrasymachean criterion by which injustice has been winning out over justice: cf. E2 below and τῶν μεγίστων (C5).

903

αὐτὴ δι’ αὑτήν (B4): Its essential nature (αὐτή) enables it to have an effect (δι’ αὑτήν). Hence also αὐτό … τῇ αὑτοῦ δυνάμει, 366E5, cf. 358B5.

904

δέ (B7) is not adversative but additive, and thus does not reach back beyond μή, as ἀλλά would.

905

παρακελεύεσθαι (C1): Glaucon was vague about what would remain ἄδηλον if the just were allowed to seem just (361C2-3 and n.); but here, Adeimantus threatens Socrates that if he allows them a good reputation he will be guilty of not preventing Adeimantus from having thoughts he believes Socrates would disagree with—the same way the patient blames his psychiatrist. Indeed his choice of words reveals that at this moment he is remembering his disappointment with his father’s, or his caretakers’, παρακελεύσθαι (362E4-363A1).

906

ὁμολογεῖν Θρασυμάχῳ (C2): Adeimantus attempts to shame Socrates with a slur that he has proven to owe to himself! ὁμολογεῖν here has the connotation of acquiescing.

907

Adeimantus uses μέγιστος (C5), in line with the refutation of the Thrasymachean claims, rather than the κάλλιστος that Socrates actually used to express his admiration for it (358A1). With ὡμολογήσας he reminds Socrates that the expression constituted a dialectical admission (cf. e.g., 339D6, 348E7 and n., 350D9 and n.) that now can be held against him.

908

The construction prepared by τε (C6) is superseded by πολὺ δὲ μᾶλλον (C7) because the effects are as nothing in comparison with the true nature of justice. For such strengthening of emphasis by shifting to δέ in the second limb cf.394C4-5, Polit.270D3.

909

αὐτὰ αὑτῶν (C7) sc. ἕνεκα: in contrast with τῶν ἀποβαινόντων … ἕνεκα.

910

ὁρᾶν ἀκούειν φρονεῖν καὶ ὑγιαίνειν δή (C7-D1). Cf. Glaucon’s interestingly different list, τὸ φρονεῖν καὶ τὸ ὁρᾶν καὶ τὸ ὑγιαίνειν (357C2-3). The asyndetic list adds ἀκούειν as a twin with ὁρᾶν. On the force of δή attached to the last item cf. nn. ad 328B4-5 and 332D2.

911

γόνιμα (D2) replaces γίγνεσθαι as it has continually appeared in the distinction δι’ αὑτό vs. διὰ τὰ ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ γιγνόμενα (vel sim.), starting at 357B8, fully stated at 357C1-2, and then continued at 357D1 (cf. n.), 358A2, and 358B6. Adeimantus means to be restating what he said in different words at 363A1-5. Adam’s notion that γόνιμα means γνήσια attributes to γόνιμα what τῇ αὑτοῦ φύσει here adds to it. Cf. the use in Tht.151E: γόνιμον ἢ ἀνεμιαῖον (of an egg), and see next note.

912

For δόξῃ (D2) contrasted with φύσει cf. Glaucon’s διὰ δόξαν at 358A5, used to contrast Socrates’s δι’ αὑτό at 358A1. There as here the distinction is between what justice creates by virtue of what it is (φύσει: cf. αὐτὴ δι’ ἑαυτήν, above) and what it creates by dint of people’s belief that it is there (δόξῃ) regardless of whether it is present or not.

913

οὖν (D2) renewing the exhortative force of οὖν at 367C5.

914

ὅ (D3) can be viewed as an adverbial accusative or accusative of respect. Clearly the nature of justice (αὐτή) must be known in order to see what profitable effects (ὀνίνησιν) can properly be attributed to it (δι’ αὑτήν). The praise will then consist of describing this ὅ (cf. αὐτό) once it has been identified. Adeimantus and Glaucon have articulated exactly the point that Socrates made more loosely at the end of Book One: that he had praised justice without knowing what it is.

915

With μισθοί (D4, cf. D7) he reverts (contrast 366E4-5, 367B5) to the language of Glaucon’s tripartition which he has just reintroduced (C5-D2), where μισθοί had served as the definitive term for the external effect that elicits praise (357D1, 358A5, B6).

916

πάρες ἄλλοις (D4) combines Glaucon’s ἐᾶν χαίρειν (358B6-7) and his μάλιστα δ’ οἶμαι ἂν σοῦ πυθέσθαι (358D3). It is not that the payoff for being just is not a good, nor that the reputation for being just is not a good, but that these goods are not directly attributable to justice in its essence and operation (αὐτὴ δι’ αὑτήν), and therefore do not constitute bases for praise of justice per se. The plurals (μισθούς, δόξας) are again derogatory.

917

For reasons revealed in the text at 613E4, I read the more belligerent ἀνασχοίμην (D5), reported by Chambry as the reading of ms. Vindob.54 (his W) and the corrector of Marc.4,1 (his T), rather than the ἀποδεχοίμην of F (read by modern editors) or the αποσχοίμην of AT. As to its meaning cf. n.5249 ad 613E4. To get the flavor of the word one should remember that the Lacedaimonians' ἀληθεστάτη πρόφασις for starting the war was that patience became ἀνασχετόν to them given because of the growth of Athens: Thuc.1.118.2, cf. 1.23.6). Adding the belligerent edge is as characteristic of Adeimantus as his sudden retraction (εἰ μὴ σὺ κελεύοις): cf. next note.

918

εἰ μὴ σὺ κελεύοις (D8): is“unless you say otherwise.” Adeimantus barely remembers to defer to his teacher (as Glaucon did, twice: ἐάν σοι ταῦτα δοκεῖ, 358B1 [cf. n.]; and εἴ σοι βουλομένῳ, 358D6). His underlying argument is that it is incumbent on Socrates to share his life’s work with a doubter, merely because having been drawn into saying justice is good inherently as well as for its effects, he must now fend off the charge of contradicting himself. Beneath this we see again how quickly the doubter’s self-recrimination manages to hide itself in a recrimination of the man who lacks the weakness he regrets in himself due to his experience of doubt. it was exactly this reaction that stimulated Glaucon’s imagination to run to slaughtering the good man; and also this reaction that cast the black stones at Socrates’s trial.

919

ἀνασχοίμην (D5: cf. n.917): Adeimantus’s willingness to accept the usual kinds of praise about justice from others is of a piece with his notion above (366C3-6) that a true knower, who could refute such attitudes, would forgive people for holding them. He conceives that Socrates’s forgiveness of those who have not recognized the problem is interdependent with his duty to help those who have.

920

The formulation (E1-5) echoes with striking redundancy what he has said just a page above (367B3-5).

921

This is Plato’s audience.

922

Cf. 537E9-538C3.

923

Thus Socrates likes to notice that people pay sophists to teach them things they could learn from their familiars better and for free (this is the implication of 600D1-2 ; cf. also Apol.19E5-6).

924

Adeimantus’s πατέρες τε ὑέσιν καὶ πάντες οἱ τινῶν κηδόμενοι (362E6-363A1) broaches the analysis of political or social substance into elder leaders and younger followers, but at the same time it constitutes something of a confession that the teaching he received from his own father was deficient, implying the same thing for Glaucon as well as for our author.

925

Indeed exactly these dynamics of transmission will provide Socrates the mechanism by which the polis is shown to decline in the Eighth and Ninth Books, a showing for which Adeimantus will intervene to play the role of Socrates's interlocutor (at 548D). We may compare also the psychological analysis of 537E9-9A7.

926

E.g., 364E and 366B.

927

The poets are called as witnesses by the young men’s guardians throughout Adeimantus’s speech. Cf. also the imaginary Young Man’s οὐκ ἄλλοθέν τοι αὐτοὺς ἴσμεν ἢ ἀκηκόαμεν, 365E.2 The role they play (or are granted) in setting the climate of opinion is the warrant for Plato’s critique of poetry.

928

Glaucon, 358C; Adeimantus 364A; Young Man, 366B.

929

The sophists’ “contract theory,” as well as their “distinction of φύσις and νόμος,” are therefore impoverishments of philosophy and hardly its substance. As we see from Glaucon's speech these are rhetorical topoi for reducing the human dilemma to manageability rather than means to penetrate to the problems that lie at its core.

930

344BC.

931

Glaucon arrived with Socrates at Cephalus’s but Adeimantus was already there.

932

Again, Adeimantus would not make his complaint about the standard fatherly advice on morals (362D4ff) if he had received better; but it must also be acknowledged that it is for some reason in general difficult for sons to learn from their fathers, else Pericles’s sons would have learned.

933

Both the proleptic ἀεὶ μέν (E6) and the climactic complement by ἀτὰρ οὖν καὶ τότε (E7) create great emphasis. For δέ replaced by the stronger adversative ἀτάρ cf. H.Maj.282C, Prot.335D, Tht.172C.

934

ἐκείνου (368A1), “the great one.” Cf. Phlb.36D for the idiom.

935

The perfect οὐ πέπεισθε (A6) leaves room for their inability to persuade themselves of the opposite.

936

τοῦ ἄλλου (B1), like ἀεὶ μέν above, is proleptic. As the ἀεί above stands for all time except the present moment (τότε), τοῦ ἄλλου (neuter) stands for a general range of their demeanor (τοῦ ὑμετέρου τρόπου) that includes everything but the current argumentation they have succeeded to impersonate, i.e., the arguments considered in themselves (αὐτούς) independent of who voiced them.

937

He has now praised their lineage or inborn nature (φύσις, 367E6: cf. γένος, 368A4) and their habits and upbringing (τρόπος ~ μελέτη). Except for anything they have gotten by a lucky gift from the gods (τὸ θεῖον, 368A5), what is left to consider is their knowledge (ἐπιστήμη: on the list of the three or four sources of virtue cf. 366C7-D1 and n.). It is becoming clear that it is for this that Ariston and his sons turn to Socrates.

938

ἀπορῶ (B3): Not only can he not move forward: neither can he withdraw. So he is stuck. This is the best description of the Socratic ignorance outside the fable of Delpic Oracle in the Apology. Adeimantus believes Socrates must have arrived somewhere by virtue of spending his whole life looking for justice (σκοπῶν: 367D8-E1, cf. πραγματευόμενον: 506B8-C1), but the contrary is true: he has not been able to leave. He has not finished the preliminary διαπορῆσαι Aristotle describes at the beginning of Met.B (995A31ff), and therefore, as Aristotle says, is like a man in bonds.

939

οὔτ’ αὖ ὅπως μὴ βοηθήσω (B7): The pointed aorist subjunctive replaces the vaguer present subjunctive of the first alternative (οὔτε γὰρ ὅπως μὴ βοηθῶ, B4), because this second alternative is now the only alternative remaining.

940

δέδοικα (B7). Prudence dictates that one fear being impious as much as he reveres the gods (cf. e.g., Euthyph.12B9, ἵνα αἰδὼς ἔνθα καὶ δέος). Socrates’s uncertainty is adamant openness; his ignorance is aware of itself; and his irony is just as biting as his friendliness is sincere.

941

The subject accusatives παραγενόμενον, ἐμπνέοντα and δυνάμενον (B8-C1) depersonalize Socrates’s apprehension and therefore generalize it. Cf. ἀγνοοῦντα, Phdrs.230A1.

942

παραγενόμενον (B8) continues the metaphor of βοηθεία. Having hastened (θεῖν) to answer the call (βοή), he has now arrived though he lacks the ability to help and can hardly tolerate being a mere bystander of justice imperiled by forensic attack. The personification evinces his compassion for justice.

943

ἀπαγορεύειν (C1) suggests a public demurral.

944

With φθέγγεσθαι (C2) Socrates expresses his dilemma that echoes the auditory metaphor Glaucon had used to expressed his own (διατεθρυλημένος τὰ ὦτα, 358C7). Things have gotten so bad that speech has devolved into sound, and his mouth cannot remain empty of defensive words just as Glaucon’s ears were full of offensive ones.

945

For κράτιστον (C6) of the most effective alternative (cf. 618E4; Euthyph.5A3), even if only a pis aller (cf. Phdrs.228C6, again with οὕτως ὅπως δύναμαι; Thg.122A3).

946

ἀνεῖναι (C5) suggests that the λόγος, i.e., the treatment of the topic, is a prey that has been trapped and now needs to be examined rather than released.

947

τὸ ζητήμα (C7) the object of the search in contrast to the method (ζήτησις, D2).

948

φαῦλον (C8) can mean “easy,” as at 374E10, 527D7; cf. also ironic uses at 423C5 and 435C4. Socrates leaves it unclear whether he means the subject is hard to grasp or the trying is arduous. The serious investigator experiences both problems.

949

δεινοί (D1) now specifies what οὐ φαῦλον ἀλλ’ ὀξὺ βλέποντος (C8) alluded to vaguely, and makes sharp vision exceptional rather than something to be ashamed of lacking. It would be too much therefore to read into the passage an allusion to the sharper vision of elders in moral matters (Leg.715D7-E2), though to the extent that such sharp vision is proverbial it is impossible to ignore it as an undermeaning of Socrates unnoticed by his young interlocutors (contrast Soph.232E6-8). Immediately, sharp vision as a metaphor for redoubtable competence (δεινότης) will be elaborated into the figure of the ease and difficulty of seeing larger and smaller letters (D2-7).

950

δοκῶ μοι ἦν δ’ ἐγώ (D1-2): With the juxtaposition Socrates takes the trouble to remind us that though he appears to be speaking to them he is reporting to us what he said to them. The reminder comes in tandem with a proposal (τοιαύτην) that launches what will be a large part of the conversation.

951

ἐννόησεν (D4). Plato does not use the νοῦς words lightly. While it would be an overstatement to say the anamnesis theory underlies this remark (that noetic insight is stimulated by recollection), we should likewise avoid understating the paradoxes that attach to any account of the natural event of memory stimulated by similars that denies a suprasensorial role to mind in recognizing their similarity.

952

ἐν μείζονι (D5) is purely epexegetical of μείζονα (a larger tablet can accommodate larger handwriting), but prepares also for the application to the smaller medium (man) and the larger (polis).

953

οὕτως (D6), semi-redundant, as often, to emphasize the syntactically subordinate first step. Cf. 327C14, 369A1, 382D3, 511B8, 557D9, 576E2, 589B5, 591E3, 596B7; Prot.314C6.

954

ἔστι που καὶ ἄλλοθι (D5): It pops into someone’s mind that larger version of the same letters is presumably to be found elsewhere (remove editors’ comma before ὅτι). The point is that the larger letters are legible and can be used to lead the eyes to recognize the smaller ones by a kind of directed scrutiny (ἐπισκοπεῖν, D7), which is exactly what Socrates will go on to do in the discussion of the soul in Book Four. To find the larger version is a lucky turn of events: an ἕρμαιον, i.e., an object that a needy person chances upon that meets his need even though it was not intended or designed for this use (cf. schol. ad loc., Charm.157C7). Socrates’s proposal is opportunistic and improvisatory, unlike the many sophisticated methodologies foisted on the passage by the commentators and then criticized for being implemented imperfectly; even his expression of the idea is aborning (ἄν at D2, where editors incorrectly supply ποιησαίμεθα, is in fact picked up by ἕρμαιον ἄν at D6). To project and impose what one knows onto what one does not know enables the inquirer to form an opinion only by disabling him from ever knowing whether it is true (i.e., whether τὰ αυτὰ τυγχάνει ὄντα). This is the reason old-school Greek teachers disallow their students to use ponies.

955

τοίνυν (E7) holds Adeimantus responsible for agreeing at E4 and 6.

956

καταμαθεῖν (E8) replaces the ἀναγνῶναι of the analogy.

957

ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι (E8) suggests an empirical and even comparative approach, but this is soon refined into something else.

958

ἐπισκοπεῖν (369A1, A3), repeated from D7, again means to look for something we already know from the first medium in the second medium. οὕτως (A1) is again semi-redundant.

959

With ἀλλά (A4) he dismisses any vestige of his former uncertainty.

960

θεασαίμεθα λόγῳ (A5) as well as the perceptual participles γενομένην (A5, 6) refine or revise the empirical proposal suggested above and propose a kind of watching not unlike going to the theatre, inherently pleasant.

961

τὴν δικαιοσύνην … καὶ τὴν ἀδικίαν (A6-7): Justice and its opposite are not two topics but one (cf.371E13-14 and n. ad loc.). The hendiadys is usual in the statement of moral and aesthetic topics (compare καλὸν καὶ ἀγαθόν) since the purpose of the study is always to avoid the one and achieve the other.

962

γενομένου αὐτοῦ (A9) the neuter replacing the feminines and the aorist the present participles from A5-7 envision a point at which we have witnessed the basic and prerequisite step being complete—i.e., that we have seen the evolution en gros.

963

εὐπετέστερον (A9) means what ῥᾴων meant at 368E8 and the opposite of χαλεπόν (at 364A4): methods are adopted, after all, to make things more possible and easier.

964

αὐτό (B3) refers to the doing (ἔργον) rather than the mere proposing (λόγος).

965

ἔσκεπται (B4): the perfect is idiomatic for dismissing a proffer to deliberate: cf. 400C4, Crito 46A4-5 (βεβουλεῦσθαι), Charm.176C5-6, Euthyd.278C7-D1, Symp.192B. Abruptness is characteristic of Adeimantus, as we have seen (362E1), and shall see (413C5, 424D7ff).

966

On the dismissive force of μὴ ἄλλως ποίει cf. 328B1 and n.

967

In Stephanus pages we have done 45. The construction per se will be completed in 2 but then extended another 32 to the end of Book Three, then to be followed, after an interruption by Adeimantus (approx. 8 pages), by the projected ἐπίσκεψις of the individual soul, to find the smaller version of this same justice within it (starting at 427D).

968

Socrates had said “Glaucon and the others” (οἱ ἄλλοι, 368C4), but not “all” the others. Thrasymachus, if we give him a thought at all, is silent; but his silence has little significance for the group now that Glaucon and Adeimantus have brought his seductive “thesis” out into the open—or, more exactly, turned it into a thesis simpliciter so as to make it decidable.

969

Consider Glaucon’s pseudo-Socratic exhortations (357A4-B4), his virtual begging (358B1 and D5 and nn.), and his use of ἀκοῦσαι (358B4, D1, D2, D5) and πυνθάνεσθαι (358D3); and consider Adeimantus’s “Baloney” (362E1 and n.), his imposition of stringent requirements upon Socrates’s answer (367B2-E5) and his assertion that Socrates can even be blamed for having left them in the lurch up until now (366D7-7A4).

970

Hence the depersonalized construction of the accusative participles at 368BC2 (cf. n.).

971

Hence he proposes only χρῆναι ἐπιχειρῆσαι περαίνειν at 369B2.

972

ἡμεῖς οὐ δεινοί (D1). Socrates always encourages the people he is with to admit that their desire for a good speech is an index of their intellectual weakness. Cf. Tht.154D8.

973

Plato appears to be dead serious about depicting his characters’ moods concretely. Their willingness and resolve to converse, their openness to truth and controversion, and the momentum of the conversation, are not treated in the superficial and arbitrary decorative way they tend to be in dialographers subsequent to Plato, but with dramatic and characterological consistency and verisimilitude.

974

γίγνεται τοίνυν, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, πόλις (369B5): Socrates does not use the article. Something comes into existence that ends up being called a polis. We might say “Cities, so called, first come into existence because...”.

975

τυγχάνει (B6): supplementary ὤν is understood and needs not be written in, with the editors: to place it into either phrase only causes an imbalance between them. Socrates prefers τυγχάνει to ἐστί here because he is wants to make a factual observation about the human condition without entertaining the question of why it is this way. The account he gives is anything but historical (pace Adam), since there is no time in history when men began forming cities. The principle of the development is explicitly said to be need (χρεία). It is a casual account based on common sense and it is conceived not as an end in itself, but only a pleasant and theoretical means to witnessing the appearance of justice and injustice.

976

πολλῶν (B6) may be neuter (referring to αὐτάρκης) or masculine (referring to ἕκαστος). That it is neuter becomes clear below when it is repeated at C2 and becomes the cause of the masculine πολλούς, but the vagueness in the interim is inconsequential.

977

οἰκίζειν (B7) already presumes that the household, the smallest unit of human organization, is the model for the larger.

978

The otherwise symmetrical ἄλλος ἄλλον ἐπ’ ἄλλου (sc. χρεία) construction (C1), by subsequently repeating the accusative (τὸν δέ) but not the nominative (C1-2), emphasizes that one man needs more than one other.

979

κοινωνούς τε καὶ βοηθούς (C3). The τε καί combines the commutative and symmetrical notion of communism with the assymmetrical and non-commutative notion of a helper, without resolving the paradoxical notion that combining them broaches. The paradox becomes more explicit with μεταδιδόναι and μετατιθέναι just below.

980

ἐθέμεθα (C4), inceptive aorist: “and that’s when we began calling them cities.”

981

μεταδίδωσι ἄλλος ἄλλῳ (C6), like βοηθούς above, designates a non-commutative and asymmetrical act, now including the notions that one person possesses an item and transfers it to another; whereas the alternative μεταλαμβάνει, like κοινωνούς above, designates a commutative and symmetric relation between the persons. The division of labor will resolve the paradox.

982

τοῦ εἶναί τε καὶ ζῆν (D2):τε καί matches the basics with their prerequisite.

983

τις (D8) as well as the alternation of subject and predicate in the face of μέν and δέ which tend to eschew such looseness evince the casual tone and manner of the “construction.”

984

προσθήσομεν (D8): A verb is needed to govern the first three jobs (D6-8), but before it is enunciated Socrates interrupts himself to add an optional fourth, in connection with which he enunciates the needed verb: the syntax imitates the casual and improvised character of the thought.

985

δεῖ (E2), continuing to look for the needful arrangement.

986

ἀμελήσαντα (E6) immediately depicts the alternative with a disapprobation that is strengthened by its lack of an object: see below.

987

καὶ μή (370A3) continues the construction with δεῖ and expresses a note of aversion.

988

αὐτὸν δι’ αὑτὸν τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν (A4): the phrase echoes ἄλλος ἄλλον ἐπ’ ἄλλου (369C1-2), and stands in contrast with its complications; at the same time that it serves as an exegesis of πράγματα ἔχειν. It attempts to magnify and advocate for the carelessly self-serving alternative (ἀμελήσαντα, E6) by recasting selfishness as being unmeddlesome: “If I neglect you, you won’t have to admonish me to mind my own business.”

989

With ἀλλ’ ἴσως (A5) Adeimantus acknowledges the insouciant attitude that Socrates has impersonated in presenting the second alternative; but with οὕτω directly dismisses the position as remote from reality and from what he and Socrates have agreed on, that in fact man is not αὐτάρκης (B5-6). We do not need a grammatical parallel (for the second person demonstrative used of the former and the third person demonstrative for the latter), but rather need to have understood Adeimantus’s rhetoric, as well as the rhetoric of the mild prosopopoeia in Socrates’s presentation of the second alternative, to which it it a response.

990

Reading ῥᾴδιον (A6) with all mss. and against modern editors who opportunistically read ῥᾷον from a scribitur in the Monacensis (ῥᾷον is likewise read against the ῥᾴδιον of all mss. at Meno 94E6 with equal alacrity, absent any historical support). For omission of μᾶλλον cf. H.Il.1.117, Hdt.3.40.2, Soph.Aj.966, and the exx. cited by Riddell §170.

991

ἐννοῶ γὰρ καὶ αὐτὸς εἰπόντος σου (A7-8). Perhaps one of them should do all the talking for both!

992

πράξει (B2) replaces ἔργον from 369E2: Socrates is slanting his argument to meet the challenge raised by the naysayer’s τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν.

993

κάλλιον (B4), an adverb, with exactly the same sense as at 353A4, namely the British “properly.” Again it is πράττειν that Socrates is focussing on, even to the point of omitting an object for the verb!

994

τὸ πραττόμενον and τοῦ πράττοντος (B10) continue to slant the diction in order to sustain a criticism of τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν.

995

With ἐν παρέργου μέρει (C1), derogatory, Socrates puns on ἔργον (an approbatory term, 370B2, B8; cf.B5).

996

ἐκ δὴ τούτων (C3) summarizes the results, and looking backward Socrates sees the points in reverse order (the chiasm of before and after: cf. n.14). πλείω (C3) draws an inference that is the converse of καιρὸς διόλλυται (B7-C1); under the term κάλλιον (C3) the principles of natural ability and specialization (A7-B6) are brought together (pace J.-C.); and ῥᾷον (C4) voices agreement with Adeimantus’s argument (ῥᾴδιον, A6).

997

σχολήν (C4): A punning second use of σχολή that turns the tables on the meaning it had just above (B11), just as the πραττόμενον turned the tables on the πράττων there. The dismissive expression (this σχολήν answers ἀμελήσαντα, 369E6) along with ending the sentence with πράττει matches and trumps the dismissive but self-deluded attitude voiced at 370A3-4. τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν ends up meaning doing what one’s work needs one to do!

998

καλόν (C9): continues κάλλιον above. The division of labor among those whose jobs we have already distinguished has the unforeseen consequence of requiring an increase in the number of jobs. In a genetic account effects are multiplied and “one thing leads to another.”

999

With πολίχνιον (D6), a diminutive of a diminutive, he sidles up to calling it a πόλις.

1000

συχνόν (D6), in juxtaposition of the diminutive πολίχνιον, courts paradox and draws more attention to itself than it seems to have received. Hesychius glosses it thus: συχνά – πυκνά, συνεχῆ, πολλά. Its etymology is probably συνεχής (by metathesis and syncope: cf. Passow, s.v.). It is found in Herodotus and Thucydides but absent in the orators before Demosthenes, and it is absent in Aeschylus and Sophocles but present in Aristophanes. Only a trace of it is to be seen in Aristotle. Xenophon’s eight or so uses reveal a penchant to describe a multitude of men undergoing something painful or unseemly. In Plato it tends to connote the toilsome or the tedious (Gorg.465E3; Leg.968B9; Rep.511C3, 539B1, 544C4; Tht.185E5). Its denotation with πολίχνιον is therefore compactness with a derogatory connotation of crowding (cf. the Davies-Vaughan tr. where these new persons “create a population”). Cf. its use below, 371B16.

1001

οὐκ ἄν πω πάνυ γε μέγα τι (D9): On the heels of acknowledging an increasing denseness Socrates and Adeimantus haltingly reveal some reluctance that the city become large. The πολίχνιον, after they have added the herdsman, “would not yet quite, in conception at least, be large per se” (the four particles and the optative construction all conspire to soften the broaching of μέγα). “Yes,” Adeimantus says, “but it won’t be exactly (γε) small, either (δέ), once it has all this,” sharing Socrates’s distaste, as his derogatory use of the neuter plural πάντα ταῦτα (E4) reveals.

1002

τε (D10, E1) linking the two users of animals for draught, and δέ (E2) introducing the other two artisans who use them for another purpose, raw materials. The paragraph closes with a chiasm that also underlines the economical dovetailing in the complementary uses of live animals for work and for supplies when dead. Sometimes you can kill two birds with one stone: the principle “one man one work” does not extend to animals. The double pairing makes it easier to fail to notice the third use we make of these animals.

1003

διάκονος (E12), though by now a term for an unskilled operative, might be connected etymologically with κόνις as if he were a man who stirs up dust on the road.

1004

The ethical dative ἡμῖν (371A8) is one of many indications we shall meet of a tendency in their experiment to identify the model citizens’ interests with the interest of themselves who are constructing the model – if you will, an ethical dative of “theoretical interest.” Cf. 376C4 and C7, 423A6, 427C6, 545D5, 607A6.

1005

καὶ δὴ καὶ τῶν ἄλλων διακόνων (A10) and the subsequent subdivision (A10-11) suggest again the automatic multiplication of effects as does Adeimantus’s automatic way of agreeing by repeating the key word in Socrates questions (370E8, E11, 371A6, A9, B3).

1006

συχνῶν καὶ ἄλλων προσδεήσεται (A16-B1). Cf. συχνόν 370D6 and n.

1007

ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ πόλει (B4) echoes its use at 370E5: we are looking for an institutional solution, or perhaps just a place in the city that will facilitate exchange.

1008

At 369C6-7. Note that the unresolved tension there between sharing (μεταλαμβάνειν) and exchanging (μεταδιδόναι) has since been resolved by the division of labor (μεταδώσουσιν ὧν ἂν ἑκάστῳ ἐργάζονται, B4-5).

1009

His speech occupies seven lines (C5-D3). He is eager to cast these persons as opportunistic lie-abouts who merely need to be located in the right place to make their living. His eagerness to criticize his inferiors is as characteristic of Adeimantus as his desire to be superior. Cf. 504C5 and n. ad loc.

1010

Despite τὰ μέν and τοῖς δέ (D1,D2), the expression neither requires that there are two occupations of persons nor that there is only one; but the mention of physical weakness raises the question of strength and paves the way for a group valuable only for this (E1-5).

1011

διακονοῦντας (D6). The continued use of this word and its cognates (370E12, 371A10 and C6), promulgates a distinction between labor and real work (done with δημιουργοί [A7, C2] or ἐπιστήμονες [B1]) and prepares us for the category of physical laborers he is about to introduce. The approbative use of δημιουργός is reminiscent of Socrates’s conversation with Thrasymachus.

1012

καλοῦμεν (D5): Adeimantus’s intervention (C5-8) adduced existing institutions as solutions for needs that arise in the city they are developing in thought, with no scruple or concern that an ideal is being contaminated by “reality.” Socrates continues in the same vein by noting that the distinctions among types that arise in thought already exist in conventional language. Cf. ἐθέμεθα 369C4 and n.

1013

ἱκανήν (E3) is not neutral but approbative, as often (cf.372B1, 362C2; Lys.204A6; and n.2045). The κοινωνία in question is the partnership of the polis, based on perceived needs (369C3, E5). “Elitism” so-called has nothing to do with the present observation.

1014

Sic ταύτην (E4).

1015

ὡς ἐγὦμαι (E5): The thought experiment can even reveal the source or basis for existing conventions! μισθωτοί carries a negative connotation (as in 346B6-8) that is only amplified by the special history the concept brings with it from Socrates’s argument with Thrasymachus (345E5-346A1, etc.).

1016

πλήρωμα (E7) is the predicate. μισθωτοί are a step below the unskilled and weak shopkeepers and are admissible into the κοινωνία on the minimal ground of their purely physical strength. Their admission therefore marks the last step, the πλήρωμα, and the completion of the σκέψις.

1017

ἐγγενομένη (E13) singular, treats ἥ τε δικαιοσύνη καὶ ἀδικία as an hendiadys (as does γίγνεται at 376D2). Cf. 369A6-7 and n. With καὶ τίνι ἅμα Socrates focusses his question, “Where (ποῦ) is the justice?” reminding Adeimantus of their notion (369A5-7) that they might see it evolve in tandem with the city itself. τίνι is masculine not neuter, as Mr.Morrisey advises me, as though justice arrived with, or in the person of, one of the distinct constituent citizens.

1018

μέν (372A1), is solitarium, hoping Socrates will provide the confirming limb.

1019

αὐτῶν τούτων (A2), the persons per se in contrast with their distinct roles (cf. τίνι ἅμα).

1020

The temptation to take Adeimantus’s χρεία in the new meaning “use” rather than “need,” as J.-C. do, is strong. It could have meant “use” in its first appearance, in the dative at 369C2, where it is explained (but not replaced) by δεόμενοι. Immediately below it was isolated as the formative principle of the City (C9-10), and then subdivided into the χρεῖαι for food, for shelter and for clothing. It appears again at 371A1 as a virtual synonym to the ὧν ἂν δέωνται of A5. Through these passages “need” has become its meaning. The emphasis in the present passage is on ἀλλήλοις, by which Adeimantus means to transfer all those needs for things to the need deriving from our interdependency, which had been brought out by ἀλλήλοις at 371B4, a passage that itself looks back to 369C6-7 (J.-C.’s reference to Arist.Rhet.1.15.22 therefore merely begs the question). This need of the members or partners for each other is strictly a new need, or at least a new expression for the need for things.

1021

The distinction between παρασκευή and δίαιτα (A5-6) corresponds to the distinction in Glaucon’s speech between the attributes of the just and unjust men and the respective lives that await them (361D7-E1). Socrates’s description of their daily regimen is lavish with particulars and made vivid by the use of the future indicative.

1022

σῖτόν τε ποιοῦντες καὶ οἶνον καὶ ἱμάτια καὶ ὑποδήματα (A6-7): Formally, the list consists of four items linked with τε... καί … καί... καί — the most flexible or least determinate scheme for connecting four items. In content it covers the first and third (and maybe fourth) χρεῖαι, food and clothing (and maybe shoes): cf.369D1-9. Food, the first χρεία, is here done with a pair, so that clothing and shoes, the third (and fourth) χρεία, become a second pair (they had been paired briefly at 370E2-3). The second χρεία, shelter, is absent, but will appear presently and will likewise be done with a kind of pairing.

1023

ἱκανῶς (B1) again expressing temperate approbation.

1024

The ordering of the χρεῖαι, with second (καὶ οἰκοδομησάμενοι οἰκίας, A7-8) coming third and being articulated anew in terms of the third (i.e., they build the houses shirtless or clothed), is another example of the flexibility and improvisatory expression of the thought; but the order of importance is preserved despite the order of mention, since the builders will be building all year but their clothing is only necessary during winter.

1025

μάζας γενναίας καὶ ἄρτους (B3-4). The adjective bespeaks the kind of approval and even admiration we feel when we contemplate rustic simplicity. Socrates uses it without irony and no Thrasymachean sneer: cf. 348C12 and n.

1026

The order (B2-4) is a double chiasm. The wheat (πυρῶν) is made into flour (ἄλευρα) and baked (πέψαντες) into loaves (ἄρτους); the barley (κριθῶν) is made into meal (ἄλφιτα) and kneaded (μάξαντες) into pudding (μάζας). Barley meal (A1), wheaten flour (B1); baking (B2), kneading (A2); pudding (A3), loaves (B3).

1027

The language (passim) describes the simple life by borrowing language from the more advanced, as if to compare them or to make them seem comparable. παρατιθέναι would be used of serving a plate to a person “at table,” as we put it; but παραβάλλειν describes the action of the present scene more accurately, even though it is the sort of language used of feeding animals, a connotation that Socrates seeks to soften by using the middle voice. κατακλινέντες invokes κλίνομαι (“recline”) but adds κατά in order to get them all the way down to the ground.

1028

I take στιβάδων (B5) to refer to areas of ground flattened by tamping down (στείβω).

1029

εὐωχήσονται (B6): The description is presented as an answer to the question πῶς διαιτήσονται and begins with ἄλλο τι ἤ (A6, on which expression see the fine note by Riddell, Digest §22), which formally limits the syntax of the ensuing description to constructions subordinate to the leading question, τίνα τρόπον διαιτήσονται. εὐωχήσονται in the midst of the description therefore makes an anacoluthon.

1030

εὐλαβούμενοι (C1) attributes a policy to them although nothing we founders have said has put it there. Their behavior must therefore be self-explanatory. That a family can be too large to afford (πενία) is obvious, but also suggests that an enlarged family requires enlarged wealth, which can either require war (πόλεμον) or, more likely, bring it on (373DE4-E7, cf. esp. ἱκανὴ τρέφειν). We should expect from the entire tenor of the passage that it be a matter of balancing alternatives (ἤ, C1).

1031

The passage (A6-C1) attracted the attention of the great Denniston who sees in its long string of participles dependent upon a single indicative an example of a loose-textured periodic style he associates with Plato in contrast with the multi-tiered weave of the Demosthenic period (Greek Prose Style [Oxford 1952] 69). But the passage does not characterize Plato’s style (he has many styles) so much as it characterizes his ability to adapt his style of expression to his content. The string of participles depicts the citizen’s day in a few bold strokes, as a pastiche of moments instead of a tedious sequence of tasks from dawn 'til dusk, and their subordinate syntactical status as participles preserves Socrates an opportunity to achieve an emotional climax by his reversion, in mind anacolouthon, to an ordinate indicative (εὐωχήσονται) at the moment dinner is served. This indicative serves as an editorial comment on the description that has accumulated in the participles and in effect answers the original question, “τίνα τρόπον διαιτήσονται” with “εὐωχήσονται.”

Many of the essential elements of bucolic or pastoral genre are prefigured by the tone, the style and the content of Socrates’s description, including the quiet joy of country simplicity, the singing, and even the festooned crowns. The poetic genre, even in its account of its own origin, will conceive of itself as providing respite from the hustle bustle of the city (cf. the third origin for the genre given in schol.Theocrit. [Ambrosianus 222]). But in truth it is, and always was, man getting away from his own institutions and “communing with nature” that is the crucial ingredient underlying such a conception. The bucolic and the pastoral perennially serve as both our warning and our consolation that the world is not of our own making and that mere country life among the plants and the seasons might just suffice for happiness: for if the farmer lives by Nature’s rules she justly and reliably repays his obedience with her bounty (cf. Vergil Georg.2.458-474, esp. fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus). The genre does not puristically ban all the rivalry and mimetic competition of the city (as today’s environmentalistic “greens” envision), but sublimates this inevitable and ubiquitous human tendency by including poetical contests that are as elaborate as they are unlikely, and also rustic but decorated prizes for the victor, like a wooden bowl with a mythological scene carved in it (Theocr. Id.1.25ff.).

1032

We have seen an example of this kind of “internal” metabasis to the next item in Glaucon’s use of ἰάτρευσις at 357C6 (cf. n.).

1033

The linking of the pairs is nicely varied. First there are two sets of μέν / δέ at B2-3 (the expression has a logically overbuilt expansiveness). The third pair, μάζας and ἄρτους, are then joined by καί but also by their shared adjective. Then we have a ἤ and then τε καί twice, then καί, and finally ἤ. On the double chiasm in the presentation of the foods, cf. n. ad B2-4.

1034

The participles have enabled Socrates to avoid naming the subjects, who are after all citizens of this city even if they don’t seem so. Glaucon will refer to them as ἄνδρες just below.

1035

ὑπολαβών (C2): We should imagine that Socrates has been turned toward Adeimantus for the last few minutes. The image elicits a reaction from outside.

1036

ὡς ἔοικας ποιεῖς (C2-3): Note the second singular: Although Socrates and Adeimantus have developed the city jointly (note first plurals at 369A5, C9, D8; 370D5-7, D10; 371B4-6, B8-9,etc.), Glaucon intterupts to make Socrates solely responsible for the description, the poetical (and therefore perhaps arbitrary) character of which he acknowledges with the term ποιεῖς. For the complementary participle in the oratio obliqua of imaginative depiction cf. Phdrs.227C5 (with γέγραφε).

1037

τοὺς ἄνδρας (C3), more than αὐτούς: Glaucon adds a sympathetic dig (cf.361D6 and n.753).

1038

ἑστιωμένους (C3): Socrates had warmly styled their διαιτᾶν as εὐωχοῦσθαι (B6, and n.) and Glaucon satirizes his praise by repeating the term but noting that there is no ὄψον on the bread. The ὄψον he has in mind may be a garnish or condiment, or it may be meat (for their diet and the economy of their animals as described so far is vegetarian). Socrates takes his meaning in a narrow and literal sense in order to provoke Glaucon to express his objection more directly. It is not quite accurate to call this “intentional misinterpretation” with Shorey, who cites Gorg.451E, 453B, 489D, 490C and 491A and Leg.714C. Glaucon is pushing us into the area that Adeimantus moved us into, by degrees, in his long speech, when he criticized the poets without articulating his complaint or suggesting a solution (first at 363D1-2, then at E3: cf. nn.).

1039

οἷα δὴ ἐν ἀγροῖς (C6): Socrates lets fall the word: he is modelling his picture of their life on a primeval country life as opposed to contemporary city life.

1040

The expression (C5-D1) is scrambled as Socrates tries hastily to make good his omission. To say they shall have these items omits to say who will provide them. The list of accusatives that is tacked on to ὄψον by τε (C5) is governed by ἕξουσιν, but somewhere in the middle of the list of items he forgets that this is the leading construction (the editors’ comma after τυρόν doesn’t help him), and when he seeks to close the list by generalizing (with the οἷα δή clause which provides him the criterion of the generalization [ἑψήματα]) he adds ἕψονται, which has the unintended consequence of depicting them boiling cheese. His γε after λάχανα tries to dispel any charge of skimping. For tacking on an appositive with τε cf. 361B2-3 and n.

1041

καί (primum, C7) indicates he is still scrambling, που is apologetic, and παραθήσομεν (C7) attempts to make amends for the roughness of παραβάλλειν above. Its change of person from third to first reveals that Socrates is in effect negotiating with Glaucon.

1042

σποδιοῦσιν (C8): By returning to the third person, by his picturesque reference to the men roasting nuts by the fire, and with his gentle participle ὑποπίνοντες, Socrates allows himself to drop the urgent tone and revert to the style of his description above, a leisurely series of participial phrases completed by a finite verb. The calm simplicity of the passage is reminiscent of Solon’s description of the life of Tellus in his first response to Croesus’s question who is the happiest man (Hdt.1.30.4), and is designed to elicit a similar reaction from Glaucon.

1043

ὡς εἰκός (D2) does not mean they will “probably” be healthy, but adds a note of humble understatement in the assertion of something about which the speaker is quite sure. Cf. Lach.188E6, Phdo.61C1, and with Ruhnken Soph.241C2 (“ut sexcenties alibi,” Tim.Soph.p.281).

1044

The tension between Socrates’s and Glaucon’s dispositions mounts, and continues to express itself in their choice of verbs. Note Glaucon’s continued use of the second plural (cf. n.1036, supra); semantically, he Glaucon replaces Socrates’s παρασκευάζειν (A6) with the less inter-personal κατασκευάζειν (D4), and refuses to accept Socrates’s smoothing over of παραβάλλειν (B4) with παρατιθέναι (C7) by now using χορτάζειν (D5) which inevitably pertains to animals since a χόρτος is a pen (cf. σῖτον / χόρτον Hdt.9.41.2). His point is not that these primitive men are slovenly but that it is inhumane to feed them garbage; but to make his point he needs to bring in pigs whose boundless appetites require them to be penned. The notion of a “City of Pigs” is one of those watchwords of Plato scholarship that has no basis in the text but is held in play only by the fact that commentators unselfconsciously and uncritically share Glaucon’s aversion.

1045

ἀλλὰ πῶς χρή; (D6), with ἀλλά expressing his recognition that the conversation can’t continue on just these grounds. The exchange of vocatives also elevates the tension. Socrates keeps the question vague by leaving out a complementary infinitive. We could supply a variety of fillings from με ποιεῖν to κατασκευάζεσθαι αὐτούς. His purpose is to give Glaucon as little as possible to play off of (i.e., the sort of retort that takes place in stichomythy) and to invite but also force him to present an answer that takes responsibility for itself and stands on its own.

1046

ἅπερ νομίζεται (D7), answering with an abrupt asyndeton but still expressing somebody else’s belief (νομίζω evasively passive).

1047

With τε (D7), as Socrates had done just above (ἅλας τε ..., C5).

1048

τοὺς μέλλοντας μὴ ταλαιπωρεῖσθαι (D8), epic diction in churlish overstatement.

1049

ἅπερ (E1): His list closes with another ἅπερ clause pointing back to his opening phrase (ἅπερ νομίζεται) as though saying something twice made it true. The clause introduces two final items: ὄψα, which points back to his original complaint (ἄνευ ὄψου, C2); and τραγήματα, which points back to the side dishes that Socrates had since added to appease him (C7).

1050

With μανθάνω (E2) Socrates indicates that he apprehends the unstated meaning of his interlocutor’s remark. From the very structure of Glaucon’s reply—the way it starts with indignant protest and then appends a list that can’t quite stop adding things—Socrates recognizes what his underlying objection really amounts to (or, forces it out into the open). For the idiom cf. Ar.Av.1451-63, 1529; Lys.1008; Batr.65, 195, and 1444-5: οὐ μανθάνω | ἀμαθέστερόν πως ειπὲ καὶ σαφέστερον. As for instances in Plato cf. Euthyph.3B5 (Euthyphro easily understands the charges though Socrates found them ἄτοπα), 9B6 (Socrates infers that Euthyphro thinks him δυσμαθέστερον than the jurors: for the pun cf. Ar. Batr. 1445.), 13D7 (Socrates makes the inference from θεραπεία via δοῦλος to the cognate θεράπων); Gorg.447D3-6 (of the unstated universal evoked by a single example), 474C9 (Socrates inferring the underlying denial about the good and the beautiful); Phdo.117C1 (recognizing the remark meant “No”); Phlb.16A6 (recognizing Socrates’s allusion to the young was aimed at himself and his peers: n.b., γάρ); Phdrs.257E7 (Phaedrus rightly suspects Socrates is telling a riddle); Rep.332A11(where Socrates suddenly realizes Polemarchus is stating his own opinion), 351B6 (recognizing Thrasymachus wants to take every opportunity to restate his thrilling position: cf. n.), 511B1 (recognizing Socrates is alluding to the “geometers”), 568E4 (announcing he “gets” Adeimantus’s joke: cf. n. ad loc.).

1051

τρυφῶσαν πόλιν (E3). τρυφᾶν means to be in the habit of taking one’s own pleasure and comfort too seriously. Hence its association with the infantile [Lach.179D; E.Ion 1376]), and thence of worrying too much about trifles affecting oneself (fastidiousness [Leg.695D] and effeminacy [Rep.590B, Ar.Nub.48,Vesp.1455; Dem.19.197]) and conversely too little about important matters (Leg.901A), overvaluing what gives oneself physical comfort (E.I.A.1050) and preening (Ar.V.688; Isoc.2.32), a willingness to affect a fickle disposition in the presence of those who wish to please you as a beloved might play the mincing coy in the face of his lover (Euthyphr.11E; E.Supp.214, whence its association with flattery Dem.8.34), and finally losing perspective and becoming insolent (Gorg.492C) and then violent (Gorg.525A, Meno 76B; Ar.Lys.405). We have the sense that these traits are bound together by an underlying neurological imbalance, but in truth it is more likely the nearly universal problem of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it, too.

Socrates, or Plato, often uses the term to describe the behavior of participants in the dialogues, as at Alc.1 114A, Euthyph.11E, Meno 76B, Phdrs.228C, and Prot.327E. Adeimantus’s behavior at 363D1-2 and E3 is a precursor. Glaucon’s intervention has exhibited exactly such behavior here, with his move from satire to sarcasm to sputtering indignation as if on behalf of custom. Jowett-Cambell and Shorey are wrong I think to view Glaucon’s reaction as merely a bit of humor used by Plato to effect a transition, and Jowett-Campbell’s remark that Glaucon’s intervention is necessary or else the conversation will not reach the complexity of a three-part state (ad 372E) begs the question. Socrates is just as serious in saying the simple state is the true one (E6) as he will be serious in saying maintenance in the prytany is his due reward (Apol.36B5-37A1).

1052

καὶ τοιαύτην (E4): καί repeats the καί before τρυφῶσαν.

1053

ὅπῃ ποτε ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν ἐμφύονται (E5-6) is much more specific than the previous formulation (εἰ γιγνομένην πόλιν θεασαίμεθα λόγῳ καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτῆς ἴδοιμεν ἂν γιγνομένην καὶ κακίαν, 369A5-7). There, justice and injustice were conceived of as arising spontaneously; here Socrates imagines them being engendered in the city as a secondary effect, though he leaves the agent or agency unidentified.

1054

ὥσπερ ὑγιής τις (E7): τις apologizing for the metaphoric ὑγιής which sets up the ensuing specification by φλεγμαίνουσαν. The predicate of εἶναι is the unexpressed antecedent of ἣν διεληλύθαμεν, pace Stallb.

1055

βούλεσθε (E7) is second plural. Socrates seeks not to ignore the whole company, and so he includes the others to referee Glaucon’s proposal, as he immediately explains (note γάρ and the plural τισιν, 373A1). Contrast Glaucon’s confrontational use of the singular at C2-3 and D4-5 (cf. n.1036), and cf. n.1067, infra.

1056

With καί (E8) repeating the καί ’s in E4 and E3, Socrates stresses that he views this finicky or sick city as a case or a type of the original city. With φλεγμαίνειν he diagnoses as a sickness what he had previously referred to with τρυφᾶν. Though φλέγμα is indeed one of the four humors, Socrates does not mean by the verb to present so fine a diagnosis but only to identify the rash temper of youth, the youth Glaucon, just as the Athenian Stranger does at Leg.691E.

1057

δή τισιν (373A1): τὶς, being enclitic, regularly follows the δή that emphasizes it (cf. 498A7, 521C3, 561B2; Leg. 630B7, 701B2, 706C6 [and England ad loc.], 885B6, 890A2; Phdo.107D7, 108C1, 115D4; Phlb.50E6; Polit.299C3, 306B6; Symp.179D6). By the combination the author alludes, but indicates that he cares not to, deigns not to, or sees better than to specify his allusion (cf. Denniston 212-3 and Burnet ad Phdo.107D7). Socrates here “sees better than to” blame Glaucon for replacing the ἀληθινὴ πόλις with the φλεγμαίνουσα. Thus also the depersonalizing plural τισιν, as above (cf. n.1055).

1058

δή (A3) moves on to the subset of items by acknowledging they have been asked for.

1059

ἕκαστα τούτων παντοδαπά (A4) a mild anacoluthon in exuberance. παντοδαπά perhaps suggests a range beyond the familiar: cf. LSJ s.v. ἀλλοδαπός and 381E4 with n.

1060

The list, κλῖναί τε προσέσονται καὶ τράπεζαι καὶ τἆλλα σκεύη καὶ ὄψα δὴ καὶ μύρα καὶ θυμιάματα καὶ ἑταῖραι καὶ πέμματα καὶ ἔκαστα τούτων παντοδαπά (A2-4), is epithumetic (cf. n.465 [excited]), both in form (breathless καί) and in content (see close parallel at A.Ach.1090-2). The editors’ attempts to rationalize it with punctuation only spoil the intended effect; even punctuation cannot mitigate the asyndeton (cf. prev. n.). The order envisions the sequence of an evening banquet, the dessert course of πέμματα accompanying the late-arriving female entertainment (cf. Symp.176E6; X.Symp.2.1). Note that from θετέον to κινητέον to κτητέον the identity of Socrates and his interlocutors moves from theorizers positing, to agents initiating, to actual members of the city possessing. In the sequel therefore Socrates will continue to speak of the inhabitants in the first plural (373C2, 4, 5, D1, etc.).

1061

ἐκείνη (B2) treats the healthy city as gone forever; and gone with it is the adequacy of the adequate: if ἱκανός is approbatory (cf.371C3, 344C6) then οὐκέτι ἱκανή is derogatory.

1062

σχήματά τε καὶ χρώματα (B6), like the “line and color” spoken of by art historians, is a common way to designate the entire visual realm. Cf. 476B5, 601A2, 616E8-7A4; Crat.423D4-5, 431C6; Gorg.465B4-5, 474D3ff; Leg.668E2-3; Meno 75A1-2; Phdo.100D1-2; Phdrs.247C6-7; Phlb.12E, 51B3-5; Soph.251A9; Tht.163B10.

1063

οἱ περὶ μουσικήν (B6): music, poetry, dance.

1064

σκευῶν τε παντοδαπῶν δημιουργοί (B8). The τε as it has in the previous sections of the list indicates that we are moving on to a new group. Each of the previous groups had been first designated and then elaborated (θηρευταί with πάντες, μιμηταί with μέν and δέ clauses, and ποιηταί with their ὑπηρέται) but in this next case we are given the elaboration before the group is named. As in the case of the previous group (ποιηταί) the elaboration (τούτων ὑπηρέται) is elaborated (by the appositive list in asyndeton ῥαψῳδοί … ἐργολάβοι), so here the elaboration (σκευῶν παντοδαπῶν) is elaborated by the τῶν τε ἄλλων καί ... phrase.

1065

τὸν γυναικεῖον κόσμον (C1): Here is the first mention of women as citizens (ἑταῖραι, A3, are not), though they are obliquely present in the reference to “mating” in the simple daily regimen (συνόντες ἀλλήλοις, 372B8, where by the common rule the masculine is used for the complex).

1066

αὖ (C3) suggests we are moving from one major category to another, as it had at the beginning of the paragraph (B2). Here the shift is from δημιουργοί—skilled workers—to διάκονοι who are ancillary operatives.

1067

δεησόμεθα (C2): Not the first plural. The needs of the polis are now for the first time explicitly turned into “our” needs. Previously we had been “watching” what the city needed (369E2ff.; 370C7, 7, E9; 371A4, A7, B1) from a theoretical distance, but now that Glaucon (rather than the city per se) has required more than the city’s necessities it has become our necessity to fulfill his requirements. This began with the verbal adjectives at A5, A6, A8, and B3 and with δεῖ ποιιν at B2, but up until now the constructions were impersonal (we have had to supply the pronouns: ἡμῖν with the verbal adjectives and ἡμᾶς with ποιεῖν).

1068

τοῦτο (C4), neuter singular, rather than οὗτοι, is contemptuous, and implicitly the practice of raising animals useful only for consumption – i.e., pigs. Glaucon’s ugly picture (372D4-5) comes true!

1069

προσδεήσει (C6). For πρός cf. A2 and C4. Socrates’s language continues to distinguish between needs which drove the design of the original city (369C9-10 and n.985), and the secondary “needs” (προς-) required to satisfy Glaucon’s objection.

1070

δεήσει (C6), i.e., προσδεήσει, by the IE rule.

1071

ἔδεται (C7): The future indicative (instead of subjunctive plus ἄν) makes their excessiveness inevitable instead of merely something to watch out for.

1072

πῶς γάρ οὔ; (C8).

1073

καὶ ἰατρῶν (D1): Doctors were not part of the original city. Socrates is careful to distinguish between needing more doctors than before (in the way we needed additional διάκονοι, C1-2), and needing doctors more than we needed them before. The mention of doctors was prepared for by the medical metaphor φλεγμαίνουσα, 372E8.

1074

διαιτώμενοι (D2): The transfer of the city’s needs to our needs, continued here by ἐν χρείαις ἐσόμεθα, is taken a step further with διαιτώμενοι, for it is not only the citizens but we ourselves who have adopted Glaucon’s luxurious regime! “Our” personal participation is continued in the first plurals at D8 and E2, below. The conflation of needs and now even of participation in the city, is due to the underlying fact that is is only for ourselves that we are constructing the city – i.e., so that we might be helped in our search for justice in case it might develop as the city develops (369A5-7). Now that the very development of the city has been endangered, so has been our search. This crisis in making “justice and injustice” visible through the construction of an objective state has, however, arisen exactly and only because the “justice and injustice” lurking in searchers’ souls (presently in the form of Glaucon’s concupiscence) has in the process come to the surface!

1075

σμικρὰ δὴ ἐξ ἀνάγκης (D5): δή is both rueful and satirical: without itself changing the city will become small. He speaks from the point of view of the concupiscent population (which he here calls “we”) undergoing effects unforeseen and unintended, for which only it is responsible.

1076

Although καί (D8) correlates ἐκείνοις with ἡμῖν above, the present sentence is not an instance of the kind of “binary” construction wherein a pair of predicates is meant to go with both subjects (cf. 329A5 and n., 329D1, 362C2-3, etc.). With its two protases the “we” describes the others’ behavior in terms different from “our” own (cf. ὑπέρ below, 374A1-2 and n.1083): while “we” are envisioned to be cutting off part of their land so as to have as much land as “we” used to (as if so much were natural: note indicative μέλλομεν expressing entitlement), “they” are envisioned cravenly overstepping boundaries (note anticipatory subjunctive with derogatory description continued with participle). It is the blindspot by which the symmetrical behavior of the two parties is asymmetric in the eyes of each, that makes war seem to each party to be something other than mutual destruction.

1077

ὑπερβαίνειν (D10), echoing 364E2 and 366A3.

1078

αὖ (E6), suggesting we have entered a new world, the world in which war is inevitable. It was justice whose γένεσις we were meant to find (369A5-7; cf. ἐγγενομένη, 371E13): instead we have found the origin of war! The implicit comparison is enough to suggest that it is the injustice we were looking for—namely πλεονεξία with all its blindspots—that is the origin of war, but Socrates does not draw this conclusion explicitly: this is what the brothers need to realize.

1079

ταῖς πόλεσιν (E7): The plural is empirical, as at 338D7, 345E2 and 368E8-369A1.

1080

ἐξ ὧν (E6): The unexpressed antecedent (ταῦτα) stands in apposition to γένεσιν and itself refers back to ὑπερβαίνειν τὸν τῶν ἀναγκαίων ὅρον, from D10: namely, overstepping the bounds of necessity, i.e., πλεονεξία. But Socrates’s failure to be, or decision not to be, explicit (aposiopesis) is odd. What has been discovered is not that poverty causes war but that the desire to “have more” causes the “poverty” that causes war. The moderation of the original citizens (372B8-C1 and n.) had seemed an expendable option.

1081

ὅλῳ στρατοπέδῳ (374A1): Hitherto the supplementary populations were expressed as a plurality of individuals (shoemakers, farmers, etc.), but now it is a class, in the singular, that is added. ὅλος means not “an entire” army (as opposed to part of an army) but expresses this transition.

1082

τῆς οὐσίας ἁπάσης (A1): Desire expanding unawares is the rule of this whole passage, just as need was the rule that formed the original city. The wanton concupiscence expressed by ἁπάσης was first associated with the neighbors’ boundless desire (D10).

1083

ἐξελθών / ἐπιοῦσιν (A1-2): The participles’s prefixes locate the military movements from the “home” point of view, and ἐπί moreover suggests that the others are the aggressors, a suggestion continued by the use of ὑπέρ (properly defensive) characterizing “our” motivation. Again Socrates describes the irresponsible and limited point of view according to which an essentially symmetrical relation is seen by the party of the first part as being asymmetric. The chiastic positioning of the participles as well as the fact that they share the same verb, however suggests that in the end the one army is indistinguishable from the other. War begins when αἰτίαι become προφάσεις (so Thuc.1.26. as interpreted by L.Pearson, “Aitia and Prophasis,” TAPA 83(1952)205-223.

1084

τί δέ; (A3) stops Socrates by requesting an explanation, but does not in itself object.

1085

αὐτοί (A3): The citizens in and by themselves.

1086

οὔκ, εἰ σύ γε … καὶ ἡμεῖς (A4): οὔκ is abrupt, and γε after σύ is reproachful.

1087

ὡμολογοῦμεν δέ που (A5): δέ rather than γάρ, reminding Glaucon in case he needs it, rather than presupposing that he remembers.

1088

τεχνική (B2): In the ensuing argument Socrates uses adjectives in -ικός for the notional competence that can be had in addition to the primary competence that constitutes the person’s identity (for which he uses nouns like γεωργός [B6] and participles like γεωργῶν [C4]), in accordance with the division of labor. I here reserve the word “competent” for translating these.

1089

Ἀλλ’ ἄρα (B6) literally, “But (no): the true inference is... ,” is ironic. With these words Socrates introduces an unremitting series of front-loaded argumenta a fortiori. See next notes.

1090

διεκωλύομεν (B6) an imperfect of citation (cf. ὡμολογοῦμεν, A5, and n. ad 350C7).

1091

σκυτικῆς (B8) continues the adjectival designation of competence alongside the nominal expressions (σκυτότομος, etc.) that designate the primary identity of the man.

1092

The pluperfect ἐπεφύκει (B10) is merely the original notion (the naturally perfect πέφυκε) placed into the imperfect of citation used throughout for back-reference (ὡμολογοῦμεν, A5; διεκωλύομεν, B6; ἀπεδίδομεν, B9; ἔμελλε, B10; etc.).

1093

αὐτό (C1) means to Socrates what αὐτοί meant to Glaucon at A3.

1094

The language (B8-C2) repeats in some detail, and thereby brings forward, their grounds for adopting the division of labor (370A7-C5).

1095

Socrates now uses participles (γεωργῶν, σκυτοτομῶν [reading FDM over A], ἐργαζόμενος, C4-5) as above he had used nouns, for the man as opposed to his putative supplementary competence done still with adjective in -ικός (πολεμικός). The participles make us imagine a man farming with his helmet on or cobbling in his greaves.

1096

οὐδ’ ἂν εἷς (C6), a tmesis of οὐδείς for emphasis.

1097

πεττευτικὸς δὲ ἢ κυβερυτικός (C5-6) The games referred to by these two competences in -ικός exemplify a need for skill even to achieve a needless purpose, in contrast to a skill that is needed exactly and only because the purpose is necessary (paradigmatically, war). Adjectives in -ικός are again used for the competence, but the point is that nobody warrants the adjective being used of him unless he has practiced the game from youth, i.e., unless he is such and such (a dice-player or a checkers-player), i.e., unless he deserves to be described with the noun or the participle.

1098

λαβών (D1), the aorist stressing the instantaneous effect.

1099

ἤ τι ἄλλο τῶν πολεμικῶν ὅπλων τε καὶ ὀργάνων (D1-2), with τε καί moving from example to general principle (cf. 330D7 and n.) so as to prepare for the use of ὀργάνων in D4. Note the -ικός adjective, denoting competence, is now being transferred to the weapon!

1100

ἱκανὸς ἀγωνιστής (D3): ἱκανός comes from A3, and ἀγωνιστής is now a nominal designation for the πολεμικός. The semantics are made to suggest that competence will suddenly seep into his underlying identity by dint of his grabbing the “competent tool.”

1101

ληφθέν (D4): The notion that the tool’s merely being picked up makes the man competent is almost unsayable (of fifteen translations consulted only three [Griffith, Baccou, Bloom] preserve the passive, and of these only one [Griffith] recognizes that the participle is causal, not merely conditional); still the notion is quite familiar, in the child’s notion of a magic wand.

1102

μήτε (D5 and 6), after the negatives in οὐ (D3-4), makes its circumstantial participle conditional. Note that success in the occupations requires φύσις (B10), μελέτη (D6) and ἐπιστήμη (D5). Cf.366C7 and n.

1103

λαβόντι (D6) pokes fun at the magical notion expressed by ληφθέν, above (D4).

1104

The “argument from contraries” or “argumentum a fortiori,” (here, 374B6-D6), being an argument from likelihood, is a common enthymeme in oratory (cf.e.g. Cic.Top.55). Within the Platonic corpus compare 336E4-9, 422C5-9, 445A5-B4, 589E, 600D;Alc.I 108E5-9A3, 110E; Apol.28E (and Adam ad loc.), 34C, 37CD; Crito 46D, 50E7-1A2ff; Gorg.512A; H.Maj.286E8-7A1; Leg.647C, 890E4-6, 902E4ff, 931C; Meno 91D5-2A2 (and Thompson ad loc.); Prot.313A2-C3, 325BC; Phdo 65B4-6, 68A3-B2, 80C2-E2; Phlb.30AB, 41E9-2A4; Tht.161C; and cf.Erastae 133A7-B2. Hippias is made to show an addiction to it in the H.Min. (363C7-D4 [imitated by Socrates at 364A1-6], 362C7-D4, 365C7, 375D4-5 [imitated by Socrates at 376C3-6]).

In its commonest form the argument asserts that S is not P on the grounds that S’ is not P although it has more reason to be (the more being based on a comparison of S and S’). The former is impugned on the grounds that is less likely to be true than latter which we already agree to be false. The proposal that a small man can lift a certain rock becomes unlikely given the fact that a large man was unable to. The truth of the one is cast into doubt by the falsity of the other.

The expression of this kind of argument will naturally employ hypotaxis, but since it consists essentially of the comparison of two propositions the Greeks have found a way to present it paratactically with μέν and δέ (cf. G.Gebauer, de hypotacticis et paratacticis argumenti ex contrariis formis [Zwickau, 1870]). The given is posited in the μέν clause and then the δέ clause presents the refutandum. Literally, “The large man could not lift the rock, but the small man can;” but since μέν is concessive the true sense is, “Whereas the large man as we know could not lift the rock, the small man can.” Add the particle ἄρα or δή to the δέ clause and we get, “Whereas the large man as we know was unable to lift the rock, I just realized (ἄρα) that the small man can;” or “Whereas the large man as we know was unable to lift the rock, the small man will of course (δή) be able to.” The “affect” added by the particle becomes the focus of the entire statement since it begs us to ask, “You ‘just realized it’ how?” or “How can you be sure he, 'will of course’”? The ἄρα that most commonly appears in the δέ clause can be prepared by another ἄρα in the μέν clause (Crito 50D, Prot.325BC, Rep.600D). For the future cf. C4 and D5; 422C9, 445B1, 600D3.

1105

πολλοῦ γὰρ ἄν … ἄξια (D7): Glaucon agrees (with γάρ) to the whole argument by agreeing to the last part: cf. 333D9 and n. His irreal apodosis grants with indirect grace that the conception of which Socrates has now disabused him was itself irreal.

1106

ἂν εἴη (E1): Socrates’s shift to the optative (E1) restores the mood of joint investigation.

1107

τὸ τῶν φυλάκων ἔργoν (D8), a periphrasis for what he had been calling πολεμική (B4) or τὰ περὶ τὸν πόλεμον (C2) that allows him to introduce the new term, φυλάξ, which quietly maintains the false conception that the function of the army is essentially defensive (cf. n.1083) only to provide for the rude awakening below that the army’s art of guarding includes the art of aggression against its own citizens.

1108

αὖ (E1), contrasting superlative release from other duties with superlative immersion in this duty.

1109

μεγίστης (E2) goes with both τέχνης and ἐπιμελείας, which are closely linked by τε καί. The pair repeat ἐπιστήμη and μελέτη from D5-6 above, and prepare for the third member of the triad (φύσις) which is postponed for emphasis. The periphrastic construction with δεόμενον (in place of δέοιτο) is meant to continue the correlative construction by ending, with an adjective, what was started with one (ὅσῳ μέγιστον … τοσούτῳ δεόμενον).

1110

Note the etymological figure φύσεως ἐπιτηδείας εἰς αὐτὸ τὸ ἐπιτήδευμα (E4). The figure is halfway between a proof and a pun, and is repeated at 394E3-4 and 433A5-6. The basic term ἐπιτηδής refers to a decided orientation. Its cognates range in denotation from worthy serviceability to cunning, from practice to polish, and from improvised advantage to duty and policy. “Pursuit” often translates it. The term ἐπιτήδευμα tends to appear in lists of καλά, where it is often placed alongside νόμοι, as Gorg.474D3ff (and 475A), H.Maj.298AB, Symp.210C3-49 (and 211C). Cf. H.Maj.294C9, 295D5; Leg.793D1.

1111

ἡμέτερον ἔργον (E6) echoes τὸ τῶν φυλακῶν ἔργον, D8: Socrates compares themselves and their duty to the citizens of the polis and theirs. The present crisis, from which they must not shrink (οὐκ ἀποδειλιατέον, E11) will come to an end once they make their brave declaration (θαρροῦντας) at 376B11ff.

1112

τίνες τε καὶ ποῖαι (E7) asks for which ones (τίνες) on the basis of their natures (ποῖαι).

1113

ἡμέτερον μέντοι (E9): Earnest solidarity (expressed here by μέντοι) is the exact opposite of the insouciant complacency of τρυφᾶν (cf. n. ad 372E3).

1114

οἴει οὖν τι διαφέρειν φύσιν γενναίου σκύλακος εἰς φυλακήν νεανίσκου εὐγενοῦς; (375A2-3) is the formulation of Socrates’s question. The rare word σκύλαξ and the chiastic alliterations, especially with the alliterative words εἰς φυλακήν sandwiched between them, make the question sound like a children’s riddle. A further application of the metaphor of the dog will of course be discovered, below. Plutarch, who continually emulates Plato in his own ways, repeats just this word in his treatise on the education of the very young (de lib. educ. 3AB).

For παρήχησις adding congeniality or initial plausibility to the argument, cf. 395E8-9, 406B8-9, 409B2/B5, 430A5-6, 433E12-4A1, 437E5-6, 496E6, 557C5-6, 609B5-6; Leg.733B6-7, 956E1, 968D2-3; Phlb.12C8-D4; Symp.188B5-6; Tht.171E5-6. Related but different, and also exampled here (γενναίου / εὐγενοῦς), is argumentation from etymology (e.g. 333B2 [and n.], 348C5ff, 374E4 [and n.], 400D11-E3, 439E5, 608E6-9A1) and its punning (Leg.658B7-C1, 803A) and fallacious (Crat.416D1-5) uses. Consult the wonderful entry in the general index printed at the end of Jowett’s translation (v.5, ed.2), s.v. “Etymology.”

1115

τὸ ποῖον λέγεις; (A4). Socrates commonly buys time to expatiate by asking a paradoxical question: cf. 382A1-10 and n.1285; for the pedagogical pun compare 467D12-13.

1116

ὀχύν τε … καὶ ἐλαφρόν … καὶ ἰσχυρὸν αὖ (A5-7): the attributes are listed genetically, i.e., in the order they will come into play: First he is sharp enough to see his prey, then he is quick enough to catch up with it and then strong enough to reduce it to possession. αὖ helps show that the list is moving stepwise. For such “genetic” listing cf. 382B2-3, 387B4, 395E1-2, 443E6-7, 551A8-10, 608A5; Charm.156D1-3; Crito 51C8-D1; Gorg.487E3-4; Leg.678A8-9, 696A2, 738D6-E1, 897A6-B1, 969B8-C2; Phdo.98B8-C1; Phdrs.251A7-B1, 255E3 [also describing a “hunt” like the present passage]; Phlb.51C3-6 [n.b.γιγνόμενα]; Polit.274A2, A7; Prot.316D2-3, 325C7-D1, 333E3; Symp.206D3-5 and 5-7; Tim.82B5-7.

1117

καὶ μὴν ἀνδρεῖόν γε (A9): The movement of the thought to the new item, bravery, continues the consecutivity of the genetic list before (ἀνδρεῖος is justified as implied by the last item of that list: εἴπερ εὖ μαχεῖται), but is nevertheless in itself something of a leap. The connective καὶ μήν … γε, in its “progessive” use (Denniston 351) acknowledges but does not explain this fact, the nature of which will presently be formulated by the distinction between body and soul (B4-7), on which see n. below.

1118

ἄμαχόν τε καὶ ἀνίκητον (B1), invincible: A minor distinction is drawn between invincibility and imperturbability (ἄφοβος τε … καὶ ἀήττητος, B2) in order to have an occasion to draw the major distinction between soul and body (B4-8).

1119

καὶ μὴν καί (B7) rather than δέ answers the μέν of B4, in order to recall the leap from διαμάχεσθαι to ἀνδρεῖον done with καὶ μήν … γε (A9), which is herewith being characterized as a leap from body to soul.

1120

πολίταις (B10): For the first time the members of the city are called citizens, and treated as a group separate from the guards (ἄλλοις is adverbial: cf.n.1494): cf. C1-4 infra.

1121

ἄγριοι (B9), πρᾴους (C1): the language is more suited to the animals of the analogy than to the guards.

1122

οἰκείους (C1) is meant to include each other and their fellow citizens. It means familiars rather than family, and suggests the dog’s ability to recognize his master. We expect it therefore to be contrasted with ἀλλοτρίους, but the political context requires πολέμους. A compromise is reached with the adjective πολεμίους (C2).

1123

ἦθος (C7), a new term to distinguish the quality sought per se from the animal that might instantiate it.

1124

ἐπισκεψάμενος (D3): Τhe compound is characteristically used of re-examination called for by unexpected or provocative implications of a thesis once it has been clearly enough formulated to be amenable to isolated scrutiny (345C1, 369A1-3, 523B1, 524B2, 598D7; Crat.428D2, Gorg.461A5, 515A3; Lach.197E3; Phdo.107B6; Prot.349E1; Tht.199E8).

1125

With ποῦ δή; (D9), after his πῶς λέγεις; (D6), Glaucon plays along, feigning open-eyed credulity as he waits to learn what in the world Socrates has in mind.

1126

ἄλλοις (D10) in its “proleptic” use, to introduce foil. Hence its μέν-clause is not answered with δέ but ousted by μέντοι (cf, 364A2-4 [with n.1192], 498D7, 511C4, 611C7, 621B5; Gorg.456C7, 458B5, 472E5, 473E1, 480E1; and Denniston 404-5).

1127

τῶν γενναίων κυνῶν (E1-2), a genitive of the topic (whence the article) to construe with οἶσθα (pace Stallb., et al., who construe it with τὸ ἦθος, a prolepsis extremely awkward and moreover obviated by αὐτῶν) in a “lilies of the field” construction. For other such genitives cf. n.4377. The adjective is meant to bring us back into the ambience of the original comparison (cf.A2-3).

1128

τοῦτο φύσει αὐτῶν τὸ ἦθος (E2) attributes the needed description (ἦθος, C7) to the appropriate subject or substrate (φύσις, 374E4 and 7).

1129

τοὺς συνήθεις τε καὶ γνωρίμους (E3) spells out the meaning of οἰκείους, C1.

1130

παρὰ φύσιν (E6) straddles between natural and logical possibility: the problem had been that the two natural dispositions (C7-8) were logically opposite (ἐναντία, C7) so that their compresence in a single character (ἦθος, C7) was a logical impossibility (ἀδυνάτοις ἔοικεν, C11) that as such was impossible to occur (ἀδύνατον γενέσθαι, D1) in nature. οὐ παρὰ φύσιν means naturally possible because not logically impossible.

1131

ἔτι τοῦδε (E9): With ἔτι, the μέν above (at E6) becomes “solitarium;” Socrates now uses the first person pronoun to move on with a warning that his next idea is novel (E9).

1132

προσγενέσθαι (E10), in contrast with ἐσόμενος, might suggest that the philosophical aspect is meant to evolve (γίγνεσθαι) in addition (πρός) to the underlying spirited aspect, but τὴν φύσιν rules out the suggestion. The aorist of γίγνεσθαι is commonly used to supplement the forms of εἶναι when the aorist aspect is desired, as here, so that it may simply mean “to be in addition.” Alternatively, the becoming in question refers to an inference evolved out of the argument: for this “dialectical γίγνεσθαι”, cf. n.205. Compare the continual use of the ethical dative as though the development of the polis were happening to “us”: cf. n.1004.

1133

οὐδὲ ἕν (376A5), emphatic for οὐδέν (and therefore parallel to μηδέν below), indicating that this is the point that is ἄξιον θαυμάσαι. The shift from οὐ to μή is a shift from “Without the stipulation that...” to “Even if it is not the case that... .” Heraclitus’s κύνες γὰρ καταβαΰζουσιν ὧν ἂν μὴ γινώσκωσι (DK 22B97) exploits the dog’s certainty in a different way. Their behavior indirectly suggests they know what they know and take that experience to be the rule rather than the exception.

1134

οὐ πάνυ (A9) according to Riddell (§139) “universally means ‘scarcely,’” but Riddell doesn’t tell us what “scarcely” means. The problem is that the expression succinctly negates entirety, which leaves everything less than all, which is too much to mean anything. It is by nature a litotes. Glaucon means by it that he has no basis for responding.

1135

πάθος … τῆς φύσεως (A11): From such a passage one can see how πάθος comes to mean “attribute” in contrast with the primary essence (φύσις here; οὐσία at Euthyph.11A7-9). Cf. LSJ s.v. III.3.

1136

ὡς ἀληθῶς φιλόσοφον (B1), ὡς ἀληθῶς suggesting the adjective is being used in an uncommon way that is nevertheless warranted—as in English we say “literally.” The dog is not a philosopher, but loves wiseness in some way that Glaucon cannot at first comprehend (whence πῇ δή; B2).

1137

γε (B8), with AF and Stobaeus, rather than τε with D. In tandem with adversative ἀλλά (with or without μέντοι), it marks the minor premise. So also ἀλλὰ μήν γε, 342C8, and most commonly δέ γε, 332A4 and n., 338E1, 349D3, 352A10.

1138

θαρροῦντες (B11) dispelling the crippling aporia of 375D3-4 (foreseen at 374E10-11), and hazarding an hypothesis: the term suggests the role of θυμός in philosophical investigation. Cf. n.33.

1139

οἰκείους καὶ γνωρίμους (C1) brings together the entire range of the synonyms we have seen in 376B6, 376A6-7, 373E3, and 375C1-2.

1140

φιλόσοφον καὶ φιλομαθῆ (C2), an instance of “reverse” καὶ, shoehorning in the target term (φιλόσοφον) before the term that serves as its warrant (φιλομαθῆ): (cf.409A3 and n.), a “chiasm of before and after” (cf. n.14) indicating that the point has been secured. In the next sentence the warranting term is dropped and the target stands alone (φιλόσοφος δὴ καί ..., D4). “Philosophy” will soon be more than being glad to see the known.

1141

καὶ ταχὺς καὶ ἰσχυρός (C4) re-include the requisite somatic elements from 375B4-5, and rounding out in three matching pairs of adjective (φιλόσοφος καὶ θυμοειδής before and καλὸς κἀγαθός after), mark the completion of a section of argumentation. Glaucon’s reply παντάπασι (C6) expresses his recognition that this is so, and his μὲν οὖν that it is time to move to the next point.

1142

μὲν δή (C7): Socrates echoes Glaucon’s μὲν οὖν, with δή adding “as you agree.”

1143

ὑπάρχοι (C7), as at 343E2, is not otiose. One’s nature affords him what he has in store. The optative is ideal and can be translated with an imperative since they are making ideas. θρέψονται δὲ δή then moves from φύσις to μελέτη, with ἐπιστήμη standing somewhere off in the future.

1144

ἡμῖν (C7), ethical dative of theoretical interest as above at 371A8 (cf. n.).

1145

αὐτό (C9) countenances that the subject has its own shape, independent of the role it may play in our overall investigation. The term therefore motivates οὗπερ—our particular goal—and raises the issue of a tension between relevancy and length (ἱκανόν / συχνόν).

1146

γίγνεται (D2) singular with the hendiadys. Cf. 371E12-13 and n.

1147

ἐῶμεν ἱκανόν … συχνὸν διεξίωμεν (D2-3): The chiasm helps draw the contrast. The purpose clause in ἵνα expatiates on the prepositional phrase πρὸς τὸ κατιδεῖν in just the same way that the indirect question τίνα τρόπον … , expatiates on the nouns δικαιοσύνην τε καὶ ἀδικίαν.

1148

καὶ ὁ τοῦ Γλαυκῶνος ἀδελφός (D4): By his periphrastic reference to Adeimantus, Socrates, in the role of narrator, effects the transition from one interlocutor to the other (calling him by name immediately below confirms and completes the transition). Adeimantus will not leave the question about poetry to Glaucon, and he reveals a personal willingness (ἔγωγε προσδοκῶ, D4-5) to run the risk of prolixity on the topic of παιδεία—hardly a surprise, given his sensitivity to the fearsome effect poetry might have on the young, according to his speech at the beginning of the Book. Once again brother helps brother (n.777); and once again it is the process of the investigation that is bringing the “justice and injustice” within the searchers’ souls to the surface (cf. n.1074).

1149

ἀφετέον (D6), like ἀνεῖναι above (368C5), refusing to miss an opportunity to complete the hunt: is a step up from ἐᾶν, above (D2).

1150

μὰ Δία (D6): Socrates scrupulously notices (ἄρα) and approves Adeimantus’s special interest by fervently allowing (μὰ Δία) that the treatment even be very long, if the occasion should demand. τυγχάνει, “in fact,” issues a warning like the warning he placed at the beginning of the “construction,” with the term ἔργον (369B2-3 and n.).

1151

οὐ γὰρ οὖν (D8): οὖν adds an insistent edge to the answer (cf.451A5-6; Gorg.466E8). Rather than thanking Socrates, Adeimantus takes the trouble to remark that his personal request was justified. Compare ἀλλὰ χρή (E1). Requesting and complaining, like describing and criticizing, are close to each other in Adeimantus, as we saw at the end of his speech and will see again and again, below.

1152

παιδεύσωμεν τοὺς ἄνδρας (D10), as Glaucon had once referred to them (372C3), not πολίτας and not φύλακας. The term invites us to “identify” with them rather than seeing them merely as creatures of an institution. Cf. 361B6 and n.753. With the metonymy of παιδεύσωμεν we have left behind the crisis in the construction and happily find ourselves once again occupied in the theoretical leisure (ἐν μύθῳ μυθολογοῦντές τε καὶ σχολὴν ἄγοντες) of founding and developing our city.

1153

ἤ (E2) is elliptical: not “or,” but “Wouldn’t you say?” to suggest an answer to the question.

1154

ἢ οὐ (E9): Socrates asks if this isn’t so and Adeimantus’s answer shows he finds this policy natural. The purpose is not to insist on priority of music: as we shall see (377A9-10), his remark merely reveals how early the education begins, when the child is still too young to be instructed in gymnastics.

1155

μουσικῆς / λόγων (E9,11) The thought easily moves downward from logical wholes to logical parts: from all παιδεία, to μουσική (sc. παιδεία), to λόγοι, to false λόγοι. The genitives μουσικῆς and λόγων, placed in the initial position, are genitives of the genus, a type of partitive genitive. The meaning of λόγοι is not as yet clear: that it should be included under μουσική is patent; whether it refers to the logical studies of the trivium, or to stories, or to historical accounts, is undecided.

1156

δέ (E11, 377A1): The last two “questions” by Socrates have no interrogative particle (cf. 333A13 and n.), but Adeimantus treats them as questions, inferring the statements are a continuation of the construction governed by τιθείς which was a question (E9). Since the brunt of his criticism of poetry at the beginning of the Book was that it gave young men false ideas, Socrates’s remark seems to get off on the wrong foot.

1157

μύθους (A4): “Fairy tales” would be convey the sense of μύθους more directly in English: that such tales should be instances of the λόγοι mentioned above clarifies both what λόγος meant there and what a pedagogically useful ψευδὴς λόγος could be (note the verb is λέγειν μύθους). Socrates spoke too broadly when he said λόγοι, and too abstractly when he used the logically exhaustive division of λόγοι into true and false, as though to send Adeimantus off the trail. The effect of the minor detour is to emphasize that it is not the truth of a story that makes it good nor the falseness that makes it bad, but its effect and suitability for the young, which is the point Socrates now develops.

1158

πρότερον δὲ μύθοις (A6), specifying the sense in which musical education begins earlier than gymnastic. Now Adeimantus learns that the distinction between false and true stories was harmless. If the children are old enough for bedtime stories but too young to run around in an orderly way we must imagine them to be two or three, not college students.

1159

τοῦτο δὴ ἔλεγον (A9): the restatement adds emphasis. We start guiding them as early as we can, even before their cognition distinguishes true from false or could profit from such a distinction.

1160

ἀρχὴ πάντος ἔργου μέγιστον (A12): The focus on their youth has prepared this statement; ὁτιοῦν is neuter and emphatically general, so it refers not only to children but to animals and even plants, anything that “grows up.”

1161

The order (B1-3) is chiastic, with generalizing phrase (ὁτιοῦν) providing the subject of the first verb (πλάττεται, passive), and the second verb (ἐνδύεται, middle) followed by generalizing clause defining its subject in turn: any thing young enough is served up to receive the influence of whatever we wish. For the middle ἐνδύεται, describing the way the trait is able to make its way into the malleable child, cf. 401D6, below and Leg.642B. Also Menex.235C. The two verbs (pace Adam ad loc.) do not have the same subject, and (pace Richards) there is no need to alter the text.

1162

ἑκάστῳ (B3), referring to underlying distinctiveness of the entity being stamped, and thereby continuing the generalization of πάντος (A12) and ὁτιοῦν (B1).

1163

πλασθέντας (B6) reminds us that the stories will be “made up,” but the term adds a connotation of lying fabrication. Even adults, after all, would prefer to hear one story instead of another and would like things to come out this way instead of that way. Telemachus has to remind Penelope that it is the singer’s inspiration that determines what he will sing (Od.1.345-59). πλασθέντας echoes πλάττεται at B2 and thereby calls attention to the twofold problem that stories are more congenial than truth and that the very young, being terribly malleable, will take them too seriously.

1164

The double use of ἐπιτυχεῖν (B5-6) is not an otiose figura etymologica, but stresses that we must be mindful not only of the story but of who chooses it, who tells it, and – as we shall see in a moment -- who composes it. ῥᾳδίως οὗτος points back to how easily the σημαίνων deeply imprints whatever τύπος he wishes on a young animal (ὃν ἄν τις βούληται, B2).

1165

δόξας (B8) includes the notion that the beliefs are adopted unconsciously, that the children’s souls are stamped with them. They are not ideas the children have formed, but beliefs that form the children’s thinking.

1166

ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ (B7) presumes that most stories are bad, so that things cannot be left to chance and that supervision is really needed.

1167

ἐπιστατέον (B11), the first time this verb is used. The interlocutors had set out to compose a city in thought but now their thinking includes “thinking ahead.” Socrates had warned us that once art was “set into motion” it would soon get a mind of its own (cf. κινητέον, 373A6).

1168

μυθοποιοῖς (B11): the poets, who of course tell their own stories.

1169

τὰς τρόφους τε καὶ μητέρας (C2-3) has the children younger than seven.

1170

τὰ σώματα τοῖς χερσίν (C4), a further indication of the timeliness of music over gymnastics during the age in question. The soul is even more impressionable than the soft bones of a baby. The allusion to baby massage is part of what one would say to the caregivers by way of persuading them (πείσομεν, C2), by expressing what might be unfamiliar in terms they already know.

1171

ἐκβλητέον (C5), stronger than ἀποκριτέον since they had already been “included” before the present criticism (κρίνεσθαι) was introduced and are already ensconced. For τοὺς πολλούς cf. ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ above. Poets have always scandalized audiences and always will, and the idea of suppressing poetry is nothing new. It is the present purpose that is new: The experiment in thought has introduced a scrutiny of values and goals so radical that the usual preoccupations of conventional society are not allowed to govern by default. Poets will now be evaluated as to their suitability for a higher purpose than before, and their effect on persons younger than we used to worry about. They must meet the radical needs of the state-in-thought, and none of them will be “grandfathered in.” So also Book Ten.

Modern sensibilities have chafed at the exclusions, but the emphasis here is on who will be included on a team (this is the primary use of ἐγκρίνειν and ἀποκρίνειν), rather than who will be expelled. Nor is much provision made for the “innocent bystanders” who haven’t the inborn nature to become guards. Socrates and his interlocutors usually focus their comments on the sub-population of noble youth (as e.g., 378C1-2, 386A2-4 and C1 [note limiting τοῖς], 387B4-5 [on παισὶ καὶ ἀνδράσιν cf. n.753], 387C2-5; 388A1-3, D2-7; 389D9-E2 [on the meaning of ὡς πλήθει cf. n.1380]; 391D5-6 [where the article and the ethical dative ἡμῖν ensure it is “the youth we are concerned about”]), but easily allow their bans to expand to the rest of the young indifferently (378B2 and D1, 381E2-5, 386A, 390A3 and B4), and to the whole city (378B1, 378D6, 380B8, 394D6). Thus at the end of Book Two we will deny a chorus and bar public performance to the poet who strikes the wrong notes, in order to ensure that our budding guards will turn out reverent and godly (383C5).

1172

ποίους δή (C6) expresses surprise, bewilderment, indignation and joy at the free play of the ideas. We should recall that only a few moments ago he was begging Socrates to correct the poets (366D7-367A4).

1173

ἐν τοῖς μείζοσι μύθοις ὀψόμεθα (C7): On the face of it Socrates is suggesting the same method as before, that seeing (n.b. ὀψόμεθα) the truth in macro will enable us to see it in micro, and this much Adeimantus grasps (ἔγωγε, 377D2); but with some impatience (the δέ in οὐδέ, D2) he impresses on Socrates that the distinction does not help him answer his previous question (τίνας, D2: cf. ποίους, C6). τύπος (C8) verges in meaning away from the imprint left (B2) to the related notion of the character or cipher that is on the stamp itself (D8). ταὐτὸν δύνασθαι is epexegesis of τὸν αὐτὸν τύπον.

1174

ἐλεγέτην (D4): with the dual that makes them partners compare Adeimantus’s hendiadys that made them one: ὁ γενναῖος Ἡσίοδός τε καὶ Ὅμηρος, 363A8. As being the most important poets Socrates has exploited the ambiguity of μείζων and ἐλάττων.

1175

ἔλεγόν τε καὶ λέγουσι (D6): With the tenses Socrates echoes Adeimantus’s stress on society’s ongoing exposure to a set body of assertions made by just these poets (cf. 366E1-3, ἀπὸ τῶν … ἡρώων … μέχρι τῶν νῦν). It appears Socrates will be engaging Adeimantus’s challenge head on.

1176

ποίους δὴ καὶ τί αὐτῶν μεμφόμενος λέγεις (D7): ποίους δή is repeated from above (C6) and τί μεμφόμενος repeats the idea of a τύπος Socrates wishes to restrain; and again Socrates deals with the methodological question before getting down to cases and telling just which ones. This is Adeimantus's personal issue.

1177

μὴ καλῶς ψεύδηται (D9), the adverb again suggesting competence. Lying poorly is not the great fault (as ἄλλως τε καί indicates) but something that exacerbates it. Again Socrates explains the obscurum with an obscurius, though the intrusive ψευδεῖς (D6) already suggests that the great fault will be lying itself.

1178

τί τοῦτο (D10), asyndeton. With his ὅπερ (D8), like his οὕς (D4), Socrates is able to sandwich in methodological preliminaries before revealing which stories he has in mind, which is what Adeimantus has eagerly wanted to know all along. His asyndeton reveals impatience; τοῦτο points to ὅπερ.

1179

μηδέν (E2) emphatic rather than merely conditional.

1180

This is the force of καὶ γάρ … γε (E4). He speaks as if the criterion Socrates suggests is so obvious and his acceptance of it so easily granted, that his request for instances is even more warranted (so again, at 378A7, agreeing as if the assertion were obvious).

1181

πῶς δὴ λέγομεν καὶ ποῖα (E5): Adeimantus with the first plural finally joins Socrates rather than challenging him to list off examples. His double question restates his double question at D7, πῶς corresponding to τί μεμφόμενος and ποῖα to ποίους.

1182

πρῶτον τὸ μέγιστον (E6): Socrates’s insistence on proper order stands in strong contrast with the way that Adeimantus in his speech presented the human situation first and then extended it to the gods, which in effect made man the measure of gods (363A5ff and 364B2ff). Adam’s insistence that μέγιστον is masculine because it will be at 378B5 requires too much “live” sense in what is merely a standard formula.

1183

ὁ εἰπών (sc. μῦθος ἐκβλητέος), E7, the first story to be thrown out (governing τό … ψευδός in hyperbaton), because it told (εἰπών) a lie and moreover did so badly; Hesiod (i.e. his poem) alleges (φησί) it to be true.

1184

ἠργάσατο and δρᾶσαι (E8) together form an aposiopesis.

1185

δὲ δή (378A1) asserts that the μέν clause was indeed concessive. The language avoids the name of Zeus.

1186

ἔργα (A1) continues ἠργάσατο in nominal form (continuing the aposiopesis), so the undergoing it led to is done with the noun that expresses undergoing, namely, πάθη. ὑπὸ τοῦ ὑέος is in syllepsis with both ἔργα and πάθη though its preposition associates it only with the latter.

1187

ῥᾳδίως οὕτως λέγεσθαι (A2-3). ῥᾳδίως οὕτως repeated from above (377B5); the passive λέγεσθαι shifts the responsibility for exposure from the poets to the parents, or from the poets to ourselves who are becoming their monitors. That the most harmful stories are about horrid dealings between fathers and sons is notable, in light of Adeimantus’s complaint that his elders have failed him (362E4ff, 366D7ff n.b.ὑμῶν).

1188

ἄφρονάς τε καὶ νέους (A3): reverse καί (cf.343C6 and n.): they are ἄφρονες because νέοι.

1189

μάλιστα μέν (A3).

1190

With ἦν (A4) he continues the irreal construction from A2.

1191

συνέβη (A6) stressing again the effect of hearing the story. Cf. 377B1-3, B7 (καὶ λαμβάνειν ...), 377C3-4, and C8-D1. The construction with ὅπως is an object clause thrown into the aorist indicative by the leading irreal construction. Cf.Goodwin, GMT §§333,ff.

1192

καὶ γάρ … γε (A7), again: χαλεποί, given the moral context, veers toward the merely esthetical. Compare the remark, καλὸν μὲν σωφροσύνη καὶ δικαιοσύνη, χαλεπὸν μέντοι in Adeimantus’s speech (364A2-4), which rather grates. The proper sentiment is, χαλεπὸν μέν, καλὸν δέ: cf. n. ad loc.). With καὶ γάρ … γε Adeimantus accedes to Socrates’s point without resistance at the same time that he waters it down. cf.377E4-5.

1193

γε (B1) answers Adeimantus’s limitative γε at A7, insisting that his concession, though weak, was strong enough to require he will now agree they must not be told.

1194

ἡμέτεραι (B1). Their overall common purpose had fallen out of view, in the midst of the give and take on Adeimantus’s favorite and most sensitive subject.

1195

οὐδὲν ἂν θαυμαστὸν ποιοῖ (B3): ἀκούοντι (this instance absent from Ast’s lexicon) is pregnant. The young person is spoken of as “hearing” a moral he might be expected to infer upon hearing the story told (hence the shift to the ideal construction). ἀκούειν has the meaning “hearing in a certain way” – i.e. interpreting – only later, when it becomes a technical term in the Greek of the scholiasts (cf. LSJ s.v., IV). The hazard of an easy shift from the plot of the story to a moral that may underlie it becomes thematic below (ὑπόνοια, 378D6).

1196

The antecedent of ἀδικῶν (B2) is the young man who hears the story: that he should implicitly identify with the character in the story is just as easy as the inference he might draw from it. In this clause it is with Ouranos he would be identifying (cf. 377E7-8).

1197

κολάζων (B3): Now he identifies with Kronos (E8-378A1), with αὖ repeated from there.

1198

The order of the sentence (B2-4) is an instance of interlaced or distributive binary construction (cf. 329A5 and n.). The second participle appears to represent a second protasis going with the apodosis οὐδὲν ἂν θαυμαστόν ..., but then that appearance is dispelled by ἀλλὰ and the second protasis is given an apodosis of its own (δρῴη ἄν ...). In the end both protases go with both apodoses. Such an easy comparison of oneself with the gods bespeaks a fundamentally impious arrogance such as we see in Euthyphro (τὰ ἐνάντια λέγουσι περί τε τῶν θεῶν καὶ περὶ ἐμοῦ, 6A5, linking himself to the gods with τε καί); and recalls Adeimantus’s clap-trap argument at 365D7-E6.

1199

αὐτῷ μοι (B6): The addition of αὐτῷ might make μοι too emphatic to go only with δοκεῖ (as it does for instance with φαίνεται at 390C4; cf. also 398B9). Perhaps Adeimantus is recanting his lukewarm reaction above (A7), but perhaps we must take ἀυτῷ also, or even primarily, with ἐπιτήδεια (for the dative cf. νέοις ἐπιτήδεια ἀκούειν, 390A4), and take it that he is comparing himself with the νέῳ ἀκούοντι at B2. Adeimantus is old enough to know better, but feels a trace of what he felt while he was delivering his speech a half hour ago, a feeling he began to confess in his last reply (378A7). It is as if Adeimantus woke up, as Mr Morrissey says. We are reminded by this dramatic detail that the purpose of the construction is to reach a response that is adequate to the challenge Adeimantus and Glaucon have placed before Socrates and their candor. The better attested personal construction δοκῶ (with mss.ADM) instead of δοκεῖ (ms.F, Eusebius, Theodoret, Ficinus [apud J.-C.], and modern editors) should be restored to the text.

1200

οὐδέ γε (B8), like his γε above, picks up right where he left off (as Adeimantus’s agreement at B6-7 permits him to do), and now he moves forward to a generalization.

1201

πολεμοῦσί τε καὶ ἐπιβουλεύουσι καὶ μάχονται (B8-C1) presents the general situation, being at war, and then specifies it with a polar doublet of specifics, plotting and battling (A/a1/a2). Cf. Euthyphr.6B6-9.

1202

οὐδέ (C1) sympathetic with οὐδέ at B8.

1203

γε (C2) bringing forward the point of the γε at B8.

1204

For καὶ ποικιλτέον (C4) and the tenor of the whole passage cf. Euthyphr.6B7-C4, which explicitly mentions the Panathenaic robe.

1205

ἡρώων (C5), the only mention of heroes in this passage. Adeimantus had included them among the edifiers (366E2). They will receive much closer consideration at the beginning of Book Three, where we will see they have a special role in the education. Their mention here, alongside gods, broaches the stratification of which men (ἄνθρωποι) are the lowest (cf.392A4-8, Crat.397D9-E2; P.O.2.2), setting up the policy that they be taught a basic aversion against fighting amongst their own kind, a kind that is here (for the purposes of the theoretical experiment) strikingly referred to as πολῖται rather than as ἄνθρωποι.

1206

δεσμούς … ῥίψεις (D3-4): The plurals are derogatory as the similar ones are at 387B-C1, 391B5-6, 495A7-8, 573A5-6, D2-4 (cf.Alc.I 122BC; Euthyphr.6B8; Gorg.490C8-9, 491A1-2; Leg.643E1; Lys.205C4-5; Phdo 98C1-2, D7-E1, 101C7ff; Phdrs.231B4 vs. A4; Soph.251A9-10; Symp.211E1-4 [esp. σαρκῶν], 218A7-B2 [n.b., Socrates is in the singular!]; Tht.166C6-7 [cf.161C5], 176C6). As a good story bears being told δὶς καὶ τρίς; telling a bad one once is already too many times. With θεομαχία a generalization embracing all the cases is achieved by a climactic neologism. New criticism after all needs new language (though cf. Xenophanes DK 21 B11,12, and 26).

1207

παραδέχεσθαι (D5), the opposite of ἐκβάλλειν (377C5 and n.).

1208

ἐν ὑπονοίαις (D6). Commentators cite for the meaning Plut.de aud. poet.19EF, where Plutarch complains about needlessly far-fetched interpretations critics foist upon (παραβιαζόμενοι) Homer to twist his meaning (διαστρέφοντες) away from an immoral theme. These he characterizes as αἱ πάλαι μὲν ὑπόνοιαι, ἀλληγορίαι δὲ νῦν λεγόμενοι. It is a fallacy to infer that something that has been renamed had originally only the sense of the new name: all of ἀλληγορία in Plutarch’s time might have been called ὑπόνοια “in aforetimes” but this does not imply all ὑπόνοια was what is now ἀλληγορία. Plutarch goes on to say these far-fetched interpretations are needless since Homer has exonerated himself, at least for those who pay attention (προσέχοντας, 19F: cf. προσέχοντος, 19E, supra) to the mute (σιωπώμενον) details of the story, and he gives two examples (19F-20B). The ὑπόνοιαι that a younger auditor might miss are not the far-fetched allegorical interpretations invented by poetasters with time on their hands, but rather the subtle meanings that Homer leaves implicit, that is, Plutarch’s σιωπώμενα. This is the meaning in works contemporary to ours, e.g., EN 1128A23-4, where Aristotle distinguishes between the older comedy that gets its laughs from explicit name-calling (αἰσχρολογία) and the newer that relies on innuendo (ὑπόνοια); and Xen.Symp.3.6, where the rhapsodes are said to be the stupidest people in the world since although they can cite their Homer from heart they do not know the meaning (ὑπόνοιαι, certainly not allegorical interpretations; cf. also ὑπόλογον, Lach.189B7.). LSJ’s fulsome gloss, “the deeper meaning that underlies everything,” receives no warrant from the passages he cites and gives ὑπο- a spatial meaning although in all other uses of the noun it has its attenuative force.

1209

λάβῃ ἐν ταῖς δόξαις (E1) imitates the language, and thereby brings forward the idea, of 377B7-9, with elaboration.

1210

πρὸς ἀρετὴν ἀκούειν (E3): Again what is to be heard is being measured by its effect (A6 and n.1191).

1211

καὶ ἐγὼ εἶπον (E7): With the more explicit and full-winded “stage direction” (not just the formulaic quasi-phonemes ἦν δ’ἐγώ or ἦ δ’ ὅς), characteristically introduced by interruptive καί, Socrates marks for his auditors (i.e., us) a moment of transition or heightened dramatic importance: cf. 416B8, 419A1, 427B2, 475D1, 487B1, 487D6, 506C6 (on the ensuing initial vocative see next note). It is after all the same Adeimantus that found the received stories inadequate that is asking this question: the deeper strategy of inveigling him into the role of city founder comes close to the surface!

1212

Ὦ Ἀδείμαντε (378E7): Initial vocative usually ushers in a new conversation, but there are in Plato about fifty instances of initial vocative within an ongoing conversation (same speaker and same addressee). In the majority of these the one interlocutor is couching the remark he is at that moment making to the other as a sort of sublating meta-remark about the conversation the two of them are having, whether reflecting upon methodology, or indicating an access of increased candor, or apologizing for what will be a something of a lecture (Charm.163D1; Crito 46B1; H.Maj.304B7; H.Min.369B3 and D1, 373B6; Ion 541C7; Leg.630D2, 634C5, 637B7, 673B5, 686D7, 708E1; Lys.204B5; Meno 70A5, 79E7, 94E3 and 95A2; Phdrs.228A5, 247E7 [correcting Theuth: cf. E4]; Prot.328D8, 334C8, 335D6; Rep.329E1 [where Soc. has told us his motive in advance: D7-E1], 336E2 [where again we get the motive: 336D5-E2], 344D7, 378E7, 450D5, 473E6, 499D10; Symp.218C7; and esp. in the highly contentious dialogues, Euthydemus [275D3 answered by 277D4, 288B4, 305B4, 307A3] and Gorgias [448C4, 461C5, 471E2, 481C5 answered by 482C4, and 517B2: note also the unique and ominous terminal vocative with which Socrates ends that dialogue: Ὦ Κάλλικλες, 527E7]).

1213

οὐκ ἐσμὲν ποιηταὶ … ἀλλ’ οἰκισταὶ πόλεως (378E7-9A1): Of course neither is true—they are guests at Cephalus’s and the host has departed. The storytelling they have embarked upon must continually reconcile the authentic freedom of leisure with the demands of relevance to the goal (i.e., allowing the ἱκανόν but avoiding the συχνόν: cf. 376C8-D10). The notion that they must play their role in an appropriate manner reveals a parallel between the proprieties of poetry and the proprieties of their own investigation. ἐν τῷ παρόντι serves not only to dismiss composing the needed stories by postponement but also to remind us that the censorship of children’s stories is just one step in the overall project of finding justice and injustice in the individual soul. The reader outside the conversation to whom Socrates has just nodded in the words before, is thus admonished to recognize the account is fictional play.

1214

τύπους (379A2), repeated from 377C8.

1215

Answering the μέν (A2) with οὐ μὴν αὐτοῖς … γε (A3-4) instead of mere δέ stresses that artistic talent will not be allowed to lord it over the critical.

1216

τύποι περὶ θεολογίας (A5-6): another θεο- compound is coined (cf. θεομαχίας, 378D5). The neologism and the word order suggest that Plato somehow meant the phrase to be quotable.

1217

τοιοίδε (A7): with the “first person” demonstrative he acknowledges that he is responsible to provide guidelines, and with που that they are not to be written in stone.

1218

ὁ θεός (B1), not οἱ θεοί, here and throughout this passage. The article here has its categorical meaning so that ὅ γε θεός, with the reinforcement of γε, means god as god. Cf. τὸ δαιμόνιόν τε καὶ θεῖον, 382E6. It may well be noted that Plato’s expression often accommodates and sometimes invites a monotheistic interpretation (Apol.42A; Crito 54E), but what we should take away from such usage is not a Platonic opinion to be recorded in the history of theological opinions, but how easily Plato allows his dialogue form to point beyond current language.

1219

εὐπραγίας (B13), could be “transitive” (cf. 353E5 and n., where εὖ πράττειν is transitive), but αἴτιον tells otherwise. In contrast to the gradual and explicit steps on the bad (B3-10), the converse argument on the good is streamlined. There the adjective (βλαβερόν, B3) led to the cognate verb (βλάπτειν, B5) verb which in turn introduced its synonymic verb-plus-adjective (ποιεῖν κακόν, B7), which then finally restated nominally in terms of cause (αἴτιον [εἶναι] κακοῦ), B9); here the four parallel steps (ὠφέλιμον / ὠφελεῖν / ἀγαθὰ ποιεῖν / αἴτιον ἀγαθοῦ) are telescoped into the single expression, αἴτιον εὐπραγίας. The replacement of ἀγαθοῦ with εὐπραγίας suggests the steps leading up to it: εὐπραγία comes from εὖ πράττειν (intransitive) derived, we are to infer, from ἀγαθὰ ποιεῖν from ὠφελεῖν from ὠφέλιμον. It is a striking instance of dialectical pacing.

1220

εὖ ἐχόντων (B15-16) characterizes the good things in question adverbially (εὖ), i.e., as results of a process or action.

1221

ἀναίτιον (B16). The quasi personal construction with the adjective achieves a verbal allusion to Homer Od.1.32-3: Ὢ πόποι οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται. | ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κακ’ ἔμμεναι … .

1222

With this assertion he borrows something back from the ensuing lines of Od.1.33-34 (αὐτοὶ | σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν), thus drawing, from the poet’s quotation of the gods, grounds that he will later use for criticizing the poet’s representation of them.

1223

ταύτην (D1) suggests there will be others (cf. οὗτος, 380C6).

1224

τὰ ἕτερα (D7): ἕτερα (here alluding the bad κῆρες), is often derogatory, in mild aposiopesis: cf. 390C7, 407D7-8, 426D8-E1, 488B2-3, 532C2, 550A1-2, 586C7, 601A6-7, 605A10; Euthyd.298E1; Gorg.481E4, 482A2, 514D8-9; Phdo.58D8; Prot.326A4; Symp.201E4; Tht.167B2. Cf. the more general remark of Gildersleeve, §593. Contrast the approbative use in litotes at Phdrs.233D4, and cf. Thrasymachus's use at 337D1 and also its use connection with infinite regress, 342A7.

1225

Hom.Il.4.85-140, when Pandarus wounded Menelaus during the truce, spurred on by Athena in the guise of Laodicus, later referred to as the daughter of Zeus (128).

1226

Hom.Il.20.1-74, when Themis gathered the gods to Zeus.

1227

σχεδόν (380A8): cf. ἐγγὺς τούτων ἀναγκαστέον λογοποιεῖν, 378D2-3.

1228

ἄθλιοι (B2) with its derogatory connotation, echoed from 360D4. This cynical term is laced with disparagement the same way the term “pity” is often laced with contempt (cf.354A4 and n.). Socrates is representing the use that someone might make of Homer, such as the uses reviewed in Adeimantus’s speech, which is the immediate target and center of the whole discourse though not its circumference.

1229

εὐνομήσεσθαι (B8), referring to mental habits one can hardly expect the citizens to have formed if from youth they had heard that obeying the law is for “losers.”

1230

οὔτε σύμφορα ἡμῖν οὔτε σύμφωνα αὐτὰ αὐτοῖς (C3).

1231

σύμψηφός σοί εἰμι (C4) humorously echoes Socrates’s σύμφορα and σύμφωνα but also alludes to the notion of a well ordered state at B8.

1232

νόμων τε καὶ τύπων (C7), with τε καί designating the special connection between the settled belief and the trait that leads to it, just now confirmed by Adeimantus.

1233

ὅδε (D1), first person demonstrative, again.

1234

καὶ ἀλλάττοντα τὸ αὑτοῦ εἶδος (D3), “i.e., switching his (visible) shape” specifies γιγνόμενον αὐτόν (“in himself undergoing change”), just as καὶ ποιοῦντα below specifies ἀπατῶντα below: the epexegetical καί of mss. ADM should be kept (pace Burnet).

1235

τε (D5) added to καί to indicate this statement of the alternative (ἤ, D5) will cover both the τότε μέν and the τότε δέ clause, with two reasons and not just one.

1236

ἁπλοῦν (D5) here in the basic sense given by its Latin cognate, “simple” (i.e., einfach, the singular of dreifach, double or duplex). It has a range of connotations similar to those of εὐήθης, though much more often approbatory. As εὐήθης refers to a goodness that might be the effect of simplicity (whence Thrasymachus’s cynical uses it of 343C6-7 and 348C12), ἁπλοῦς expresses a simplicity, or lack of duplicity, that might be the cause of good. Here in a “corrective” chiasm, it means guileless and corrects ἀπατῶντα, as ἥκιστα ἐκβαίνειν corrects γιγνόμενον.

1237

τί δὲ τόδε (D8): “But what about this (thing of mine)?” – typical at such a juncture. The ensuing argument, that god never changes whether actually or apparently (380D8-2E11), is an extended eliminatio (as in the development of the first τύπος the argument is purely dialectical and essentialistic, as befits gods). If the god actually changes the change is caused either by himself or something else (380D8-E1). That it can be caused by something else is refuted first (380E3-381B7); that he would change himself is refuted second (381B8-C6). Rather than move on to god’s apparent changing—i.e. changing from our point of view—Socrates pauses to expel a selection of stories that depict gods as changing (381D1-E7). Only then does he move to the possibility that gods deceive men into thinking they change when they don’t (381E8-10). He refutes this possibility by distinguishing between two kinds of deception (382A4-C1) and then eliminating both, the one kind because it is abhorrent to both gods and men (C3-5) and the other kind because while it has several uses for men none of them is needed by gods (C6-E4). It is only then that he presents the second τύπος in formal dress (383A2-5), as he had the first τύπος at 380C6-9, and closes the discussion with the extended example of a story about god deceiving man, which this second (cf. δεύτερος, 383A2) guideline would now disallow.

The interruption of his argument with condemnations halfway through led the scholiast to find two traits in this passage (ad 380D and 382A: ἀμετάβλητος and ἀληθής) and confused J.-C. (ad 380D). For self-transformation and producing the illusion of difference as the two types of deception cf. Soph.236C. The brunt of this second trait is that the gods must be depicted as trustworthy. Thus the climactic example of a passage to be censured in accordance with this trait is Thetis’s complaint at being lied to by Apollo in propria persona, whom she trusted since he is a god (cf. 383B5-6: θεῖον ἀψευδὴς στόμα ἤλπιζον). She has no doubt that the god did not change (note her striking anaphora of αὐτός).

1238

τι (D8) is the subject of ἐξίσταιτο (not god, as neuter αὐτό [E1] shows). The enclitic shows a distinct tendency to come early in its clause rather than wait for the word it agrees with (cf.411A9-10 and n.1235, 382A1, 389B7, 430E7, 555A1, 564E2). There is a slight anacoluthon, in that the optative sets forth an ideal conditional sentence – a possibility to be countenanced – but since the apodosis is an assertion governed by necessity (ἀνάγκη, D8), the condition concludes with a generalization (μεθίστασθαι without ἄν representing a present indicative in “present general” condition). The variant ἐξίστατο reported in F would be setting forth an irreal condition and the ensuing anacoluthon would be intolerably harsh: indeed, ἄν would need be added after μεθίστασθαι.

1239

ἀνάγκη (D8) of the logical necessity of logically exhaustive possibilities (cf.333D9 and n.199).

1240

ἀλλοιοῦταί τε καὶ κινεῖται (E3-4): exegesis of the precedent term, ἀλλοιοῦται, with κινεῖται suggests a passing reference to Ionian φυσιολογία, to which Socrates easily turns, and rather often, for gross corroboration of moral or psychological ideas. Cf. 388E5-7, 485B2-3, 498A6-B1, 548C5, 563E9-564A4; Lys.215E1-216A2. Here it ushers in the examples from the world of animals (σῶμα) and plants (φυτόν).

1241

ἀνδρειοτάτην καὶ φρονιμωτάτην (381A3), two of the four standard virtues, to match the pair of bodily virtues adduced above (380E6), τὸ ἀνδρεῖον selected for its kinship to bodily strength, and τὸ φρόνιμον somewhere between σοφία and σωφροσύνη.

1242

ταράξειεν (A4) embodying in one word both types of effect (fear and confusion) that the soul’s bravery and intelligence suit it to resist. These two aspects of the soul happen also to be the prerequisites of the natural born guard, from above.

1243

ταράξειέν τε καὶ ἀλλοιώσειεν (A4): contrast ἀλλοιοῦταί τε καὶ κινεῖται above, where the exegetic verb followed the precedent term and helped introduce the exemplary material (380E4 and n.). Here, by a reverse logic, the exemplary realm (the soul) has already been introduced and the term particularly suited to it (ταράξειεν) comes first, followed (with the same connective, τε καί) by the precedent or generic term, which in effect asserts that the particular verb (ταράττειν) is indeed an instance of, and therefore boils down to nothing more than, the precedent or general idea (ἀλλιοῦσθαι). For τε καί linking the example to the principle cf. A8-9 (with n.), 339E2, 374D1-2.

1244

καὶ μήν που καὶ τά γε σύνθετα (A6): the asseveration (μήν) is shown by που to be merely opportunistic.

1245

τά (γε) σύνθετα πάντα σκεύη τε καὶ οἰκοδήματα καὶ ἀμφιέσματα (A6-7). The predicate position of πάντα makes τὰ σύνθετα a noun. Therefore the list σκεύη τε καὶ οἰκοδήματα καὶ ἀμφιέσματα is an exegetical appositive to τὰ σύνθετα πάντα. For τε linking an apposition cf.361B2-3 and n.

σκεῦος is one of those nouns that can be used for the species or for the genus. As a genus among other genera it stands for the artificial realm in contrast to the natural (e.g., Gorg.506D5-6 [σκεῦος, σῶμα, ψυχή, ζῷον]; H.Maj.295CE [σῶμα, ζῷα, σῶμα, σκεύη, etc.]; Rep.401A3-4 [σκεύη, ἡ τῶν σωμάτων φύσις, τὰ ἄλλα φυτά, on which cf. n.1596], 510A5-6 [ζῷα, φυτευτὸν γένος, σκευαστὸν γένος], 596C5-9 [σκεύη, φυόμενα, ζῷα, etc.], and cf. Soph.219A11-12). It can also be used for a species or subset of artificial items, usually with modifier as at Leg.679A (ἀμπεχόνη, στρωμνή, οἰκήσεις, σκεύη ἔμπυρά τε καὶ ἄπυρα) but also alone as at Charm.173B7-C1 (σκεύη, ἀμπεχόνη, ὑπόδησις). Its “ancipital” character as genus (looking back to the natural genera σῶμα, φυτόν, ψυχή) and species (looking forward to οἰκοδήματα and ἀμφιέσματα) accounts for its being placed first in the present list. The subsequent verbal nouns οἰκόδημα and ἀμφίεσμα are metonymies for the more usual οἰκία and ἱμάτιον (as, e.g., at 372A7) stressing the fact that these items are the result of manufacture (σύνθεσις).

1246

εὖ εἰργασμένα (A7-8): the natural way to say this would be καλῶς εἰργασένα (in the sense of καλός noted at 353A4); εὖ is used to slant the expression toward εὖ ἔχοντα (see next note).

1247

εὖ ἔχοντα (A8): cf.380E3 (with εὖ rather than ἄριστα copying the εὖ with εἰργασμένα), but that notion primarily applied to living entities that achieve one or another stable state such as health or weakness or strength or disease (i.e., ἕξεις from ἔχω): this category does not properly apply to artifacts, which are put into their condition by being manufactured, and thereafter merely last, shorter or longer. The καί therefore links the case to the precedent term, as above (A4).

1248

ὑπὸ χρόνου τε καὶ τῶν ἄλλων παθημάτων (A8-9) calls for exactly the same analysis as εὖ ἐργασμένα καὶ εὖ ἔχοντα (A8). Time is the new item, specific to artifacts since they do not have ἕξεις but simply wear out, which is then linked to the precedent term it needs to instantiate (τὰ ἄλλα παθήματα, redone from 380E6). Here the connective is τε καί, connecting example to principle as it did at A4.

1249

πᾶν δή (B1) draws a generalized conclusion from the instances σῶμα, φυτόν, ψυχή, σύνθετον (380E4-381A7) which then as a principle would be applied to the gods.

An argument of this form cannot be valid or “logically true.” A strictly exhaustive list of specifics would have to include the demonstrandum itself (here, the gods or god) and therefore could only beg the question; conversely a logically exhaustive division according to types would prove too much on the one hand since the demonstrandum would perforce belong to only one of the types, and too little on the other since the truth of the principle in the one instance draws its support from its resemblance to the others.

Still this kind of argument can be stronger or weaker, and more or less persuasive. If the collection of instances or types is comprehensive and yet each type instantiates the principle differently but indifferently well (as the overlapping terminology in the presentation of the cases nicely evinces), then the principle appears to be detachable from its cases and true for its own reasons (and so it shall be, again in the manner of its expression: cf. n.1251, infra). The present collection lays out essentially three categories that collapse into two: body (human or otherwise natural [cf. use of φυτοῦ at 491D1-2]), soul, and artifact (whether a tool or a house or a garment). Behind these three loom two larger categories, things that grow (as well as ψυχή, the principle of life within, reading now αὐτήν with D rather than the οὐ τήν of AFM, at 381A3) and things that are made, a version of the distinction between the real and the artificial. The selection is therefore both comprehensive and refined. As to the principle that what is in good condition is less liable to change under external assault, the attributes of health and strength which all natural bodies share enable them to resist the assaults to which they are severally liable, of food and drink or of wind and heat. The soul in turn if it is strong in its way retains its mindfulness and resolve. Even artifacts, whether the equipment we make for ourselves or our houses and our clothes, if made well (this now corresponding to being “grown” well), are more durable and less liable to break apart into their original components.

The argument points to relations within the several categories of individuals that it adduces. Objectively speaking, as the examples continually re-instantiate the principle, the principle verges onto taking on a life of its own. Even though articulating the principle may still borrow from or bear traces of the examples that have revealed it, it finally rises out of the process as truer and realer than each and all the examples exactly because it remains the same while they come to be seen as embodying it only in their several ways. Stated subjectively the mind is led by the sequence of examples to notice, isolate, remember, and then apply a common element it had not seen as such before. This leading on of the mind, identical in all essential aspects to the kind of argument Socrates has used with Polemarchus in Book One, gives this kind of argument the name ἐπαγωγή, or induction.

1250

καλῶς εἶχον (B1): εὖ and ἄριστα are replaced by καλῶς under the influence of the last example, the artifact.

1251

ἢ φύσει ἢ τέχνῃ (B1): φύσις in its sense of the natural condition (i.e., ἕξις: cf. 514A1-2, 518B2, 573C8, 576A6 and B7, 591B4); but pairing it with τέχνη brings it into its more usual meaning (the world of nature). The slip in meaning is tolerated in order to reach and exploit this standard, highly abstract, exhaustive doublet, which confers exhaustiveness onto conclusion and stresses its indepedence from the examples that motivated it. After the careful overlapping of terminology in describing the cases there is here a gratuitous abandonment of that terminology, substituting for it the new terms ἐλαχίστην (for ἥκιστα), μεταβολή (for ἀλλοίωσις and κίνησις), and highly abstract modal term ἐνδέχεται, as well as the gratuitous expansion of the principle with ἢ ἀμφοτέροις, added without regard to whether there are in fact any cases where φύσις and τέχνη are both involved. For this gratuitous expansion after the basic point has been secured, cf. καὶ ἐδεστέον γε καὶ ποτέον at Crito 47B9-10, εἴτε καὶ αὐξάνοντες at Polit.293B6, ἢ καὶ γυναῖκα at Polit.296B7.

1252

ἀλλὰ μήν … γε (B4), reading γε with D Euseb (τε AFM), which helps mark the minor premise while καί infers (whereas τε is unneeded).

1253

ἄριστα ἔχει (B4), retrieving the original terminology from 380E3.

1254

μὲν δή (B6) along with ταύτῃ (sc. ὁδῷ) gently reminds us that there remains still another way that γοητεία might express itself (380D3-6). For men repeated at the end of the men-section, providing a transition to the de-section cf. μέν at Phdrs.248A1 (repeated from 247B6)***

1255

ἴσχοι (B6): In the midst of retrieving original terms Socrates allows himself also to use a new term (rather than retrieving γιγνόμενον and ἀλλάττοντα from 380D3), which relies on and brings forward the role played by the cognate expression ἔχειν πως in the proof.

1256

πολλὰς μορφάς (B6) also retrieves the original terminology (380D4), and gives the sense of a QED.

1257

ἀλλ’ ἆρα (B8) introducing the remaining alternative. Adeimantus recognizes and acknowledges the logic of the eliminatio, by answering, “Clearly he would alter himself, if it is actually true (εἴπερ, B9) that he changes.”

1258

μεταβάλλοι καὶ ἀλλοιοῖ (B8): μεταβάλλειν is new. The alternative concept, that he is both subject and object of the change, is most simply expressed by a transitive verb, which is then made to boil down to a type of ἀλλοίωσις (καὶ ἀλλοιοῖ).

1259

βέλτιόν τε καὶ κάλλιον (B10) the comparative degree of the commonplace hendiadys expressing value, ἀγαθὸς καὶ καλός, just as τὸ χεῖρον καὶ τὸ αἴσχιον represents their opposites.

1260

κάλλους ἢ ἀρετῆς (C2), the nouns that go with those adjectives, in reverse order.

1261

ἀνάγκη (C1): Adeimantus again acknowledges the logical necessity of the eliminatio.

1262

χεῖρον (C1) does the work of the hendiadys: the beautiful is certainly good because it is good for it to be beautiful, and therefore when the doublet is to be represented by one of the members, the member that does the work is τὸ ἀγαθόν.

1263

οὕτως ἔχοντος (C3) genitive absolute, unexpressed neuter τούτου standing for the principle enunciated in B10-C2, that change would have to be for the worse. That principle is deduced from the perfection of god, but once grasped—that (for whatever reason) change would be for the worse—men can come back into the argument: for what god or man would choose change for the worse?

1264

χείρω ποιεῖν ὁπῃοῦν (C4): χείρω worse in general (cf. C1 and n.); then ὁπῃοῦν, generalizing, includes both τὸ ἀγαθόν and τὸ κακόν.

1265

θεῷ (C7), with ADM, instead of the facilior θεόν (with F). καί emphasizes that logic binds god.

1266

κάλλιστος καὶ ἄριστος (C8), the superlative degree.

1267

εἰς τὸ δυνατόν (C8) seems to me a concession to the separate virtues of the gods in the pantheon.

1268

ἀεὶ ἁπλῶς ἐν τῇ αὑτοῦ μορφῇ (C9): ἁπλῶς suggests straightforwardness and honesty (so it was used, saliently, at 380D5: cf. n.) and therefore threatens to confuse the distinction that the two-part argument is based on (actual change, whether caused by external forces or the god himself, and deception that such change has occurred: 380D3-6). But the basic distinction there was between the actual and the apparent, and the apparent was characterized by the motive of deception. There remains the question that if the god actually changed what would be his motive for doing so. The refutation that he does not actually consists, in part, in showing that in pure logic he could have no rational motive to change. This argument ignores our fear of some underlying character (as opposed to his thinking) lurking in this powerful divine force, so that the assertion, here, that he is straightforward is consoling and in itself harmless. The issue of his intentions will in any case be dealt with next.

1269

In the first case (D2-4), instanced by Thetis and Proteus, the Homeric words themselves, παντοῖοι τελέθοντες (Od.17.495-6), are relevant to the formulation of the τύπος; but in the second the relevant word, ἠλλοιωμένην (D7), comes in Socrates’s narrative. We are free to imagine this term did appear in the immediate context of the quoted fragment (which is reported by schol. in Ar.Batr.1344 as being from Aesch.Xant.[= fr.170 N], whence μηδ’ ἐν τραγῳδίαις [D5-6]). Hera’s story perhaps disguised herself as a second priestess of to discover the infidelity of Zeus with Io.

1270

ἀναπειθόμενοι (E2), of being persuaded against one’s better judgment, as at 365E5.

1271

περιέρχονται νύκτωρ πολλοῖς ξένοις καὶ παντοδαποῖς ἰνδαλλόμενοι (E3-4): the language is in fact an interpretation and elaboration of the quote from the Odyssey above (cf. Adeimantus’s similar move at 366A3-4 and n.), here helping to bring out what is troublesome about it (περιέρχονται νύκτωρ ~ ἐπιστρωφῶσι // πολλοῖς … καὶ παντοδαποῖς ~ ἀλλοδαποῖσι παντοῖοι [the repeated -δαπ- or -απ- element suited to the foreignness of their garb: cf. the etymology given in LSJ s.v. ἀλλοδαπός]). The inference that the gods changing shape would alarm the children reveals the point of ἁπλῶς at C9.

1272

The contrast is between their actually changing and merely deceiving us, but as above its articulation sets the gods (sc. as they are: αὐτοὶ μὲν οἱ θεοί, 381E8, cf. τότε μὲν αὐτόν, 380D3) against us (sc. as viewing them: ἡμῖν δέ, 381E9, cf. τότε δὲ ἡμᾶς, 380D4). The same polarity will be stressed below, 383A3-5.

1273

ἴσως (E11) indicates not that he is unsure but that he recognizes this is the next unanswered question in the structure of the eliminatio.

1274

ἢ λόγῳ ἢ ἔργῳ (382A1-2): generalizing with the usual couplet, but since the primary semantic field of ψεύδεσθαι is in language he needs to add a “picture” of what a lie in action would be—whence φάντασμα προτείνων Cf. 382E9-10 and n.1314.

1275

οὐκ οἶσθα (A4) answering Adeimantus’s οὐκ οἶδα: Socrates buys himself an opportunity to expatiate on his question—by introducing a new meaning of ψεῦδος and ψεύδεσθαι.

1276

ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος (A4): Broaching a new idea with a paradox (cf. G.Billings, Art of Transition 87-8). Compare his riddle about the γενναῖος σκύλαξ, 375A2-3 and n.

1277

μισοῦσι (A5), functioning as the opposite of ἐθέλειν (A1, A8).

1278

And again with οὕτως (A7) he opens by answering the interlocutor’s expression (πῶς λέγεις, A6).

1279

ψεύδεσθαι (A7) despite having been deponent middle just above (A1), may in this extremely vague clause be middle or passive, and so should at this point to be translated in a way that excludes neither possibility.

1280

οὐδείς (A8), neither god nor man (cf. A5), the opposite of τις at 381C4.

1281

ἑκὼν ἐθέλει (A8), not redundant, but exact. ἑκών as often describes not the will but the knowledge or awareness with which the will acquiesces, as in the maxim οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἁμαρτάνει. Contrast the use at 331B2 (and n.).

1282

ἐκεῖ αὐτό (A9): both terms are vague and yet both are emphatic, ἐκεῖ as third person demonstrative adding importance as ἐκεῖνος = ille, and αὐτό not τοῦτο, suggesting prior familiarity or notoriety.

1283

οὐδὲ νῦν πω μανθάνω (A10): The explanation has introduced new (νῦν) confusion.

1284

τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτόν (A7): The adjective is new in the context. Intensionally, it connotes mastery (as the attribute of a subject), or importance or influence (as the attribute of an object); its extensional reference, as well as the force of its dative case are at this point unclear (though ἐκεῖ subsequently begins narrow the range of the dative).

1285

οἴει γάρ τί με … σεμνὸν λέγειν (B1): enclitic τι tending to appear early in the clause rather than after the word it goes with (σεμνόν: cf. 380D8 and n.1238). It is not deep but it is a riddle. it is totally in keeping with the Socratic method as we know it and with the Platonic method of composition that imitates and emulates it, that Socrates’s interlocutor as well as Plato’s reader should be required to do some thinking along the way and reach the idea on his own. By stirring up a question in his interlocutor's mind Socrates's intentional obscurity at least creates a berth in his mind (and ours) for an answer. For instances, compare 375A2-3, 392C9-D8, 413A2-B4 (compare τραγικῶς there with σεμνόν here), 421C8ff, 557D1-2, 602C1-6, 608C9, 612C5. Conversely the commentator who lies in ambush, waiting for a compelling proof, often ends up finding fault with the text for failing to do his work for him, or faults the argument for ignoring questions that occur only within his own mind.

1286

τῇ ψυχῇ περὶ τὰ ὄντα (B2): By the syntactical parallelism (κυριωτάτῳ / περὶ τὰ ὄντα) we immediately perceive that Socrates is answering his riddle by filling in its blanks.

1287

ψεύδεσθαί τε καὶ ἐψεῦσθαι (B2): ψεύδεσθαι is repeated from A7: what was unclear there was not, as with κυριωτάτῳ and κυριώτατα, the semantics or reference of the verb, but how deceiving (ψεύδεσθαι) could be tantamount to acquiring something (κεκτῆσθαι: A9). Epexegetical καὶ with ἐψεῦσθαι, as though it were an etymological clarification, begins the explanation, the ensuing terms depicting a metamorphosis that ends with the target term κεκτῆσθαι.

1288

ψεύδεσθαί τε καὶ ἐψεῦσθαι καὶ ἀμαθῆ εἶναι καὶ ἐνταῦθα ἔχειν τε καὶ κεκτῆσθαι τὸ ψεῦδος (B2-3): The list is “metabatic,” providing the steps that lead from the term ψεύδεσθαι to the term κεκτῆσθαι from the previous remark (I borrow the term from Phdrs.262A2-3). The person deceives with or by his soul (ψεύδεσθαι), then himself becomes deceived (ἐψεῦσθαι) as if telling the lie forced him to unlearn what he knew (ἀμαθῆ εἶναι), because there (ἐνταῦθα) where he knew truth he now holds (ἔχειν) the lie, so that it has become a fixture there. The metabasis in this case is a temporal process.

Usually the metabatic list is used to bring the interlocutor along in prospect rather than to backfill: cf. 348D2-3, 357C5-7, 395D1-3, 412C12-13, 488D1-2 (cf.488E1-9A1), 492C7-8; cf.Crat.393A6-B1 (a specious use of metabasis that is characteristic of the etymologies of Cratylus, as again 429D8-E7), 411C4-5, 423B4; Crito 48B8, 54C5; Gorg.505A6-10; Ion 533B6; Leg.634A3-4, 664A6-7, 678A3, 686E4-5, 828B3, 909B5; Parm.142A3-4 (cf.155D6-8); Phlb.17E4-5, 36C10-11, 50B1-4; Prot.319D2-4, 337C8, 352B4; Tht.157B4 (where του is metabatic [with Campbell ad loc.] and not to be emended), 206D3-4; Tim.49B8 (λίθους) and C1-2 (ἀέρα), 76D8-9 (and Cornford ad loc.). Less obviously metabatic are Lach.192A4-6; Leg.704D6-7, 783A6-7; Lys.215D4-7; Phdo 80C4-5; Symp.192A4-5.

1289

Emphatic αὐτό (B4) repeated along with μάλιστα from A9, is now seen to mean κεκτῆσθαι τὸ ψεῦδος περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα, i.e., περὶ τὰ ὄντα; leaving the spatial or local expression ἐν τῷ τοιούτῳ to refer to ἐκεῖ, there, which is now seen to mean the κυριώτατον, i.e., the soul. The soul began vaguely as the referent of the deception (bare dative κυριωτάτῳ, cf. τῇ ψυχῇ, B2), but ended up as the medium in which the lie was lodged (ἐν τῷ τοιούτῳ, B4-5 – with perfect passives).

1290

τῷ τοιούτῳ (B5): referring to the soul in terms of its crucial influence (as τῷ κυριωτάτῳ) in the judgment and awareness of truth.

1291

ἀλλὰ μήν … γε (B7), introducing the “simultaneously true” minor premise, in this case the articulation of a distinction between the kinds of falsehood that inhere in statements and in souls, indirectly alluded to by the expression ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος above, an oxymoron at the same time emphatic and vague. All that we have to go in is the obverse of A7-9: is there a ψεῦδος that lodges in a less primary or influential instrument or medium? or a ψεῦδος about less primary and influential things (depending on the sense of κύριος)?

1292

τό γε ἐν τοῖς λόγοις (B9): With τό Socrates suggests we already have met this kind of ψεῦδος. He is referring back to A1-2 with its indication (again indirect, as much is in this page!) that the primary application of ψεῦδος and ψεύδεσθαι was in λόγος and speaking (so that ἔργῳ there needed to be illustrated with a metaphor: cf. n.1274).

1293

μίμημά τι τοῦ … παθήματος καὶ ὕστερον γεγονὸς εἴδωλον (B10): μίμημα stands to the world of the verb and the adverb as εἴδωλον stands to the world of the adjective and noun. The former, with its indefinite τι and its objective genitive παθήματος, another verbal noun, expresses a groping or evolving process that later comes to a stop (γεγονός). When the waters clear and the dust settles the fixed outlines of an εἴδωλον come into view, which then can be compared with the original and found to be false, to be a ψεῦδος. For this use of εἴδωλον of a “reification” in contrast with the verbal blur that leads to it, compare 599A6-7 and B4-5 with nn.

1294

ἄκρατον (C1) of wine undiluted with water: the εἴδωλον bears some admixture of truth as having achieved realness (γεγονός) and bearing some mark of the πάθημα that led to it, which itself was real ἔργῳ. The ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, conversely, is a ψεῦδος ἄκρατον because it occludes the soul from performing its sovereign function of reaching the sovereign truth.

1295

τὸ τῷ ὄντι ψεῦδος (C3), standing in contrast with τὸ ἐν λόγοις ψεῦδος as ἔργον in contrast with λόγος, and replacing the more provocative juxtaposition, ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, with which he bought time to draw the distinction (382A4: for the synonymity cf. 343C4, 347D4-5). Now that the distinction has been achieved, such a periphrastic expression as this may safely be adopted.

1296

πότε καὶ τῷ (C6): The reference of τῷ is unclear: it may be a dative of means (like πάντῃ, E6) or a dative of interest. At this point we do not know what it means.

1297

πρός τε τοὺς πολεμίους καὶ τῶν καλουμένων φίλων (C7-8): The shift to the genitive is unexpected. The τε, rather than as usual setting up a connection for a second prepositional object (second to πολεμίους) to be governed by πρός after being introduced by its own καί in effect places a comma after πολεμίους, placing πρὸς τοὺς πολεμίους on its own, with proleptic καί introducing not only the complementary noun φίλων but, with its new case, a new syntactical phrase in which the role of the genitive is not yet clear, the default sense being partitive.

1298

τῶν καλουμένων φίλων (C7). The proviso recalls the confusion in Book One whether people are our friends because we help them or we help them because they are our friends, a point that will suddenly become relevant below (E3). The shift from accusative to genitive extenuates the construction, which is then slightly shifted (Heindorf’s οἳ ἄν for ὅταν smoothes out the mild anacoluthon, unnecessarily).

1299

ὅταν (C8): The question is πότε καὶ τῷ χρήσιμον (C6). πρὸς τοὺς πολεμίους combined the two (our enemies [ἐχθροί] during war); the mention of friends, the complement to ἐχθροί who are πολέμιοι, gives a second answer for τῷ and thus begs for a corresponding second answer for πότε, a time or circumstance in which falsehood would be useful for friends. ὅταν is therefore natural and expected (pace Hermann who emends to οἳ ἄν in order to give the genitive a governing syntax as soon as possible); the dangling genitive is then tucked in to the sentence as an objective genitive governed by ἀποτροπῆς (C9). τότε is semi-redundant, like οὕτω below.

1300

ἀφομοιοῦντες (D2) being nominative may only go with the subject of λέγομεν, and so also with εἰδέναι. We the founders are being conflated with the poets for whose poetry we are in the process of formulating guidelines.

1301

οὕτω (D3) semi-redundant, elevating the syntactically subordinate participial expression to the ordinate rank. Cf. 368D6 and n.

1302

καὶ μάλα … οὕτως ἔχει (D4): Of course the “validity” of the argument relies on the list of usefulnesses being exhaustive. Whatever comprehensiveness might have been suggested by the reference to friends and enemies is undermined, however, by the opportunistic reference to storytelling. So, in lieu of a logically comprehensive list of usefulnesses we are given the dramatically strong response of Adeimantus.

1303

τῷ θεῷ (D5). The article with θεός in the singular verges toward the meaning “that which is god” i.e., the divine: cf. its first uses in the present context, at 379A7 and B1 and note ad B7. The reasoning is clearer if it is based on god as god rather than calling for an exhaustive survey of the entire pantheon, which would be just as ridiculous as imagining that god is ignorant of days gone by. Indeed the shift from the indiscriminate plural used of men above, to this essentialist singular bespeaks a categorical shift from the human to the divine.

1304

διὰ τὸ μὴ εἰδέναι (D6) begins to go through the possible grounds of usefulness in reverse order according the usual chiasm of before and after (cf. n.14).

1305

ποιητής μὲν ἄρα ψευδὴς ἐν θεῷ οὐκ ἔνι (D9): ἐν θεῷ (in divinity) virtually replaces ἐν θεοῖς (among the gods), continuing thereby the essentialist, or “theological” tenor of the argument.

1306

δεδιὼς τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ψεύδοιτο (D11), the reading of mss. ADM and the edd. The phrasing copies that of the previous option, ἀφομοιῶν ἂν ψεύδοιτο (D6-7), with the exception of omitting ἄν (read by F and Eusebius before ψεύδοιτο). The omission of discourse markers in parallel questions is an index of the casual spontaneity of dialectic (cf. 333A13, 352E7, 398A6, 415D9-E3, 443A6). ἐχθρούς substitutes for πολεμίους (C8) since the gods do not engage in war; but it matters little since they don’t have rivalrous and hateful relations, either.

1307

οἰκείων (E2) replacing τῶν καλουμένων φίλων (C8), and the construction in διά being imitated (in reverse chiastic order). But the notion of friendship it is not forgotten: θεοφιλής (E3): the gods are not stuck with mad relatives and fickle friends as we are.

1308

ἀλλ’ οὐδείς (E3): The sequence of answers shows the options are not just false but ridiculous and absurd. The ἀλλά with which Socrates introduces the alternatives (D11, E2) mildly protests, “But perhaps... .” With this third answer, Adeimantus closes the door on the “but perhapses” by himself saying, “But no.”

1309

πάντῃ (E6) formulaic in summary of an eliminatio.

1310

τὸ δαιμόνιον τε καὶ θεῖον (E6): the neuter adjectives more explicitly formulate the essentialism of the argument; the addition of δαιμόνιον, shoehorned in before the precedent term θεῖον, broadens the conclusion to include everything beyond the human realm (cf. 427B6-7 and n. ad 391D1-2), as if to remark that we have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope throughout this phase of the argument, trying to conceive of gods on analogy with humans.

1311

ἀψευδές (E6) a new term used in powerful litotes: in the course of learning the gods don’t lie we have been reminded that men live in an unreliable world and always may.

1312

κομιδῇ ἄρα (E8).

1313

ἁπλοῦν καὶ ἀληθές (E8): The neuter adjectival mode of expression is continued by ἁπλοῦν (recalling the first limb, that god does not change: 380D8-381C10 [cf. ἁπλῶς, 381C9, ἁπλοῦν 380D5]) and ἀληθές (recalling the present limb, 381E8-382E7, about falsity and deception).

1314

οὔτε κατὰ φαντασίας οὔτε κατὰ λόγους (E9-10) redoes 382A1-2 (ἢ λόγῳ ἢ ἔργῳ φάντασμα προτείνων) in normal chiastic order, and corroborates the interpretation that (pace Adam) is only meant there as an explanation of ἔργῳ.

1315

οὔτε κατὰ σημείων πομπάς (E10): This new item is a natural extension of what has already been dealt with, perhaps anticipated by δαιμόνιον (E6) as occupying the μεταξύ through which the message is sent. We shall see its application immediately below (πομπήν, A8).

1316

The ending portion of the list (E9-11) is our first instance of “serial subdifferentiation,” each new section of the list differentiating the last item in the previous section. Cf. 395A4-10 and n.

1317

φαίνεται (383A1) is therefore “dialectical.”

1318

The conclusion is here agreed to (383E8-383A1) and then adopted as a τύπος (A2-6), just as agreement was presented at 380B6-C5 and then formalized into a τύπος at C6-10. J.-C. are wrong to read 383E8-11 as the articulation of the τύπος and as the antecedent of τούτον (383A2). The τύπος is stated in the ὡς clause (383A3ff), which otherwise becomes either a redundant restatement of the τύπος or a circular explanation of it.

1319

ποιεῖν and λέγειν do not govern ὡς (pace Adam and J.-C.). As in the presentation of the first τύπος (380C6-9) their syntax is enclosed within the prepositional relative clause that defines the purpose of the τύποι in general, which is then followed by the recitation of the τύπος itself, in an infinitival noun clause (παράγειν), that is the antecedent of τούτον (383A2, cf. οὗτος 380C6). If ὡς is intolerable as introducing an infinitive noun clause it must be dropped. Emending παράγειν into παράγοντας (Richards) makes ὡς possible at the expense of making its clause redundant or circular; and it creates a balanced pair of participles for the two μήτε’s at the expense of restricting sorcery to alteration where before it had been applied to both alteration and deception (cf.380D1-6, 381E8-10).

In the previous two formulations of this τύπος, the word order pointed a contrast between the gods and us (μήτε αὐτούς …, μήτε ἡμᾶς: cf.381E8-9 with n., and 380D3-6), whereas the statement drew a contrast between the gods changing and the gods deceiving. This same astigmatism of contrasts is present a third time here, with αὐτοὺς γόητας ὄντας and ἡμᾶς intervening between the μήτε’s and the datives they govern (τῷ μεταβάλλειν ἑαυτούς and ψεύδεσι), the former intervening accusative being the subject and the latter being the object of the infinitive παράγειν. The word order seems gratuitously lapidary and something we would expect in the ὄγκος style of the Laws.

1320

Iliad 2.1-83. Zeus remains in heaven and sends Dream (a δαιμόνιόν τι, we may say) to Agamemnon, as a messenger who looks to Agamemnon like Nestor and who tells him he is a messenger from Zeus. It is a deception πρὸς ἡμᾶς. Zeus instructs Dream to tell Agamemnon that now is the moment he can sack Troy since it is no longer defended by the gods, which is a lie. He hopes Agamemnon will rely on this lie, attack rashly, and then suffer great losses. Zeus lies that victory is in store in order to create the opposite outcome. Agamemnon does rely on the message—partly because Dream looks like wise old Nestor but also because Dream says it is from Zeus—and calls a counsel of the princes and advocates an attack. Nestor (the “real” Nestor) counsels the princes to believe the dream: from any other than the best of the Achaeans it might be a lie. Nestor places Agamemnon in the same position of reliability as Agamemnon had placed Zeus: the reliance proves to be transitive and the princes summon all the troops. Agamemnon tests their will by telling them a lie (110ff), that he has decided that Zeus’s long-standing promise they would some day sack Troy has now after nine futile years proved to be a bitter deception, and that it is time for them to quit and go home. Agamemnon lies about his dream from Zeus in order to create the opposite outcome: the troops rebel against retreat and the battle is joined. It is here we get the Catalogue of Ships.

1321

Again the god did not change but lied, and again it is reliance (ἤλπιζον, B6) on the lie and its exact inversion of the truth that makes it so bitter. Had Apollo ceased to be Apollo Thetis could at least point to a time when Apollo was good to her; if someone or something else had forced him to change she could blame the someone else instead of him. But he did not change (as her anaphora of αὐτός stresses), and she had relied on him and the truth of what he said in the interim. Aeschylus’s almost otiose εἰπών (B3), repeated at B8, sets up a damning contrast between words and deeds (κτανών).

1322

χορὸν οὐ δώσομεν (C2): As his argument gains ground Socrates feels inspired to expand the reach and sway of the policy, arrogating a greater role to himself than the hypothesis of the argument justifies.

1323

That piety confers godliness is an adumbration of the notion of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ developed below (500C5-D2, 501B7, 613A7-B3).

1324

τούτους (C6) indicates Adeimantus has grouped the second trait (divine deception) with the first (divine blamelessness), and this in itself suggests the end of a section, a section about gods. It is in the character of transitions to begin before we know it and to end when they become obvious.

1325

ὡς νόμοις ἂν χρῴμην (C7): Adeimantus accepts the argument in the dialectical sense (συγχωρῶ, C6), not only as a τύπος to be used for the φύλακες but as a guide he would be willing to adopt as law and custom (cf. 380C4 and n.1231), an acceptance that likewise goes beyond the hypothesis of the argument.

1326

τιμήσουσι (A3) future because the education of the young guards is meant to instill in them opinions that will not be the opposite of what we will need them to be when they grow up (377B7-9).

1327

τήν τε ἀλλήλων φιλίαν μὴ περί σμικροῦ ποιησαμένοις (A3-4) The τε may be viewed primarily as adding the φιλία to the other two or primarily as adding the negative clause to the positive one, but it is best to view it as doing both. The sentence has the binary construction Plato favors (cf. 329A5 and n.). Either way there are three items we want them to honor, gods parents and friendship among themselves: these constitute three aspects of piety (as defining the relation to gods, parents, and city). Socrates is making more explicit what he broached with the term θεοσεβεῖς at 383C4. We had heard that young men might easily apply the relations among the gods as a justification for their action toward their own parents (378B1-5); but it is only to the latter that the present words apply.

1328

ἀνδρεῖοι (A6), as the primary predication of the δέ clause, virtually presumes the μέν clause covered a single virtue co-specific with bravery—i.e., piety, as we had guessed. The transition has ended when it became obvious (cf. n.1324 ad 383C6).

1329

τἀν Ἅιδου ἡγούμενον εἶναί τε καὶ δεινὰ εἶναι (B4): τε καί linking prerequisite and inference, with εἶναι shifting from existential to copulative sense.

1330

ἥττης τε καὶ δουλείας (B6): loss of the battle and enslavement as its result.

1331

περὶ τούτων τῶν μύθων … λέγειν (B8) a constructio praegnans for μύθους λέγειν περὶ τούτων.

1332

ὡς … ἂν λέγοντας (B10-C1), reading the ἄν of F (om.ADM) with Burnet. I take the construction to be an abbreviation of ὡς οὔτε ἀληθῆ ἂν λέγοιεν, ταῦτα λέγοντες, οὔτε ὠφέλιμα, the tautology of λέγειν being abbreviated into ἄν only for ἂν λέγοιεν and the participial protasis λέγοντες attracted back into the accusative case of its antecedent, the accusative subject of λοιδορεῖν, if they do in fact speak this way.

1333

N.b. τοῦδε (C3), first person demonstrative.

1334

Achilles speaking to Odysseus in Hades (Od.11.489-91). Achilles would sacrifice τιμή (and, we are to take it, accept ἥττη τε και δουλεία [B6]). Other than honor, Achilles, according to the heroic world view, knows no greater good, except perhaps life, and never will. But now he chooses the merest of lives above ground over the endless “diminution of life” (καταφθιμένοισιν) in Hades. How can we expect our young to begin any better off than he? In the end the best of them will of course learn what Achilles doesn’t know, and the heroic world does not know, that being brave is a good in itself.

1335

Iliad 20.64, the thought of Hades fearing that Poseidon’s angry earthquake might expose his house to the world above.

1336

Il.23.103, spoken by Achilles after embracing the air where he dreamed the dead Patroclus was standing.

1337

Od.10.495, said by Circe of Teiresias when she tells Odysseus he must go down and take counsel with him.

1338

λιποῦσ’ ἀνδροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην (D10), a formula used of the death of Patroclus (Il.16.856) and of Hector (Il.22.382).

1339

Il.23.100, describing the disappearance of Patroclus from Achilles’s embrace, immediately before the passage quoted above.

1340

Od.24.6-10, of the suitors’ shades.

1341

διαγράφειν (387B2). Clearly Socrates is thinking of a text written on something, as he did above with ἐξαλείψομεν (386C3).

1342

τοῖς πολλοῖς (B3): as opposed to our wards. Cf. C3-5.

1343

παισὶ καὶ ἀνδράσιν (B4) is metabatic and genetic, meaning “the children we will need to end up as men who are free” (cf.413E6). The tense of the ensuing participle πεφοβημένους likewise describes the process in terms of its result.

1344

By γοόωσα in the first (386D10) and then by the participles of τρίζω used in the last two A3, A8.

1345

ὀνόματα (B8).

1346

δεινά τε καὶ φοβερά (B8-9) distinguishes the effect of the fearsome terms (δεινά) from the feelings that motivate their use (φοβερά): Socrates’s point is that the two feed on each other.

1347

Κωκυτούς τε καὶ Στύγας καὶ ἐνέρους καὶ ἀλίβαντας (B9-C1) The plurals as well as the autonomasia are satirical and derogatory (cf.378D3-4 and n.1206).

1348

ὡς οἴεται (C2), of all mss. makes no sense; I read ὡς οἷόν τε written into the Monacensis (as reported by Burnet).

1349

μή … γένωνται ἡμῖν (C5): Again he is careful to indicate that his argument is not against the power of stories and language per se, but its misuse in the presence of the young who are being groomed to become guards (cf. ποιητικά, 386B3).

1350

θερμότεροι καὶ μαλακώτεροι (C4-5): as opposed to the cool and steady temper of an ἀνδρεῖος. I take the two comparatives to be opposite tendencies (as θυμός is depicted at 590A9-B4). To interpret them progressively, as a fever that follows a thrill (e.g., Phdrs.251A) leading to a softening of metal by heating (Rep.411B) not only mixes metaphors (as Shorey notes in the course of accepting the interpretation, ad loc: [1.206 note c]) but leaves us with nonsense.

1351

τὸν δὲ ἐναντίον … ποιητέον (C9): At first the emphasis was on excision, but with the elaboration of instances and the natural variation of expression a fuller and fuller picture comes into view. We will not only bar some things but also request others; control will be placed on the authors (ποιητέον) as well as on the readers or reciters (λεκτέον) and the performers and actors, too (χορὸν οὐ δώσομεν, 383C1-2), since all kinds of poetry will be supervised (380C1-2, 381D5-6), and even depictions in the plastic arts (ποικιλτέον, 378C4).

1352

τοὺς ὀδυρμούς … καὶ τοὺς οἴκτους (D1), both onomatopoetic. ὀδυρμός recalls Cephalus’s criticism of his contemporaries for their intemperate emotionality (329A4-B3: esp. ὀδύρονται, B2). Socrates elaborates on the emission of inappropriate phonemes (as Adeimantus sees, D3).

1353

ἐπιεικής (D5), again the language of Cephalus: 330A5, 331B1; cf. n.160.

1354

ὑέος ἢ ἀδελφοῦ ἢ χρημάτων ἢ ἄλλου του τῶν τοιούτων (E3-4): The list is paced (cf. nn.197, 640), moving from two examples of one species of assets (son, brother) to a single general term for a second species of assets (χρήματα), to a closing term, all-inclusive because totally vague (ἄλλου του τῶν τοιούτων). Classing family members alongside one’s possessions (which offends the modern sensibility more than the Greek: cf.Gorg.511E1-3 [where γυναῖκας perhaps means female slaves: cf. Dodds ad loc.]; Leg.830D1; Lys.219D5-7; and cf. also Phdrs.239E2-40A8; Symp.178C6-D1; Tht.174D3-5A5) is here meant to emphasize the man’s autarky.

1355

The infinitives ὀδύρεσθαι and φέρειν (E6) are parallel with στερηθῆναι from which they are direct inferences, as indicated by the repetition of ἥκιστα ἄρα with its inferential καί (E6). There is no need to emend them into indicatives with Stallb. nor to supply a lost indicative with H.Richards (apud Adam). J.-C.’s attempt to explain them away as dependent upon λέγομεν above (387D11) is vitiated by the fact that λέγομεν already took ὡς rather than the infinitive in indirect discourse in D11-E1, but did not do so again in E3-4, to which the present clause is clearly parallel.

1356

ἐξαιροῖμεν (E9) repeats the word used at the beginning of this argument (cf. 387D1) effecting closure, or a sort of quod erat demonstrandum.

1357

καὶ οὐδὲ ταύταις σπουδαίαις (387E10-388A1), preparing the ground for including women among the guards. The stipulative use of the demonstrative (καὶ ταύταις), usually done with the neuter accusative (Riddell §§17-18; cf. Smyth §947), is here given a personal construction. The δέ in οὐδέ here has the same role as the περ in καίπερ in stipulative constructions, cf. Smyth §2083b.

1358

καὶ ὅσοι κακοὶ τῶν ἀνδρῶν (A1): The policy expands beyond giving examples only of the good, to finding a place for the derogatory depiction of the others.

1359

δή (A2) as well as τούτοις (second person) indicates virtual indirect discourse after δυσχεραίνωσιν: we hope they will chafe at us, saying, “How can you, who are supposed to be grooming us, show us such men as you have?”

1360

θεᾶς παῖδα (A6) is the basis for his being an ὀνομαστός (387E9): so also with Priam (ἐγγὺς θεῶν γεγονότα: [only] seven removes from Zeus [Apollodorus 3.12]).

1361

Il.18.23-4, upon hearing of Patroclus’s death.

1362

Πρίαμον (B4): Socrates deals as evenhandedly as Homer with the Trojan leaders and the Greek ones, and for the same reasons: for both are ἐλλόγιμος (for this his criterion is their divine lineage). With these two cases we pass from unseemly body language (κυλινδόμενον) to unseemly phonemes (ὤμοι, etc).

1363

καταγελῷεν (D3): As his confidence increases and he can ask how can we not laugh at the ridiculous, Socrates’s tone approaches the satirical indignation of Juvenal (e.g., Sat.1.30). Quickly he will cap this tendency (E5ff).

1364

ᾄδοι (D7), recalls Cephalus’s ὕμνειν (329B2). In πολλοῖς ἐπὶ σμικροῖς … παθήμασιν θρήνους (D6-7), the adjectives by a favorite construction are separated from their nouns in order to be placed side by side to strengthen their contrast, their nouns being re-added afterward in chiastic order. (παθήμασιν θρήνους, D7), with ὀδυρμούς added to tie the statement back to the logos above (387D1-388A3).

1365

καλλίονι (E3): not a stronger argument (like the so-called κρείττων λόγος), but a more attractive argument. Socrates again reveals his awareness that his argument to censor Homer is controversial.

1366

ζητεῖ (E6) perhaps means “calls for,” with μεταβολήν a euphemism for a good swat. At the same time, the term μεταβολή, the parallelisms of quality (τοιοῦτον) and quantity (ἰσχυρῷ and ἰσχυράν), and the correlative καί in cause and effect suggests Ionian φυσιολογία, in which context ζητεῖ is a synonymous with φιλεῖ. Cf. 563E9-564A1, where ἀνταποδιδόναι corroborates the suggestion, and where both the moral and the physiological conceits are present. As often a vague or inexact statement will be cleared up in the sequel.

1367

κρατούμενος (E9), in contrast with καρτερῶν (388D6), now expresses the “equal and opposite reaction” of ἀνταπόδωσις.

1368

ποιπνύοντα (389A6) = Il.1.599-600: Lame (ἀμφιγυήεις, 607), he is easily winded. The laughter is the contagious reaction (ἄσβεστος, 599) of the gods responding as a mob (κρατουμένους) to deride Hephaestus's ungainliness as he tries to defuse the conflict between Zeus and his mother Hera by moving hastily among the gods to fill their cups with wine: Zeus whose anger was great enough to cast him down from to earth from heaven one day (589-594).

1369

τὸν σὸν λόγον / εἰ σὺ βούλει ἐμὸν τιθέναι (A7-8). The byplay does remind us that the whole argument is for the sake of Adeimantus and his and his brother's challenge to Socrates, but does so harmlessly: it serves primarily as a technique of transition to the next topic. Cf. n.1379.

1370

οὐ γὰρ δὴ οὖν ἀποδεκτέον (A8-B1). Bravery has not been defined but instantiated in several of its aspects. It is slow to fear, strong in the face of adversity, and proud of its bearing. A technical definition is neither needed nor proffered at this point.

1371

ἀλλὰ μὴν καὶ ἀλήθειάν γε (B2).ἀλλὰ μήν breaks to a new or independent idea (as when it introduces a minor premise), and γε points to the word it follows as warranting the break. Thus ἀλήθεια seems to mean “truth,” though it will mean “truthfulness.” I render the force of the γε with this translation of the substantive and with the ensuing litotes. Truthfulness is not one of the canonical virtues and cannot be assimilated to bravery which has come before nor to temperance which comes next (389D7ff); Socrates is not bound to a canonical treatment. In the ensuing passage on temperance Socrates will exploit his emphasis on truthfulness to expand the sway and elevate the tone of his criticism still further, on which trend cf. n. 1171supra and nn.1378, 1390, 1394, 1396, 1403, and 1408, infra.

1372

τοῖς ἄρχουσιν δή (B7): The initial placement of the dative followed by δή encourages us to construe it with δοτέον, but as it turns out προσήκει provides the construction. This sort of syntactical segue is not uncommon in Greek.

1373

ταὐτὸν καὶ μεῖζον ἁμάρτημα (C2): καί is, idiomatically, “corrective” (cf. n.2382); but logically, ταὐτόν suggests there is an analogy: this once grasped, μεῖζον makes the evaluative comment that the analogue is graver than the original.

1374

μὴ τἀληθῆ λέγειν (C4), like μὴ τὰ ὄντα λέγοντι (C5) – as opposed to ψευδῆ λέγειν or μὴ ἀληθῆ λέγειν or τὰ μὴ ὄντα λέγειν – suggest they have been asked and fail to answer the truth. The ruler has the duty to ask and the ruled the duty to tell.

1375

ὅπως … τις … πράξεως ἔχει (C5-6). For the genitive cf. n.2802.

1376

With the analogies to doctor, trainer, and pilot (C2-6) Socrates imports prejudices about the nature and functions of the ruler familiar from his discussion with Thrasymachus (341C5,C9; 341E4ff; 342D4,D9). The first two analogies depict the individual’s private gain from being ruled well, while the last begins to place him in a “social” group that shares a common fate (ναῦς and πόλις).

1377

Od. 17.383-4: Eumaeus lists off the types of men worthy to be invited for dinner, in contrast to the beggar one is unlikely to invite. Interestingly the list has one more entry, which Socrates leaves out: ἢ καὶ θέσπιν ἀοιδόν, ὅ κεν τέρπῃσιν ἀείδων. (385)

1378

κολάσει (D4): The ruler will inflict a punishment, not just the sorts of athetizations inflicted on the poets’ work by Socrates and Adeimantus. Again the sweep of their authority broadens.

1379

ἐάνπερ … ἐπί γε λόγῳ ἔργα τέληται (D6). It is the doctor’s, trainer’s, captain’s, and ruler’s reliance on the lie and not the lie itself that causes problems. Adeimantus again answers with an elaboration, which (like the byplay with personal pronouns at 389A7-B1) creates closure of the topic of truthfulness (cf. n.1369).

1380

ὡς πλήθει (D9), taken by Shorey (Loeb ad loc.) to designate a demotic version of σωφροσύνη to be distinguished from a finer version belonging to philosophical types, spoken of elsewhere in the Republic or in the other Dialogues. But it is Socrates, not Plato, who is speaking, and his purpose is not to maintain consistency in a corpus of Dialogues but to rough out a definition of the virtue (as with ἀνδρεία: cf. n.1370) so that they might apply it, ἐν τύπῳ, in the censorship of poetry: it means therefore “on the whole” and, parallel with μέγιστα, refers to σωφροσύνη in its principle outlines. For the construction (ὡς + dative) cf. S.OC 20 (and Jebb ad loc.).

1381

τῶν περὶ πότους καὶ ἀφροδίσια καὶ περὶ ἐδωδὰς ἡδονῶν (E1-2): for the content and for the epanalepsis of περί cf. 329A5-6 and n.51.

1382

Iliad 4.412. Eustathius (490.37, apud LSJ) declared this instance of the term τέττα untranslatable. Agamemnon has just rebuked Diomedes for acting less bravely than his father and Diomedes has taken the rebuke in silence, but young Sthenelus pipes up and calls Agamemnon a liar: their fathers were no more honorable than he and Diomedes. Diomedes then turns upon Sthenelus and advises him with this line and its sequel not to talk back to his commander.

1383

Il.4.431-2. Socrates calls these lines τὰ τούτων ἐχόμενα (E7) with reference to 4.412. Emendation is not necessary: he calls them this not because they are immediately contiguous but because they describe the immediate outcome of Diomedes’s statement: the army has fallen into line. The external comparison of Plato’s text with Homer is less important than grasping the development of Socrates’s argument.

1384

σιγῇ again (E9). Quietness (ἡσυχία) is likewise the watchword of σωφροσύνη in the initial definition that Charmides diffidently offers to his elder, Socrates (Charm.159B2-6).

1385

Achilles to Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad (1.225).

1386

Adverbial ἄλλος (390A5) asserting the irrelevance of the pleasure. The fact that the line is pleasurable for its intemperance does not countervail the claim for expunging it: indeed the pleasure is no accident! The remark is appended to make a segue from the acquiescent aspect of σωφροσύνη (the μέν clause above, ἀρχόντων μὲν ὑπηκόους εἶναι, 389D9-E1) to the continent aspect (the δέ clause, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἄρχοντας ..., E1-2), and in accepting it Adeimantus is already halfway to agreeing to curtail the subsequent stories about failing to master desire.

1387

ἄνδρα τὸν σοφώτατον (A8): To mention the reputation without the name of the person who bears it (Odysseus, whose words these are: Od.9.8-10) is damning by fulsome praise. Insouciance toward Odysseus is by Plato’s lights all he deserves, and it is beside the point that Socrates’s “treatment of the quotation is hardly fair to Homer” (Shorey in the Loeb, ad loc.). What is at stake here is the upbringing of young men and how they would take the line and use the line, not the reputation of the famous poet.

1388

χαμαί (C3) specifies the unplanned implication of αὐτοῦ and therefore makes βουλόμενον oxymoronic.

1389

δι’ (C7), the lectio difficilior (mss.ADM as opposed to the ἤ of ms.F). Socrates’s reason to expunge the deed of Hephaestus is the passionate behavior, similar to Zeus’s, that provoked it. ἕτερα (C7) is derogatory in mild aposiopesis (cf. 379D7 and n.1224).

1390

θεατέον (D2): Again his policy expands (n.1371), now beyond stories to theatrical productions. Note the apodotic chiasm (λέγονται / πράττονται // θεατέον / ἀκουστέον, D2-3).

1391

Od.20.17-18. Odysseus lies awake planning the fate of the suitors (κακὰ φρονέων ἐνὶ θυμῷ | κεῖτ’ ἐγρηγορόων, 20.5-6) while the world sleeps except for the maids returning from servicing them. Contrast the wakeful Zeus who forgets his vigilant planning just above (μόνος ἐγρηγορὼς ἃ ἐβουλεύσατο … ἐπιλανθανόμενον (390B7-C1). Odysseus is angered by the easy incontinence into which his house has fallen but must contain his anger and wait for the right moment to strike.

1392

τούς (D7) continues the stipulation introduced by ἐλλογίμων above (D2).

1393

δωροδόκους γε (D7), another topic from the brothers’ speeches: 364C5ff, 365D7-6B2 (cf. esp. the euphemistic ἀναπειθόμενοι, 365E5 and n.860).

1394

οὐδ’ ὁμολογήσομεν (E7-8): He expands the reach and sway of the policy from barring the assertion to barring belief in what it expresses.

1395

Reading δι’ (391A3) with FD rather than δή, the facilior, with AM. Socrates’s periphrasis with διά as well as his expression of ὄκνος (ὀκνῶ δέ γε … δι’ Ὅμηρον λέγειν) constitute his careful attempt to distinguish between the formulation and enforcement of the policy on the one hand, and whatever reverence and love he feels for Homer on the other (cf. φιλία τις καὶ αἰδώς, 595B9). To chastise the poet here would take him off track just as writing proper poems would have done above (378E7,ff), but his mention of the tension in passing reveals he is conscious that the argument has led him into a radical zone. The tension will return in a larger way later, in Book Ten (595B9-C3).

1396

οὐδ’ ὅσιον (A3): More extension. Not only should the lines that get important matters wrong be athetized (διαγράφειν) and Homer himself be barred from writing them: he should also be chastised for having written them since they are untrue, even if he only heard them from someone else, since he promulgated them. With ὅσιον Socrates emphasizes what had been particularly inappropriate in Homer’s line about bribing kings with gifts, namely, calling them αἰδοίους in this connection (390E3).

1397

Iliad 22.15.

1398

θεὸν ὄντα (B1), i.e., Scamander: Iliad 21.130-2.

1399

καὶ αὖ τὰς τοῦ ἑτέρου ποταμοῦ (B2): Never before or since was the Spercheius the “alternate” river to the Scamander! Socrates is heaping the criticism on, exploiting the tail end of one idea as his segue to the next, rather than laying out an orderly division at the start.

1400

Iliad 23,151. Again Shorey (Loeb ad loc.) needs not apologize for Platonic exaggeration. The story can easily be seen in its context to involve no impiety, but for a young Adeimantus to misunderstand it in order to justify an act of impiety is even easier.

1401

Referring to Iliad 24.14ff and 23.175-6 respectively. Note again the derogatory plurals (ἕλξεις / σφαγάς, B5-6).

1402

μηδέ τιν’ ἄλλον θεοῦ παῖδά τε καὶ ἥρω (D1-2): τε καί linking ground and inference. Plato’s usage of ἥρως conforms with the Hesiodic notion that the heroes are the fourth generation after the gods and spirits (δαίμονες), and mankind the fifth (WD 109-10). Compare the lists θεοί τε καὶ δαίμονες καὶ ἥρωες, Rep.427B6-7 (cf.392A4-6) and Leg.717B2-4, 738D2, 799A6-7, 801E1-10. At Leg.799A6-7, 818C1-2 the heroes are called παῖδες θεῶν; and cf. Crat.397D9-E2, δαίμονάς τε καὶ ἥρωας καὶ ἀνθρώπους.

1403

καταψεύδεσθαι (D3) verges on the charge of slander (κατ’ Ἀχίλλεως above [A4] started the ball rolling). Socrates’s tone and posture now expand (cf. n.1371) to include a sort of indignation on behalf of the good that verges on an a desire to drag somebody into court.

1404

αὐτά (D4) isolates the notion, as often in Plato. Here it separates the verb from its subject, the deed from the doer.

1405

κακὰ γεννῶσιν (D6). Busy hands have emended the metaphor away (replacing giving birth to κακά with giving birth to κακούς), but the straddling metaphor is exactly what Socrates needs to connect the present thesis, that gods’ offspring can hardly be evil (κακοί), with the general thesis from Book Two that the gods are not responsible for evil in the world (κακά). See next note.

1406

ὅπερ γὰρ ἐν τοῖς πρόσθεν (D7): With the back-reference to the gods causing only good we sense the section is coming to an end, so that the ensuing general statement that heroes are nobler than men takes on the status of summarizing its theme. Already we sense that we will be moving on from gods and heroes (377E1-2) to men, as will be confirmed explicitly just below.

1407

The passage (E7-9) is attributed to Aeschylus’s Niobe and refers to the Tantalids.

1408

With παυστέον (E12) the policy exceeds the bounds of the hypothesis of educating imaginary guards and arrogates an historic status and role to itself, as a policy for the future that will correct the present (νῦν, D3) as well as the past (πράττουσίν τε καὶ ἔπραττον, E5-6), recalling in this the historical perspective and challenge of Adeimantus’s criticism (366D7-367A4).

1409

εὐχέρειαν (392A1) means not dexterity as if its etymon were χείρ, but a lack of internal impediment or hesitation, whether to do good or evil (cf.Shorey, CP 12[1917]308-310). Compare its use (with δυσχερής) to describe natural inclinations at 475B11-C8. It is a direct reference and response to the εὐπέτεια for misbehavior afforded by poets (364C6: cf. n.819) and the δυσχέρεια for injustice that one needs to have, innately, in order to resist the culture around him, mentioned by Adeimantus at 366C7.

1410

περὶ θεῶν ὡς δεῖ λέγεσθαι (A4-5), a phrase for which above he coined the abbreviation θεολογία at 379A5.

1411

ἄρα (A13).

1412

Reading ἄδικοι μὲν εὐδαίμονες πολλοί (B1-2) with Burnet and ms.F rather than ἄδικοι μὲν εὐδαίμονες δὲ πολλοί with Adam and mss.ADM. The scandalous doctrine being opposed is that unjust behavior is what confers happiness while just behavior only diminishes the goodness of one’s life (makes one ἄθλιος), and the μέν / δέ construction contrasts the fate of the unjust with that of the just. To include ADM’s δέ after εὐδαίμονες creates a contrast between being unjust and being happy (many are unjust but nevertheless happy), which only begs the question and moreover undermines the principal contrast between the unjust and the just.

1413

The language (B1-4) repeats the belief that the entire enterprise is meant to overthrow, including the ironic and fraudulent language by which Thrasymachus first recommends it (343C), and the proviso added by Glaucon and restated in the speech of Adeimantus (367C2-5), that one escape detection (ἐὰν λανθάνει, B3): e.g., ἀλλότριον ἀγαθόν (“good, but not for you”), ἄθλιοι (“losers,” 360D4), λυσιτελεῖν (“profit” 344C7-8, cf. nn. 268, 488, 525, 655), οἰκεία ζημία (self-penalty).

1414

ἃ πάλαι ἐζητοῦμεν (B9), reading the imperfect, with Stallbaum [pace Burnet] and all mss. It means “what we were seeking to discover in the previous stage of our conversation.” To presume (presumption is the denotation of the perfect, ὡμολογηκέναι) that we know how men should act would beg the question that set us on this path of the construction we are still in the midst of. Stallbaum suggested ζητοῦμεν as his guess about what Ficinus had before him so as to translate with quae iam diu quaerimus. This suggestion became “ζητοῦμεν Stallb. cum Ficino” in Adam’s apparatus, “ζητοῦμεν ci. Stallbaum” in Burnet’s, and “ζητοῦμεν Stallb.” in Chambry’s, even though Stallbaum himself read ἐζητοῦμεν! The present is used at 420C1.

πάλαι points to a previous phase of action or experience, or section or phase or context within the discourse (Adam is right to see that this is what πάλαι means but wrong to think it hasn’t happened), and only means “long ago” or “long since” if the current section or phase has been going on for a long time (whence πολλὰ ἔτη needs to be added to πάλαι at Apol.18B2, since by itself the opposite of πάλαι is only ἄρτι [18D8-E1], referring to the time before the trial as opposed to the time of the trial itself (compare πάλαι at Gorg.458B6:”before you arrived”). At 414E7 πάλαι refers to a time one minute (twelve lines) ago, the moment before Glaucon had heard the big lie as opposed to the present moment, to stress that hearing it has changed his mind. At Phlb.18D7 it refers to 18A1-5 where Philebus and Protarchus wanted a hasty answer about the relevance of Socrates’s methodical description of moving from the one to the many. Rather than answer Socrates had interposed a second methodical description, of moving from the many to the one (18A6-D2), and they “still” want to know. It appears in the eleventh line of the Laches (179A1) to announce, with προοιμιάζομαι, that the immediately previous ten were an introductory section. Compare its uses at 336B8-C1, 346E5, 414E7, 420C1, 506B5, 551E6, 574D5, 588C2, and 590A5; Euthyd.293B2; and Arist. An.Po.100A14 with Ross ad loc. As to the similar semantics of its adjective, παλαιός, cf. 607B5 and n.5052, and 611D2; for the semantics of its noun, παλαιοτής, cf. 609E2 and n.5123.

By reminding Adeimantus that the present treatment of poetry is but a sub-part of the larger investigation into the nature of justice that he himself asked for, Socrates effects a transition to the next phase of that treatment at the same time that he keeps the whole section, as well as the entire construction of a state, in perspective.

1415

φύσει λυσιτελοῦν (C3) lacks the pointed precision with which Socrates characteristically quotes previous passages (namely Glaucon’s words at 358B5-6 and Adeimantus’s words at 367B3-5), although he does echo the obiter dicta of Adeimantus, his current interlocutor, with φύσει (in opposition to δόξῃ: cf. Adeimantus at 367D2) and λυσιτελοῦν (which comes close to Adeimantus’s ὀνίνησιν at 367D3).

1416

διομολογησόμεθα (C2), of an agreement reached through dialectical steps (cf. nn. 3182, 4950).

1417

τὸ δὲ λέξεως (C6): supply περί in anastrophe. By the parallelism and etymological connection with τὰ μὲν λόγων Socrates bluffs that his new idea already makes sense, just as he began the last section with the bluff that of course the false stories should be taught first (377A1-2). Plato often depicts him bluffing this way, asking questions intentionally obscure as to content that portray themselves by their form as being crystal clear, in order to elicit a query from the interlocutor that will allow him to expatiate. Cf. 382B1 and n.1285.

1418

ἅ τε λεκτέον καὶ ὡς λεκτέον (C7-8): τε … καί is used to emphasize the idea that the study has two parts, continuing the bluff so as to raise even further Adeimantus’s desire to find out what this second part might be.

1419

τί γὰρ ἄλλο (D4).

1420

μίμησις (D5) is inherently abstract, and as such tends to be vague, so that Adeimantus does not understand. γιγνομένῃ (sc. διηγήσει, D5-6) nails down the point that had only been implied by appending ἁπλῇ to διηγήσει, namely that μίμησις, whatever it is, is a kind of narration.

1421

οὐ κατὰ ὅλον ἀλλὰ ἀπολαβὼν μέρος τι (D9-E1). His attempt at making things clear with a general statement has failed for its vagueness (ἀσάφεια: D8,9) so now he will make his meaning clear (δηλοῦν) with an example, which he calls a “part” to promise its relevance to the general point. On ἀπολαμβάνειν cf. n.268 ad 336C6-D2.

1422

ἐπίστασαι (E2) suggests having mastered the text, perhaps having it by memory.

1423

μὴ Ὅμηρον δοκεῖν εἶναι τὸν λέγοντα (393B1-2): We tend to overlook the fact that impersonating another requires us to “depersonate” ourselves, but Socrates points to it. This is the first consequence of his premise that mimicry is a kind of διήγησις rather than something alongside it. Let us note in general that the subject tends to forget he is another person, and also that we tend to forget that a picture is an oiled canvas.

1424

περί τε τῶν ἐν Ἰλίῳ καὶ περὶ τῶν ἐν Ἰθάκῃ καὶ ὅλῃ Ὀδυσσείᾳ παθημάτων (B3-5): The list dares to move toward a generalizing universal (ὅλῃ Ὀδυσσείᾳ) after two coordinate specifics (τὰ ἐν Ἰλίῳ and τὰ ἐν Ἰθάκῃ), the first itself being a generalization of the example of Chryses’s prayer. Note that the generalization is achieved by generalizing (more exactly, perhaps, by “universally quantifying”) only the second. The fact that the entirety of the Iliad took place in Troy whereas the entirety of the Odyssey did not take place in Ithaca spoils the logic only for the scholar (cf. Herwerden apud Adam and Adam’s gratuitously ingenious response to him, ad loc.): Ἰθάκῃ is an “ancipital” item whose logic looks both ways, exactly as ἰάτρευσις did at 357C6 (cf. n.677).

For generalizing the whole by generalizing only the last (co-specific) item, as here, cf. Leg.716E2-4, 735B1-3, 792B6; Polit.307A8-B1; and n.1898. Distinguish this from the essentially otiose use of a generalizing term with an item that is already generic in order to indicate that a generalization is being drawn, as Leg.716D7: εὐχαῖς καὶ ἀναθήμασιν καὶ συμπάσῃ θεραπείᾳ θεῶν (cf. 777E2-4, 792B6, 881E2-3; Polit.280C1-2, 288D7-8). Finally, a generalization can be achieved by concatenating the former with the latter, as for instance Charm.173B7-8: τὰ σκεύη καὶ τὴν ἀμπεχόνην καὶ ὑπόδεσιν πᾶσαν καὶ τὰ χρήματα πάντα (cf. Polit.289B4-5 [a degree of first-stage generalization gotten from pluralizing the species], 307A8-B1; Rep.387E3-4, 608E6-9A4). Leg.694E6-7, ποίμνια καὶ πρόβατα καὶ ἀγέλας ἀνδρῶν τε καὶ πολλῶν πολλάς, is something quite different. Generalization is achieved through the introduction of a neutral grouping term (ἀγέλας) which is then impleted with a list of genitives of substance that is itself generalized: cf. Leg.777E2-4 (where the participle is the grouping term); Polit.288B2-4; Rep.580A3-5 (πανδοκεῖ). The move at Thg.124B5-7 should also be mentioned in this connection, where the genus is “generalized” by the addition of its complementary coordinate (ἰδιωτῶν) which is then itself generalized by subdivision into complementary subspecies: … αὐτῶν τῶν γεωργῶν καὶ τῶν τεκτόνων καὶ τῶν δημιουργῶν ἁπάντων καὶ τῶν ἰδιωτῶν καὶ τῶν γυναικῶν καὶ ἀνδρῶν.

1425

ὥς τις ἄλλος ὤν (C1): We would say “when he tells speeches as if he were the person giving the speech.”

1426

τότε (C2), giving the point for which the μέν clause (B7-8) provided the foil or background.

1427

λέξιν (C2), the definiendum that this digression was designed to explain, now reappears.

1428

τί γάρ (C4) asks for more: “Yes we will—so what?”

1429

ἢ κατὰ σχῆμα (C5-6) widens the scope of the imitation beyond voice to appearance and emphasizes the performative aspect of practicing poetry, which as we will soon see is the essence of Socrates’s present concern. The widening is done by the logical step of adding sight to sound, but at the same time we must recognize that the term σχῆμα narrows the mere sight or appearance of a person to those aspects of his appearance that show his character (hence “posture”), in the same way that the voice (φωνή) of a person is here to be understood in a sense narrower than the mere sound of the person’s voice. Cf. 395D3 and n. ad loc. Imitation of mere sound will come later (396B5-6, 387A4-7).

1430

τί μήν; (C7). Socrates is a very poor teacher (cf.392D8): first he goes too fast, then he goes too slow. And Adeimantus is a testy student, impatient of what he does not understand (392D7) and what he does (as here), but also too quick at jumping to conclusions (392B7, 394D7-9).

1431

δή (C8), responds to Adeimantus’s impatience.

1432

καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι ποιηταί (C8-9): Socrates characteristically generalizes beyond his example whenever the pace of the epagoge affords him an opportunity to do so. Cf. the widening with σχῆμα just above.

1433

διὰ μιμήσεως (C9): His explanation has consisted in moving from a plain description of what the poet does (ποιῆσαι ὥςπερ ἄλλος ὤν, C1: cf. B1-2) to a more compact statement of it (ὁμοιοῦν ἑαυτὸν ἄλλῳ, C2) to a most compact statement (μιμεῖσθαι ἄλλον, C5-6), and then ends by replacing this last verb with its cognate abstract noun in -σις, which was the original obscurum (διὰ μιμήσεως, C9, cf.392D5 and n.1420). The explanation among other things fixes impersonation within narration as a mere narrative technique and hence requires us now to translate μίμησις with “mimicry.”

1434

Aristotle in his Poetics does closely follow Plato’s treatment of poetry in this passage but the anatomy of poetry here is not an end in itself, as in Aristotle, but merely a vehicle for Socrates’s investigation of paideia (whether that of the guards or that of Adeimantus), and will be dropped as soon as it ceases to serve those ends. The absence of λέξις from an account of poetry in the very different context of Gorg.502C therefore has no inherent significance.

Adeimantus does not understand the distinction between λόγος and λέξις because it is new. Aristotle (Poetics 1450B14-16) already takes it for granted. That Aristotle should borrow from Plato without acknowledgment and in ways that reveal he either did not recognize the purpose or did not care about the purpose of the remarks he borrows is more the rule than the exception. One of the unfortunate effects of the comparison Aristotle thereby suggests, between his own works and purposes and those of Plato, is that what is merely a dialectical event or passage in Plato can be made to seem an entry in a systematic history of some idea or field – in the present case the history of literary criticism in antiquity. Thus the pedagogical apparatus Socrates here uses on Adeimantus can be transmogrified into so many Platonic beliefs, prejudices, and even fears about literature. J.W.H. Adkins (Literary Criticism in Antiquity [Cambridge 1934]1.33-4, 41-4, 47-9) for instance invents Platonic reasons for the present censorship of poetry over and above those that the present context already supplies, while G.M.A. Grube (The Greek and Roman Critics [Cambridge 1968] 50-52), invents a psychological predisposition of Plato’s that, he claims, requires him to have Socrates do this.

1435

ἀποκρύπτοιο (C11) suggests device and deception, whereas the ensuing periphrastic construction affords Socrates an opportunity to use the dative αὐτῷ (D1) as though the poet were better off without the business of lying. Again, where we take the εἰκών as the truth (i.e., meaning) of poetry Socrates measures poetry against truth (i.e., reality).

1436

ποίησις τε καὶ διήγησις (D1). διήγησις stands to ποίησις as λέξις to λόγος (392C6-D3). The proliferation of verbal nouns in -σις is perhaps an affectation.

1437

ἵνα … μὴ εἴπῃς ὅτι οὐκ αὖ μανθάνεις (D2) where αὖ adds “don’t start with that (again).”

1438

μάλιστα δέ (D5): The detail with μάλιστα is repeated to bring us to the point in the quotation above (A5) at which Chryses had begun to speak in propria persona (as we would have it), or (as Socrates would have it) Homer began to speak in aliena persona.

1439

The subject of ἦν (D7) is τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο, drawn from μετὰ τοῦτο at D5.

1440

ἐλθὼν ὁ ἰερεύς (D8-E1): Asyndeton is felt even though mitigated by forward pointing ὧδε (D7), and shows that the ensuing passage is to be taken as a set piece. For the text, Iliad 1.12-42, for which Socrates composes his “metaphrasis,” as Roger Ascham calls it in his Schoolmaster (1570) [http://www.classiclanguagearts.net/resources/the-schoolmaster.htm, accessed 12/4/11], and a comparative analysis of Plato’s version of it, see Appendix 1.

1441

ἀνακαλῶν καὶ ὑπομιμνῄσκων καὶ ἀπαιτῶν (394A3-4) digest the content of the prayer into its three rhetorical moments. First the I calls to the Thou (ἀνακαλῶν: cf. κλῦθί μευ, ἀργυρότοξ’, Iliad 1.37); then the I invokes the aspects of the Thou that it needs, as well as putting the Thou in mind of previous services rendered by the I (ὑπομιμνῄσκων: cf. Il.1.37-41, ὅς … αἰγῶν), which in turn creates an auspicious moment at which the I presses his claim to the Thou (ἀπαιτῶν: Il.1.41-2, τόδε μοι ...). The list depicts the termini of the prayer with its first and last items, and everything in between with its second (ὑπομιμνῄσκων).

1442

ὧν δή (A6). The relative, as noted by Smyth, can be equivalent to a demonstrative plus connective particle (§§2488, 2491); but this is a survival in Attic of the epic use of relative for demonstrative, which Socrates here finds it natural to imitate.

1443

μανθάνω (B2).

1444

μάνθανε τοίνυν (B3).

1445

ἀμοιβαῖα (B5) is pregnant. Exchanges are what you are left with only after you take all the rest away.

1446

ποιήσεως τε καὶ μυθολογίας (B9-C1): cf. μυθολόγων ἢ ποιητῶν (392D2), another instance of Socratic accuracy in reminiscent quotation (cf. 340C9 and n.359), with apodotic chiasm to boot. δηλοῦν (B8) likewise echoes δηλῶσαι (392E1).

1447

The widening of Adeimantus’s τραγῳδίας with κωμῳδία is again characteristic of Socrates’s technique. Herwerden’s conjectured τε before καὶ κωμῳδίας at B6 is unneeded.

1448

αὐτοῦ τοῦ ποιητοῦ (C2-3) again insisting on the fact that the poet or reciter comes with a voice of his own as opposed to the voices of other persons he might make himself into.

1449

τε (C4-5) followed by δέ rather than καί. The mention that there are others is not just ampliative generalization (this would have been done with bare τε .. καί). δέ is also mildly adversative, dispelling any hint of limitation imported by the use of epic as an example (cf.Apol.19D8 [and Stallb. ad loc.]; Leg.818C4-D1, 919D5-7 [and Engl. ad loc]; Polit.270D1-3 [ἄλλως τε … δέ for ἄλλως τε … καί!]; Rep.367C6-7, 370D10-E3, 395C4-5, 499B2; Symp.186D4-5; and cf. Denniston 513-4). The shift from τε to δέ within an enumeration to add a contrary or complementary item (Phdo.65C5-7; Polit.305B8-C1; Rep.382E8-11) is a subtype of this use.

Distinguish this adversative δέ from illative δέ (341D1, 475C4).

1450

πότερον ἐάσομεν (D2).

1451

ὁποῖα ἑκάτερα (D4).

1452

His καί in εἴτε καὶ οὔ (D6) suggests he is ready to hear as much.

1453

ἴσως δὲ καὶ πλείω (D7): Socrates allows that their result may be even more radical than the wholesale abolition of drama not (as J.-C. and even Shorey say) to foreshadow the treatment of poetry in Book Ten, as if Socrates were speaking on behalf of the author who is putting these words into his mouth to a reader that is not really listening to his characters, but to set into still higher relief (with Adam) that following the logos is to be the guide, not some personal agenda nor the avoidance of controversy.

1454

ὅπῃ ὁ λόγος ὥσπερ πνεῦμα φέρει (D8-9): I take the metaphor to be nautical. One resets his sails and helm in response to the varying strength and direction of the wind so as to keep the boat under weigh. The willful alternative that Socrates deflects consists not so much of determining the direction of the search but relying solely on one’s own strength to keep it going or (to continue the nautical metaphor) dropping the sails and relying on rowing instead, which is the meaning of the hard-going δεύτερος πλοῦς of the Phaedo. While, as Shorey objects (Loeb ad loc.), it is naive to think that Plato does not know where the argument is leading, it is likewise simplistic to believe with Shorey that all that is meant is to resolve that any conclusion will be accepted once it comes into view. The argument is forming all along and there is no separation between it and the interlocutors. The conclusion reached will make sense in itself before it is seen to contradict what had been said at the outset (in case it does) or to be otherwise surprising or paradoxical.

The usual interpretation, that they are to follow the logos willy-nilly, is a notion far too flaccid for the engaged questioning they are immersed in. Adjusting the sails to varying circumstances is akin to the other great metaphors with which Socrates describes rational search (ζήτησις), namely, (1) the hunt for game (Rep.432B7ff [and Shorey Loeb ad loc., 1.365]; Euthyd.290BC; Lach.194B5ff; Leg.654E [and Stallb.ad loc.]; Lys.218C; Parm.128C; Phdo 66C; Polit.263B1-2, 264A5, 290D5-6; Soph.235B; Thompson ad Meno 96E and cf. Gorg.483A7); and (2) the pursuit of the beloved (Euthyph.11E2,14C3-4; H.Maj.295A8-B1; Meno 70B, 76B4-C2; Phdo 66E; Phdrs.266B; Rep.489D (and Shorey Loeb 1.26 note b), 347C, 495-6, 490B, 521B; Tht.148Eff.

Besides these great metaphors there are individual passages worth quoting for their eloquence in putting the paradox of knowing questioning, such as Rep.450D8 (ζητοῦντες ἅμα τοὺς λόγους ποιεῖσθαι); Gorg.455A8 (ἴδωμέν τί ποτε καὶ λέγομεν: cf.Crat.428D). The argument is felt to suggest the way (λόγος ὑφηγεῖται: Lys.217A2). At Rep.453D5-11 they hope their logos will stay afloat until a dolphin might save them! The Athenian Stranger can be sure his interlocutors will agree with him if only he takes the argument a little further (ἐὰν βούλεσθε πειράσομαι ἰὼν κατὰ τὸν ἑξῆς λόγον ἀνευρίσκειν τε καὶ ὑμῖν δηλοῦν ...Leg.688D). The path of the logos is a metaphor threaded all the way through the Laws; elsewhere cf.Crit.106A1-3; Rep.420B3, 432C7ff; Tim.44D1-2, 55C1-3, 55D5-6.

1455

τόδε τοίνυν … ἄθρει (E1). With τοίνυν and the imperative ἄθρει Socrates acknowledges that he is in charge after all, and with the first person demonstrative τόδε that it is he that sees the next step first.

1456

The etymological figure ἐπιτήδευμα καλῶς ἐπιτηδεύοι (E3-4), as also 374E4 and 433A5-6, is not otiose: see below.

1457

ὥστ’ εἶναί που ἐλλόγιμος (E5-6) is an epexegesis of πάντων not the object of ἀποτυγχάνοι. For ὥστε with infinitive used in epexegesis cf. Prot.314B5-6 and Smyth §2271. There is no need to emend πάντων to πάντως with Ast.

1458

πολλὰ (sc. μιμήματα) μιμεῖσθαι (E8-9), parallel with ἐπιτήδευμα ἐπιτηδεύοι above, as is confirmed at 395A3-6, below.

1459

σχολῇ (395A1). The expression belongs to conversational Greek only, and therefore to the Greek of Socrates. Outside Plato it appears in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, where thrice Socrates’s interlocutors use it to grant Socrates a question whose answer is obvious (3.14.3, 4.2.24, 4.4.25). Among the orators it occurs only in Andocides (1.90,102; 2.19), although Aristotle incorporates the expression into his example of the oratorical argumentum a fortiori (the “argument of more or less”) in Rhet.1397B13.

Plato uses σχολῇ for one thing only: to draw an inference a fortiori (354C1, 388D3, 610E7 ; cf. Lach.190A; Leg.668C; Phdo 65B, 106D; Prot.330D8; Soph.233B, 241E, 261B; cf. LSJ s.v.), and in every case but one (Soph.261B) the fortius is what something is in itself (τί αὐτό) as compared to what else it might be by virtue of being what it is (οἷόν τι), that favorite of Socratic and Platonic distinctions. Aristotle imitates and perhaps echoes Plato in this usage (e.g.Met.999A10, 1001A23, recounting Platonic arguments; and EE 1218A1 rejecting what he thinks is one). Though Aristotle always adds γε (as Bonitz notes, Index s.v.), as do Xenophon and Andocides, Plato’s usage is more flexible and spontaneous (besides using it with γε, he uses it with ποτε at Soph.233B and 241E; with που at Soph.261B; with μέντοι, Prot.330D; and alone at Rep.354C). When he uses γε it is to highlight the hinge of the argumentum.

The present argument is likewise an argument a fortiori whose “stronger” is ἐπιτήδευμα (ἐπιτηδεύσει γε) while the “weaker” is μίμημα, the parallelism between these having been set up in the previous sentence (cf. previous note). If mere mimesis requires specialization, clearly any serious competence would. Adams sees this (ad 394E8), but J.-C. in their gratuitous and far reaching attempt to explain “Plato’s enmity to the drama” miss the logic of the passage under their eyes (2.123-4).

1460

γε (A1) implies a valorization of ἐπιτηδεύσει over μιμήσεται, which is then confirmed by the periphrastic expression of its internal object, τι τῶν ἀξίων λόγου ἐπιτηδευμάτων (A1-2).

1461

ἐπεί που (A3), adducing an empirical fact. Just as “the uncertainty of που, whether real or assumed, is ill-adapted to the precision of history or to the assertiveness of oratory” (Denniston GP 491), it is perfectly suited in dialogical contexts to the introduction of empirical (as opposed to logically inferred) assertions, as here.

1462

κωμῳδίαν καὶ τραγῳδίαν (A4-5): Upon those who see a contradiction to complain about (as J.-C. do) or to resolve (as Adam) between this passage and Symp.223D (where Socrates asks whether the same man can or should be able to write comedy and tragedy, too), it is incumbent to tell us what person believed both at the same time and in the same respect so as to be suffering from contradiction. Socrates asks that question there because the only interlocutors still awake for him to engage are Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian, just as here his arguments are tailored to the earnest request of Adeimantus and his brother.

1463

ἄρτι τούτω ἐκάλεις (A5-6), refers back to ὅλη at 394C1, itself an interpretation of Adeimantus’s 394B6-7.

1464

κωμῳδία / τραγῳδία // ῥαψῳδοί / ὑποκριταί // ὑποκριταὶ κωμῳδοῖς τε καὶ τραγῳδοῖς (A4-10). The sequence presents pairs with smaller and smaller differences and greater and greater overlap, namely, composing in two genres, performing in two genres, performing two sub-types of one genre of performance. The fact that each subsequent pair with its smaller differences cannot be performed by the same person constitutes an indirect argument a fortiori that the previous ones, with their larger differences, cannot either. The implicit warrant for believing that the pairs are increasingly close together is the epanaleptic structure: each new pair is a subdivision of the second item in the previous one.

The list is therefore a dihairesis or division, each new species becoming the genus for a subsequent division. Though lists often do imply or contain arguments, producing a virtual argument a fortiori is not the most common use of sustained serial subdifferentiation. Usually the logical relations among the items assembled by this means are less important and it is a matter of finding more by looking at what you have more closely (inventio). The purposes of such an increasingly specific list can for instance be illustrating an idea by elaborating it with finer and finer distinctions so as to establish it in one field before it is applied to another (Alc.I 111Bff; Crat.397C-400C; Rep.438B4-C4) or expressing certainty with perspicuous fullness (north, east, south, and west) or an exhaustion of the possibilities (jot and tittle), the subdivisions verging onto lavishing particularization (Crit.117A7-B4; Gorg.483D3-4, 517D2-5,6-E2; Meno 71E1-72A1; Prot.334A3-C6 [exhibiting the boundlessness of his relativism], 354A4-6). Subdivision of the last item only can achieve closure (cf. 361B4-5, 443E3-4, 547B3-4 and n.426 ad 342E10; and Gorg.502D6-7; Leg.743D2-4, 747A2-5; Phdrs.241C1-5; Polit.293B5-6, 299E1-2; Soph.262D2-3). In a strained use it can make a transition to a desired item by exploiting the fact that that item can be made to appear among the subcategories of the present topic, as music is reached from the quick tempo of bravery in Polit.306C10-D3 (cf. also Leg.823B2-C1).

As one can see from a passage like Soph.221B2ff or 231B3ff, which resume dihaereses, the ordering of items by means of serial subdifferentiation naturally results in a list that has the form of what was called a κλῖμαξ in antiquity, i.e., where the list moves to the next item through an epanalepsis of the previous one—not “from Tinker to Evers to Chance,” but “from Tinker to Evers and Evers to Chance.” Demetrius notes the figure at de Eloc.270 citing Dem.18.179 and then accounts for the term as describing a sequence that ascends. I sense rather that the metaphor of the ladder or κλῖμαξ derives from the way that the epanalepsis resembles the foot replacing the hand on the rungs (cf. Longinus 23.1, who classes it under πολύπτωτα confirming that for him the definitive feature is re-use of the same term with shift in syntax [i.e. epanalepsis], and cf. the Latin term gradatio [step pushing off from step] as Cic.de Or.3.54.207 and Quint.9.3.24 [who cites among other examples Hom.Il.2.101-8, in which there is epanalepsis but no climax]). For κλῖμαξ in Plato cf. Gorg.473B12-D2, Phlb.54C1-4, Rep.424D7-E2; the thought of Leg.669C4-D2; and exclude Prot.352B4 which lacks epanalepsis and is merely a climactic sequence (pace Deuschle-Cron ad loc.).

1465

κατακεκερματίσθαι ἡ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου φύσις (B4): To be human is to have limits and to lack limits is divine. The topic characteristically arises in Plato’s discussions of creativity, as here and at 596CD. Cf. also 612A and n.5204, Soph.233A3-4. The keynote of Plato’s condemnation of poetry is not philosophical arrogance but an awareness of human limitations in both artist and audience, who very often conspire to help each other forget such things.

1466

Asserting that the list consists of mimicries (ἀφομοιώματα vs. αὐτὰ ἐκεῖνα, B5-6) is pointless unless to set up the argumentum a fortiori produced by the stronger interpretation I have given to ἤ. With this step Socrates finally broaches the inherent superiority of the original to the copy.

1467

αὐτὰ ἐκεῖνα (B5), approbative, articulating the fortius of the argumentum a fortiori.

1468

δημιουργιῶν (B9), approbative as in Book One (cf. n.371), just as ἐπιτήδευμα is approbative above.

1469

ἐλευθερία (C5). This characterization of their mission is new and climactic. Apart from an obiter dictum at 387B5, the term had until now belonged to the strong-man outlook of Thrasymachus (344C5-6; cf. Gorg.485E1, Leg.962E4, 5-6), an outlook to which Socrates will return much later (when he isolates ἐλευθερία as the characteristic of the democratic stage of the polis’s decline, around 563D, which becomes unavailable to the tyrant: 576A4-6). In common usage the ἐλεύθερος is the free man vs. the slave, one of the four primary divisions among humans alongside young and old, male and female, ruler and ruled (351D10, 433D2-4; cf. also Gorg.515A7 [cf.514D]; Leg.665C2-3, 777B5-6, 838D7-8; Meno 71E-72A). Its climactic and approbative use here resembles Phaedo’s use of it in his climactic eulogy of Socrates at the end of the Phaedo (114E-115A).

In a sudden access of inspiration Socrates reaches for the term and arrogates it to his own current purpose. Adam finds the expression “artificial and somewhat strained,” perhaps because it never appears in a list of virtues, which the present phrase is turning out to be; but something must be brought in to substitute for δικαιοσύνη in order to avoid circularity (cf.392B8-C4). I would suggest that the reader give it the best meaning he can until Plato and Socrates make it good, taking it for now to denote something like the full flowering of human potential.

1470

τούτοις (C4): sc.τοῖς δημιουργοῖς ἐλευθερίας; but also pointing forward to the adjectives ἀνδρείους, etc., which attract it back into its accusative case. The character type determines the behavior appropriate to it. τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα then reverts to the construction of τὰ προσήκοντα in order to set up the contrast next achieved, with τὰ δὲ ἀνελεύθερα, which equals τὰ μὴ τουτοῖς προσήκοντα.

1471

ἀνδρείους, σώφρονας, ὁσίους, ἐλευθέρους καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα (C4-5): Compare for the content as well as the resolute tone the famous retort at Leg.817B: ἡμεῖς ἐσμὲν τραγῳδίας αὐτοὶ ποιηταί.

1472

τὰ δὲ ἀνελεύθερα (C5-6): The other shoe drops (cf. n. 1469, supra): The unfree or slavish is unadmirable to both the Thrasymachus’s and the truly magnanimous! It is for this unanimously shameful negative that Socrates introduced the positive ἐλευθερία, though ambiguous, above; and now the mere depiction of the imitator imitating shameful behavior will clinch the argument.

1473

ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν (C7-D1): By their act of imitating (producing a likeness) they would reap what it is to be (rather than imitate being) that way. For a similar argument using this verb cf. 606B5-8.

So much in life hinges on the distinction between reality and illusion, and yet Plato has been singled out for insisting on it -- as if it were an illusion of his. Everyone remembers the Cave but few of those who do would actually say they have been outside it. Socrates’s present justification for insisting on the distinction derives ultimately from Adeimantus’s complaint that fathers teach the mere show of virtue, starting with δοκοῦντι (363A2) and culminating in the young man’s corrupt and irreversible rationalization (365B-366A), to which Socrates presently alludes with the verb κήδεσθαι (D5: cf. 363A1).

1474

κατὰ σῶμα καὶ φωνὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν διάνοιαν (D3), is climactic in its syntax (epanalepsis of κατά), its content (moving from outside to inside through the sound of the voice), and its rhythm (esp. the addition of τήν), and rightly elicits an enthusiastic καὶ μάλα from Adeimantus. The tension between the structure (A1, A2, B), as suggested by the two κατά’s and their placement, and the path of the thought (from the extreme of body through the mediation of voice to the extreme of soul) is powerful. Stallbaum’s conjecture (σχῆμα for σῶμα, with the precedent collocation of σχῆμα and φωνή at 393C5-6) reduces the tension at the cost of the sense. For φωνή used to effect a metabasis from body to soul cf. Lach.192A4-6 and Crat.423D4-5; for διάνοια standing in for ψυχή in contrast to σῶμα, cf. Leg.916A7, 925E3-4; Phdrs.239A-240A.

1475

κήδεσθαι (D5), the fathering term used by Adeimantus at 363A1, again focussing the scope of their special measures on the guards-to-be (cf. 394E2). Socrates is responding to Adeimantus's request by putting him into the position of the κηδόμενος!

1476

ἐν συμφοραῖς τε καὶ πένθεσιν καὶ θρήνοις ἐχομένην (E1-2): The sequence is illogical but genetic and phenomenologically accurate. Imagine the director coaxing his actress: “She finds herself in trouble (συμφορά): imagine how she feels (πένθος) and what then she would say (θρῆνος).” The plurals are derogatory. With the previous participial phrase this one forms a chiasm (οἰομένην … ἐχομένην) and together they close the sequence of participial phrases. This is only the beginning.

1477

πολλοῦ καὶ δεήσομεν (E2): Stallb. read πολλοῦ γε with the recentiores, citing Favorinus and Hesychius as witnesses to the idiom πολλοῦ γε καὶ δεῖ as meaning οὐδαμῶς (for which cf. A.PD 961; D.13.28, 16.52), but γε is not needed for the idiom (cf.Tht.179D6). The climactic καί is “marking a minimum” (Denn.293).

1478

πράττοντας (E5): We do not know whether to take it with the proximate masculine δούλους (having a construction parallel with the feminine singular participles of the previous list), or with the remote masculine αὐτούς (D6, the guards we are educating)—nor will they know, if they play the roles for long! The syntactic ambiguity is continued in the sequel.

1479

Note anaphora of οὐδέ γε (E5, E7).

1480

δειλούς τε καὶ τὰ ἐναντία πράττοντας ὧν νυνδὴ εἴπομεν (E7-8): With his “one word list” in δειλούς, Socrates compendiusly alludes to his list at C4-5 above, since it began with (opposite) ἀνδρείους.

1481

κακηγοργοῦντάς τε καὶ κωμῳδοῦντας ἀλλήλους καὶ αἰσχρολογοῦντας (E8-9) the rhyme is intended and its effect is satirical. The first participle redounds to the ill repute of the spoken of but the last to that of the speaker, who also is the imitator.

1482

εἰς αὑτούς τε καὶ εἰς ἄλλους (396A2): The finer ethical point that their vile behavior harms themselves as well as the others, broached by αἰσχρολογοῦντας, now becomes explicit; that it is true is easier to see in others than in oneself, in particular easier to seen by the imitator in the imitated. And with this the imitator we are imagining becomes more intimately inveigled in the behavior in which he is indulging.

1483

The repetition of ἐν λόγοις / ἐν ἔργοις (396A1-2, A3-4) directs our attention to the fact that the former is the actual behavior of these low types whereas the latter is the actors’ imitation of it in gesture and recitation.

1484

Closure is achieved by reversion through the material (μαίνεσθαι [A3]; κακοί [395E7]; γυναῖκες [395D6]; πράττειν / μιμεῖσθαι [395C6 and C3]), which broaches a transition to a new category of considerations (A8ff).

1485

ἀληθέστατα (A7), announcing “excess” in agreement: cf. 395C7 and nn. 2058, 2982.

1486

αὖ and ἤ (B7) ironically feign openmindedness. Socrates’ point having been made through the decline of the imitanda from women out of control to persons enslaved in general to those who cannot help but harm themselves (395D5-6A6), Socrates now adds, in confirmation ex post facto,(on which cf. n.1898) persons who make noises, grunts, or pacing-calls (A8-B2), to animals that make quasi intentional noises (B5), to inanimate natural objects that make noises characteristic of them only because they are natural (B6). When the imitandum reaches the zero-point of intentionality, its imitator appears to be insane, as Adeimantus will soon quip.

1487

ἀλλ’ (B8), like impatient καί in his last answer, reveals that Adeimantus has come over to Socrates’s argument out of a sense of the shamefulness of imitation, especially when it is most skillful (cf. δεινούς, 395C6), and therefore expresses his agreement with indignation. To presuppose “What justice” in evaluating the proper depicition of man would have been circular, but nothing prevents Socrates the teacher from stimulating a healthy aversion to base behavior by causing Adeimantus the student to imagine himself acting that way. When it comes to the τύποι for the gods we can, and indeed we must, rely upon dialectic (cf. nn. 1242, 1249); but the τύποι for men arise from the authority of the witness, since he is nothing other than a man – logical circularity flips into an impertinence to demand credentials.

1488

μήτε μαίνεσθαι μήτε μαινομένοις ἀφομοιοῦσθαι (B8-9). The order is arresting. They had agreed above to bar μαινομένοις ἀφομοιοῦν αὑτούς (A3: in bringing this forward (with the perfect tense) Adeimantus astutely replaces the active plus reflexive with bare middle voice), but now extends the interdiction by placing a new and second interdiction before it. He is relying upon the general interdiction not “to do the shameful thing let alone imitate it” (A5-6, cf. 3952-3), and so by cleverly identifying the imitation of mere sounds with raving madness he closes the argument by creating a retrospective chiasm in the Socratic manner (e.g., 396A4-6).

1489

καλὸς κἀγαθός (B11): The crasis adopts a tone conventional and uncritical or unexamined. On the pair of adjectives cf. n.1591.

1490

φύς τε καὶ τραφείς alluding to φύσις and μελέτη (and our educational program: 376C4-8) and reminding us by its omission of the third ingredient, ἐπιστήμη (on the triad cf.366C7 and n.885).

1491

ποῖα δὴ ταῦτα (C4): “What in the world is this (thing of yours)?” For anarthrous ποῖα presenting a challenge in the form of a question cf.330B1, 375A4, 526A2, 588C1, n.77 and compare the οἷον that Stallbaum styles “miratum” (Alc.I 113E; Charm.166C). Incredulity can also be feigned to express indignation or contempt, announcing the rejection of a point, as 400A7, Charm.174B4 (on which cf.Riddell, Digest §319); Erast.132B8; Euthyd.304E7; Gorg.490D10,E4; H.Maj.285D2 (and Stallb.ad loc.); Ion 536E6 (cf.E2-5); Laches 193E9 (and my n. ad loc.),194D10 (contrast E3 and cf. Stallb.); Phlb.63C8; Tht.180B8. The idiom is common in comedy (A.Ach.62,109,157,761; Eccl.763; Eq.32,162; Nub.247,1233,1337; Plut.391; Vesp.183,1202) and does appear in tragedy (S.Trach.427; E.HF.518, Hel.567).

1492

μέτριος (C5) picks up the conventionalist tone of the crasis above.

1493

ἢ ὑπὸ νόσων ἢ ὑπὸ ἐρώτων ἐσφαλμένον ἢ καὶ ὑπὸ μέθης ἤ τινος ἄλλης συμφορᾶς (D2-3): The list of less attractive events (D2-3) moves from more objective to more subjective sources of trouble (i.e. from disease to lust and even [καί] drink), but the moral is that since he is a good man even the bad moments in his life will be decent enough to imitate without shame. Thus even his response to events utterly beyond his control (συμφορά) will be decent: cf. 387E7.

1494

ἄλλης (D3) combines two distinct idioms, ἄλλος as mass singular and ἄλλος adverbial.

(1) Singular (ἄλλος as a mass term: “the rest of” vs. “the other”): Rep.357C6-7: ἰάτρευσίς τε καὶ ὁ ἄλλος χρηματισμός—cf. Leg.763B3-4; Prot.334B; Rep.368B1, 402E6, 414C1-2, 416C6, 457A7-8, 458D1-2, 461E7, 465B9, 467B4, 521A8, 537D5-6, 543C2-3, 554C1-2, 608B7-8, 609D5, 612B8-C1; Tht.185D1.

(2) Adverbial: The primary use of ἄλλος is to make a transition from species to genus (horses and other animals) but it can also make a transition from a species to an adjacent species, where we have to translate it adverbially, with “also” or “besides.” The logic of this adjacency admits everything from the opposite (τῶν πολιτῶν καί τῶν ἄλλων ξένων: Gorg.473C7-D1—cf. Polit.298D5-6, Rep.390A5) and the complement (Polit.269A1-2: ἡλίου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἄστρων [n.b., the sun was not a star in antiquity]—cf. Leg.898D3, 916D2-3 [and England vs. Stallb. ad loc.], 941B4-5; Phdrs.232E [and Ast ad loc., pp.241-2]; Prot.316D2-3; Rep.368B1 [“pleonastic” ἄλλος, Campb. ad loc., 2.219 §43 {d}], 396E6, 401A4 [cf.380E4-5, 564A1], 404A12-B1, 414C1-2 [cf.D3-4, D7-E1, 417B5-6], 457A7-8, 458D1-2, 618A7ff; Tht.170B3; Tim.40D6, 76D8-9, and the related meaning, “second” in the ordinal sense [as alter in Latin] at Tim.39A10ff), to the neighboring species (Leg.868A7-B1: ἀγοράν τε καὶ ἆθλα καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ἱερά—cf. Apol.36B; Crit.117B4; Leg.699C7-8, 789D6; Polit.305B8-C1; Rep.416A4-5; Symp.191A8-B1; and perhaps Rep.336A6 with n.257 ad loc.).

The word’s meaning is purely logical. The flexibility and range of its uses serves as a reminder that the Greek language like others is as unsystematic as thought itself. We can only guess its logic in a passage like Phdo.118A16-17. Its meaning can be seen to approach that of αὖ at Leg.935B6 (cf. Leg.868B1).

1495

ἐλάττω καὶ ἧττον (D1-2), in paucioribus et minus (Stallb.). For the neuter plural adjective plus adverb distributing intensity over a greater extension, cf. πάντα μᾶλλον below (397A2) and πολὺ πλείω καὶ μᾶλλον at 417B3-4. For ἐλάττω measuring plurality rather than degree cf. Crito 53A2, Gorg.512B6.

1496

γίγνηται (D3) sc. ἡ διήγησις with κατά in the sense it has at Apol.17B6: κατὰ τούτους εἶναι ῥήτωρ.

1497

τινα (D3) goes with ἀνάξιον so both must be masculine singular.

1498

τῷ χείρονι (D4): i.e., αὐτῷ χείρονι ὄντι. The article makes χείρονι a predicate, the predication taking place in this decent man’s mind: “to a man he would see as inferior.” By now it becomes clear that Socrates’s use of the comfortable terminology of the καλὸς κἀγαθός (B11) and the μέτριος (C5) are an index of what progress he thinks he has made in establishing a vision of the growing leader. The test of whether he has succeeded is whether Adeimantus is still with him.

1499

εἰ μὴ ἄρα κατὰ βραχύ (D5). With ἄρα Socrates suddenly realizes and momentarily acknowledges that the principle at stake will have its exceptions in the real world (indeed, in context the idea that the ignoble man might do something worthy could be taken as him imitating a good man, perhaps to his benefit!), and with βραχύ he introduces still another degree in the spectrum of degrees already broached by ἐλάττω δὲ καὶ ἧττον (D1-2). The exception, and its inclusion, are comparable to the prudential allowance that the leader may tell a lie, broached at 389B. The young guard is being accorded discretionary privileges pari passu with his growth, and his conversely prudential discretion is taken for granted.

1500

In fact, the only μιμεῖσθαι (D6) he will be allowed to practice is emulation (395C4-5). For this lack of familiarity with the territory compare the converse situation, when the base man finds himself in the company of the good (409CD).

1501

ἐκμάττειν (D7), from modelling wax or plaster.

1502

τῶν κακιόνων (E1): Again the comparative, again representing the point of view that has lodged in his soul.

1503

παιδιᾶς (E2), filling in the complement to σπουδῇ (D4): again the idealistic puritan remembers what his critics would dub “reality.”

1504

ἀτιμάζων τῇ διανοίᾳ (E1): sc. τύπους. Suppression of the direct object so easily supplied adds emphasis to τῇ διανοίᾳ, recalling the damage to one’s consciousness (διάνοιαν, 395D3) posed by continual exercise, which our guardian-to-be has foregone (ἀγύμαστος ὤν, above).

1505

χρήσεται (E4): The future tense is continued. Originally it was a creature of Socrates’s expression of conviction (and therefore subordinate to οἶμαι) but now Socrates sees the future with enough conviction that he drops οἶμαι and uses the indicative without scare quotes. Still and again he exceeds the hypothesis of the construction. He’ll check himself at the end of the paragraph (ἢ οὐδὲν λέγω; E7-8).

1506

μιμήσεώς τε καὶ τῆς ἄλλης διηγήσεως (E6-7), with ἄλλης adverbial, of the complement to μίμησις. Adam’s emendation (ἁπλῆς for ἄλλης), for all of its conveniently similar number of vertical strokes in majuscule, falls into the category of emendations that force the text to say what it has already, by its own devices, forced its reader to realize it has to mean. As usual something is lost by making the author say what he should have said. The decent man can take advantage of the fact that there are two options and minimize the role of the one, reverting by default (ἄλλης) to the other. This is what Socrates then says in the sequel.

1507

μὴ τοιοῦτος (397A1): μή rather than οὐ as negating the hypothesis rather than the fact. τοιοῦτος refers back to φύς τε καὶ τραφείς, 396C3.

1508

πάντα τε μᾶλλον (A2): The two terms, describing his eagerness, correspond in content and even order to the pair of terms with which Socrates described the good man’s reluctance (ἐλάττω καὶ ἧττον, 396D1-2). There, when the διήγησις (used of the whole story, as at 396C6) reaches a baser type as its topic (it was not the man but the διήγησις that was the subject of γίγνεται, as κατά indicated), the good man became reluctant; here, the baser man goes right along without scruple, if anything more eager. διηγήσεται like διήγησις at 392D3 (and as understood with the feminine participle γιγνομένῃ at 392D5-6) in the parallel passage above, refers to the telling not the narrative λέξις in particular. By its back-reference to ἐλάττω καὶ ἧττον, πάντα μᾶλλον places the accent on the second man’s lack of narrative scruple in general. Only if the back reference is missed will Madvig’s addition of μιμήσεται ἤ before διηγήσεται seem necessary.

1509

δή (A4) adds an acknowledgment that the opportunity to re-use this exemplary material was unforeseen, and once again Socrates does not resist the opportunity to indulge in satirical mockery. The ensuing list presents a gradus from unintentional sounds produced by physical objects (ψόφοι), to the polished “timbres” of musical instruments (φωναί), to the lower level of articulate animal expression (φθόγγοι).

1510

τροχιλιῶν (A5), an example repeated by Plutarch, de aud.poet.18B.

1511

ὀργάνων (A6): In antiquity, ὄργανον, like “instrument” today, can denote without modifier a musical instrument. What underlies this usage becomes clear from a passage like Symp.215BC, where Alcibiades says that Socrates can move a person the way Marsyas can except that Marsyas needs a flute in his mouth (δι’ ὀργάνων … τῇ ἀπὸ τοῦ στόματος δυνάμει) whereas Socrates can do it ἄνευ ὀργάνων ψίλοις λόγοις. That all the instruments listed here are wind is not accidental. Persons can make music without instruments by singing in their own voice. ὄργανον is therefore a metabatic term here, effecting the transition from the imitation of sounds to the impersonation of animals. For other metabatic terms cf. μεγαλοπρεπές at Leg.837C6-7, ἐμφάνεσι at Leg.855B7-8, σκληρότερα at Polit.307B9-10, αἴσθησις at Tht.164A6-7, and κωφόν at Tim.88B4. μεγάλως is sophistically metabatic at Euthyd.284E1-5.

1512

The funniest list so far (A4-7), competing with the satirical irrationality of 373A2-4 and B5-C4 but with a stronger underlying point, that the mimic of everything makes himself into everything else’s instrument and finally replaces his own voice with an animal’s (cf. n.1509, supra)

1513

φωναῖς τε καὶ σχήμασιν (B1-2) Fleshing out ἐν λόγοις καὶ ἐν ἔργοις (396A1-2 and 3-4), as they are disfigured in the medium of imitation. Cf. φθέγξασθαι / ποιήσει (604A6-7 and n.4957).

1514

σμικρὰς τὰς μεταβολὰς ἔχει (B6): The reference of μεταβολή and even its sense are at first obscure. Socrates is beginning to make a transition within μουσική (376E) from story to music proper, and he needs an abstract and general term to make the bridge. μεταβολή was indeed the term for modulation in music (cf. LSJ s.v.). For the idea behind σμικραὶ μεταβολαί cf. 604E1-4 (where ἔχει is again used, E1).

1515

Taking λέγειν (B8) as the subject of γίγνεται.

1516

ἁρμονία (B7) is close to what we now call mode, but “key” is less technical, and can serve in the translation to get the meaning, for a while.

1517

πρέπουσαν ἁρμονίαν καὶ ῥυθμὸν τῇ λέξει (B7): Already the principles that the melody follows the lyrics and the rhythm follows the melody are broached. καὶ ἐν μίᾳ ἁρμονίᾳ (B8) is epexegetical on αὐτήν, and gets its explanation in the parenthesis; but rhythm, too, had just been mentioned alongside ἁρμονία (note chiastic order of before and after) and so needs not to be forgotten, at least in passing.

καὶ δὴ καί here has the force of recalling an item that is inherently interesting or demands inclusion in its own right whether it advances the immediate theme or not. Likewise δή can be used to mark the transition to a new class of item in a list (n.34 ad 328B4-8). The new class may well be the target of the list (cf. Leg.758E4-6; Phdrs.274C8-D2; Rep.563E10-4A1) or the argument (Rep.330A3, 331A10, 332D2, etc.) in which case καὶ δή is transitional (Denniston 256), but may just as well not be, as here and at Charm.169B6; Meno 96D2; Leg.747A2-5, 760A7-B1; Rep.371A10 (along with several other δή’s, passim, as the occupations multiply), 419A5-10; Soph.265C1-3.

1518

παιδαγωγοῖς (D7) is a surprising addition unless the first plurals above (D1, D2) have lingered in our minds. If it is we that are deciding what the paideia of these young guards will be, we are their παιδαγωγοί. Socrates is admonishing Adeimantus that they are taking an unorthodox position, and immediately portrays him standing alone (οὗ σὺ αἱρῇ, D7-8) in rebuttal of the whole mob, including, indeed the very κηδόμενοι he complained about in his speech (363A1), asking for Socrates's aid to rebut.

1519

ἥδιστος γάρ (D9), “assentient” γάρ (Denniston) granting the objection unperturbed.

1520

οὐ γὰρ οὖν ἁρμόττει, another assentient γάρ, unperturbed.

1521

ὑπὸ σοφίας (398A1) along with emphatically placed ἄνδρα already suggests the much-touted arrival of the sophist as it is depicted at the beginning of Prot. (309C1-310A1, 310B6-D4) as well as Gorg. and Euthyd. The slight illogic or confusion of αὐτός τε καὶ τὰ ποιήματα βουλόμενος ἐπιδείξασθαι satirizes the grandness of his arrival as well as the fatuous avidity of the Athenians to see him perform, something Plato always satirizes. Cf. Euthyd.271A1-5; and in Gorgias, οὐδὲν οἷον τὸ αὐτὸν ἐρωτᾶν (447C5), followed by Socrates’s surprise question ὅστις ἐστίν (D1); and in Prot., Hippocrates’s οὐδὲ ἑώρακα Προταγόραν οὐδὲ ἀκήκοα οὐδέν (310E4) followed by Socrates’s prudential distinction between the man and what he says. The praise Socrates suggests that we give to this interloper is not “Platonic irony” but the quickest way to persuade him to leave.

1522

ἱερὸν καὶ θαυμαστὸν καὶ ἡδύν (A4-5), exhibiting the swift powers of the triadic form. Socrates moves from the objective assessment (ἱερόν) to the subjective cause of the assessment (ἡδύν), through the middle term θαυμαστόν. For such an elegant triad cf. 461B6, 522C1-2, 582A5, 601D4-5 (a double triad); and Crito 47B1-2; Gorg.485E1, 494E5; Leg.634A3-4, 704D6-7, 757B4-5, 809D3, 897C6; Phdo. 66C6; Phdrs.229B7-8; Polit.301D2-3; Prot.338A8; Symp.208E4; Tim.82B6-7. Contrast Thrasymachus’s rather flaccid attempt at elevation in his peroration, 344C5 (and n.453). Characteristically the connectives are striding καί only (A καί B καί C) or for that matter asyndeton (e.g., Symp.211E1 and Rep.399C2-3 and n.1556), rather than the usual A τε καί B καί C; and characteristically the rhythm is managed with considerable effect.

1523

The contrast between οὐκ ἔστιν and οὔτε θέμις ἐγγενέσθαι (A5-6) depends on the distinction between οὐσία and γένεσις, the strongest of distinctions in Plato, and hardly needs the improvements of the negative adverbs suggested by Adam (οὔτ’ for οὐκ in A5) and Bekker (οὐδέ for οὔτε in A6). Our city by its nature (οὐσία) has no place for this type and moreover would be harmed by its introduction (γένεσις) from the outside.

1524

Reading τε εἰς (A6) of ms A rather than τε ἂν εἰς of mss FDM, with edd. It is an index of the intimacy of connection done by τε that ἄν does not need to be repeated, just as it tends to be reiterated in clauses connected by the stronger and more insistent δέ (A5, A8).

1525

ποιητῇ … καὶ μυθολόγῳ (A8-B1) repeats οἱ ποιηταὶ καὶ οἵ τι λέγοντες (397C8).

1526

The contrast here drawn between ὠφελία (the utile) and τὸ ἡδύ (the dulce) begins, to all appearances, a tradition that extends down to Horace’s contrast between them at Ars Poetica 333-346, and beyond. Cf. 607E1-2.

1527

κατ’ ἀρχάς (B3), referring back to the τύποι περὶ θεολογίας (379A1-6).

1528

Such fundamental points and logic are exactly what is ignored in Glaucon’s account of the “nature and origin” of justice (358C2, E3ff), and are what, by being ignored, made the beginning of the account incoherent (what it is is whence it came; injustice has a nature but justice does not: cf. n.716; and nn.720, 732, 738, 740, 741, 757, 763, supra).

1529

Piety corresponds to the proper way of speaking about the gods (τύποι περὶ τῆς θεολογίας, Book Two); then in Book Three, in connection with the depiction of heroes, whom we would properly emulate, comes bravery (386A6, cf. n.763), truthfulness (~ wisdom? 389B2), and temperance (389D7, and n.1380); as to justice (which would guide the proper depiction of mere men) this begs the question (392A10-C4).

1530

Cf. nn. 1322, 1325, 1358, 1363, 1394, 1396.

1531

392A3-6.

1532

Note the construction with μέν and δέ and the etymological figure λόγων / λέξεως (392C6): Cf. n.1417.

1533

For etymological transition cf.nn.173, 542, and 1287. Plato’s manner of inventing distinctions in order to create a context of thought onto which more important questions about a better life can be projected and thereby dealt with at a more comfortable distance, stands in the strongest contrast to Aristotle’s discourse, which invents distinctions for their own sake and thereby paves the way to philosophy as a divertissement for people who enjoy thinking more than they need to. Aristotle places the difference between his own and Plato’s manners of philosophy into its very best light at the beginning of the de Partibus Animalium I.2.

1534

ἐὰν ἡ ἐμή … νικᾷ (397D4).

1535

Namely, the παιδαγωγοί (397D7) cf. n. 1518. The repetition of his personal asseveration καὶ αὐτῷ μοι δοκεῖ at the very end of the section (398B9) recalls and stands in contrast with the moment near its beginning when Adeimantus averred the corrosive effect that the patricidal stories of Zeus and Cronos had even upon himself (378B6-7).

1536

As his several caveats about the special constraints of the present context continually remind us (he defers to the traditional structure of education, 376E2-3;377B1-2, B7-9; 378A2-3, B2-5, C1-3, C6-D3, D7-E1, E7-379A1; 380B7-C1; 381E1-6; 383C1-5; 386A1-4; 387B1-6, E7-388A3; 390A4; 391D7-E1; 394E1-2; 395B3-D3). Criticism of literature per se will come in Book Ten, where its effect on the mature soul, there thought of as tripartite, can be evaluated.

1537

It is perhaps Plato’s very strength and authority as a literary artist that worries and has worried his less philosophically inclined readers when suddenly he has his “spokesman,” Socrates, focus his attention and his very penetrating light into their favorite haunts. From antiquity this authority was revered as now it is feared, even though from the beginning he had contrived a way to write that would require and allow his readers to interpret for themselves what is being said (the logos) before they could “attribute” it to him or anybody else. Sir Philip Sidney famously preferred, in connection with Plato’s criticism of poetry, “justly to construe Plato’s authority rather than unjustly resist it” (Defence of Poesy, ch.13), and quoted Scaliger’s criticism of the barbaric use of Plato’s “authority” to ban all poetry from the city (Poetics, 5.A.1). Plato however did all he could to evade being an “authority” by remaining anonymous, just as his teacher, Socrates, avoided “authority” by waiting for the question to be placed by others.

1538

He shows a certain insouciance about music right away with the pun συμφωνήσειν (C5).

1539

κινδυνεύω ἐκτὸς τῶν πάντων εἶναι (C8): cf. H.Maj.293A9. Adeimantus had intervened to ensure that poetry, with which he was particularly concerned, should receive a full treatment (at 376D4-5: cf. n.1148); Glaucon's interruption suggests that he, in contrast, is particularly fond of music, whatever this implies.

1540

πάντως δήπου (C11).

1541

With ἱκανῶς ἔχεις (C11) Socrates, with characteristic sensitivity, picks up Glaucon’s expression (οὔκουν ἱκανῶς ἔχω, C8-9).

1542

Socrates’s γε (D4) picks up Glaucon’s (D3).

1543

ἐν τοῖς αὐτοῖς δεῖν τύποις λέγεσθαι οἷς ἄρτι προείπομεν καὶ ὡσαύτως (D5-6), echoing both B7-8, ἅ τε γὰρ λεκτέον καὶ ὡς (in using the adverb to refer to the λέξις rather than λόγος), and B1-4 τὴν τοῦ ἐπιεικοῦς λέξιν μίμοιτο καὶ τὰ λεγόμενα λέγοι ἐν ἐκείνοις τοῖς τύποις, ... (in abbreviating the whole treatment of μῦθος as boiling down to λέξις and the τύποι of the λόγοι).

1544

τήν γε ἁρμονίαν (D10) is causal. The omission of a separate article for ῥυθμός despite change of gender is a way to avoid weakening its force.

1545

ἁρμονίαι (E1). It is now (cf.397B7 and n.1516) that we need to improve upon translating ἁρμονία with “melody” and to begin substituting the notions of key, or mode, or scale. The traditions of classical Indian raga are perhaps the most fully articulate model still available to us for what Socrates has in mind. In the raga tradition there are several scales and within each scale there are many ragas each intimately connected with a season and/or time of day and/or meteorological condition and/or a mood (from heroic to dolorous), a theme, a god. Proper execution of the given raga by the performer establishes the raga’s characteristic feeling or mood—its ras or juice or sap—and maintains and explores it through the piece.

1546

θρήνων καὶ ὀδυρμῶν ἐν λόγοις (D11) almost begs the question since θρῆνοι are already songs. For this reason indeed Socrates has ready to hand the term θρηνώδεις ἁρμονίαι (E1) for the musical modes that would conform to the content of the λόγοι. The semantics corroborate the principle that melody follows content. Cf. the next example, and n.1550.

1547

σὺ γὰρ μουσικός (E1): Despite the impression of relative incompetence we were supposed to take from Glaucon’s opening remark (ἐκτὸς τῶν πάντων, C8), Socrates now lets fall that he is some kind of musical expert after all. Only a desire to know can produce this combination. His uncertainty what to say about music is an index of his interest and attraction to the subject. Analogously, a combination of interest and uncertainty that Adeimantus had exhibited in his very speech motivated him to intervene (at 376D) to ensure that “enough” time would be given to the question of poetry, where “enough” ended up meaning as much time as he wanted.

1548

γυναιξίν (E4): For the second time Socrates casually assumes some of the guards will be female (cf. 387E9-388A3, to which he here refers).

1549

And therefore so are stories (λόγοι) about such behavior, to which the corresponding ἁρμονίαι must now be determined.

1550

μέθη … καὶ μαλακία καὶ ἀργία (E6-7): In the case above, θρῆνοι καὶ ὀδυρμοί corresponded to θρηνώδεις ἀρμονίαι. In the present case, μέθη … καὶ μαλακία καὶ ἀργία correspond to μαλακαί τε καὶ συμποτικαὶ ἁρμονίαι, where the chiasm registers the accumulating success in applying the principle of finding ἁρμονίαι to correspond with the action or behavior depicted in the λόγος. The two cases exhibit dialogical pacing (cf.n.197 ad 333C11). In the first and easier, we have language ready-made for expressing the correspondence between the content (θρῆνος) and the musical mode (θρηνώδης). The second case expands upon the first with a double instance, and resembles the first case in the first of its instances by the use of an etymological figure despite the fact that no musical genre is referred to (μαλακία / μαλακαί) and in its second instance by the use of an established musical genre without relying on etymology (μέθη / συμποτική). The verbal variation begins to broach the question whether every activity has a music essentially appropriate to it despite the limits of language.

1551

With σοι (399A3) Glaucon continues to accept the role Socrates has assigned him, to play his consultant in technical musical matters.

1552

κατάλειπε (A5), again gamely repeating Glaucon’s word (λείπεσθαι, A3). The present is conative and alongside his demurral of expertise it adds pathos.

1553

ἀποτυχόντος (A8) is analyzed into two cases governed by exegetical participles, the first (ἰόντος) subdivided into two that are related by degree (εἰς τραύματα / εἰς θανάτους) and the second (πεσόντος) closing the pair with a generalization (εἴς τινα ἄλλην συμφοράν) that repeats the governing idea of vicissitude stemming from ἀποτυχόντος.

1554

τὴν τύχην (B3), with quasi-demonstrative article, points back to the idea with which the colon began (ἀποτυχόντος) creating closure, with omission of the prefix by the I-E rule (cf. n.1567).

1555

Reading ἑαυτὸν ἐπέχοντα (B6) with all mss. Its sense is spelled out by the two subsequent participial constructions. The shift in the man’s role from the person entreating to the person entreated entails abandoning the genitive participial construction and replacing it with the objective accusative. The vagueness of ἐπέχοντα, like that of ἀποτυχόντος in the first limb, opens a space in which the ensuing specifications can gather. καὶ ἐκ τούτων, κ.τ.λ. (B7) corresponds to ἐν πᾶσι τούτοις, κ.τ.λ., above (B1-2), introducing pari passu the description of how the person bears the circumstances he meets. παρατεταγμένως καὶ καρτερούντως there describe bravery whereas κατὰ νοῦν and μὴ ὑπερηφάνως describe sobriety or temperance here; these two virtues, bravery and temperance, then appear side by side in the summary (C3).

1556

βίαιον, ἑκούσιον, δυστυχόντων, εὐτυχόντων, σωφρόνων, ἀνδρείων (C2-3): Socrates has sketched the activities of wartime and peacetime with a few well-chosen strokes, and now summarizes with an elegant triad of complementary pairs set out in asyndeton. Of these pairs the first and last correspond to war and peace, in characteristic chiasm, and the second pair (δυστυχόντων, εὐτυχόντων) emphasizes the theme of human vicissitude that permeates the whole paragraph. The syntax of the neuter singulars βίαιον, ἑκούσιον needs no editorial refinement: all that is needed for the sense is to distinguish this pair from the other two which deal with the vicissitudes and the types of persons worth imitating. Lists in asyndeton are not uncommon, especially when the items are coordinated (Denniston is willing to class this as formal asyndeton rather than stylistic: lxiii and Intro.II[2][iii]), but achieving elevation by asyndeton, in Plato at least, is rare (cf. Symp.211B1 and E1).

1557

The sudden elevation in Socrates’s expression (A5-C4) resembles in degree as well as manner that of his description of the idyllic life in the simple city (372A6-C1), including elaboration by balanced pairs and extenuation of the construction with participles and divisions instead of subordination. In both cases he retains a humbler tone by avoiding periodicity.

1558

ᾠδαῖς τε καὶ μέλεσιν (C8) referring to the words and the melodies, respectively, again.

1559

τριγώνων (C10): A recondite stringed instrument referred to also at Arist.Pol.1341A41; surely not our modern “triangle.” For both condemned instruments cf. Susemihl-Hicks, Politics of Aristotle 1.632-6.

1560

πολυχορδότατον (D4): Embouchure and “squeezing” the stops can achieve slight variations in tone on the flute as if it had thousands of fixed strings.

1561

Reading μίμημα (D5) with the majority of mss. By the second singular παραδέξῃ (cf. also σοι at D7) Socrates again defers to the expertise of Glaucon and then guides it with the ensuing observation about the modes appropriate to the flute. Glaucon accepts the observation as plainly true (δῆλα δή, D6).

1562

σύριγξ (D8): Socrates introduces the shepherd’s pipe without worrying about the kind of music it makes because its use is not so much for making music for the polis but for an individual killing time (τις, D8, is dismissive) out in the country, where a Gyges could be, in the company of his sheep, without even being noticed. He mentions it at all because he has been formulating a policy to provide for ὀργάνων δημιουργοί (C10-D1), and so it is a bit of a joke.

1563

ὡς γοῦν … ὁ λόγος ἡμῖν σημαίνει (D10), something of a catchphrase to acknowledge the compelling logic of an entailment in the face of its courting paradox, reinforced by γοῦν of “part-proof” more often than not (334A9, 584A11; Gorg.511B7; Tht.160C1-2) or its empirical unverifiability (Gorg.527C6, Phdo.66E4). In the present case it is the former: Glaucon the concupiscent μουσικός (398E1) feels a bit of vertigo as to the austerity to which the argument has taken them. Compare the stronger idiom, ὁ λόγος αἱρεῖ (604C7 and n.4966). The giddiness continues in his climactic asseveration just below (Μὰ Δία … οὔ μοι φαινόμεθα [Ε4] after mere οὐ φαινόμεθα above [D2 and C9]).

1564

νὴ τὸν κύνα (E5): Socrates replies pari passu with his own more moderate oath, favored by though not peculiar to him (cf. Ar.V. 83), which the Scholiast describes as Rhadymanthean. Cf. Greene’s note to the scholion ad Apol. 22A in his edition (Scholia Platonica, 5) for other ancient testimony. It was traditionally thought to be an expedient for avoiding the free use of divine names, like “Godfrey Daniel” in English and other such ingenuities in all languages.

1565

λελήθαμέν γε διακαθαίροντες (E5). The perfect represents their total engagement rather than asserting they have completed the job of purification (cf. E8), which is presented in a conative aspect by the present participle (διακαθαίροντες) re-enforced by the prefix δια-. What has brought this coloration of their work to mind for Socrates is the remark he himself has just made about Apollo and the impious Marsyas. He had set the tone with his Rhadymanthean oath, and the whole trend is noticed by Glaucon in his response. Such back-reference always suggests the end of the section is near.

1566

σωφρονοῦντές γε ἡμεῖς (E7): Cf. 374D7. It was after all this same Glaucon whose concupiscence caused the city to become spoiled and enervated, as Socrates here reminds him (with τρυφᾶν [E6]: cf.372E2-3); but now, in very accordance with the elevated description of good behavior above – and perhaps also remembering Athena's rejection of the flute for the way playing it required her to disfigure her own face, a moderation unfelt by Marsyas who picked it up gladly and challenged the seemly god Apollo – Glaucon acquiesces in the outcome of the argument (compare τὰ ἀποβαίνοντα ἀγαπᾶν, C1) the two of them have presently reached together (ἡμεῖς), and now adopts for himself a policy of moderation instead.

1567

καθαίρωμεν (E8) simply repeats διακαθαίροντες (E5). Dropping a prefix in restatement is as characteristic as repeating it: Cf. λείπειν (C5) after κατάλειπε (C4) and τύχην (B3) after ἀποτυχόντος (A8); also 335E2, 365A6, 370E11, 402B6-7, 410E1, 413D5, 436B5, 444D3, 472A2 (and n.2644), 474C3, 484D5, 528C8, 564B2, 610C3, 612E1, 619C2; Charm.153D1; Gorg.453C5-6, 497B7-C1; Lys.209C1, 223B1; Meno 97C7-8; Phdo.59B7-8, 104D1-2; Phdrs.248A2-5; Polit.286A3-4; Tht.178A2-4. Cf. C.Watkins HSCP 71(1966)115-9 on the underlying Indo-European rule.

1568

αὐτούς (E10), along with the δέ of μηδέ, treats choreography as an accompaniment following the rhythms considered in themselves, as rhythm itself was understood to follow melody.

1569

κοσμίου τε καὶ ἀνδρείου (E11), the two essential behavioral characteristics pursued and defined above (A5-C4), associated there with peacetime duties and wartime, and corresponding to the traditional virtue of σωφροσύνη and ἀνδρεία. The genitive is the genitive of characteristic. The construction is repeated at 400A7 and survives even the addition of πρέπουσαι (B2-3) which would otherwise have called for the dative.

1570

ἀλλὰ μὰ Δι’ (400A4), an oath not Rhadymanthean (contrast νὴ τὸν κύνα, 399E5 and n.1564).

1571

τεθεαμένος (A6) here suggests spectacle (θέαμα: cf.390D2) not study. The perfect is empirical as at 577A6-7, 584D9, 601B4, 608D3; cf. Lach.183C1, 184A8, 185E7, 186A8; Leg.711A; Phdrs.249E5; Polit.264C4. Glaucon admits he has seen more art than he has understood: so much is implied below at 402D4. The distinction becomes thematic at 475D in conversation with this same Glaucon.

1572

ποῖα δὲ ὁποίου βίου (A7), instead of τίνα and τίνος, and in contrast to ἄττα above (A5) stresses that the basis for associating the rhythms with the moods will be “qualitative” (as opposed to the more mechanical dissection of the whole into its parts and the quantitative mapping of one onto one evoked by τρία and τέτταρα above [A4-6]), but also express Glaucon’s skepticism whether there is any way in the world to do so after all (on ποῖον incredulous cf.396C4 and n.1491).

1573

ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μέν (B1) dismisses the question, and the ensuing καί as well as the first plural βουλευσόμεθα, by referring the question to Damon, exonerate both Socrates and Glaucon from pursuing imponderables once the principle has been set down (cf. οὐκ ἐσμὲν ποιηταί, 378E7). The καί with Damon is not derogatory but approaches δή in meaning (sic Denniston 317, 320): translate with “our”. Accordingly, the next statement (οἶμαι δέ, B4) provides a justification for bringing him in.

καί commonly introduces a reference to a source or an authority outside the text, as it also may introduce a corroborative etymology (cf. 404B10 [and Shorey ad loc., Loeb 1.267 note f], 407C7; Leg.706D; Phdo.65B3 [Burnet’s worries ad loc. are unfounded]; Phdrs.240C1-2; Tim.72A6; and Arist.de Caelo 279B30; EE 1218A36, 1332A8; EN 1096A3; Met.989A10, 1076A39-B1, B39-1077A1; Top.65B16; for etymologies, e.g., Arist. HA 492A22; EN 1103A17, 1112A16-17).

1574

ἀνελευθερίας καὶ ὕβρεως ἢ μανίας καὶ ἄλλης κακίας (B2-3): The form of the list appears to be: a1 καί a2 ἤ a3 καὶ ἄλλο A (assuming κακία is the genus and designating it with a capital, of which ἀνελευθερία, ὕβρις, and μανία are meant to be species). The sequence of connectives (καί, ἤ, καί) appears slovenly. As to its content, if the opposite of κακία is ἀρετή, then for guidance in understanding the three listed species we can consider the species that are their opposites, the set of cardinal virtues. But these are usually four (σοφία, σωφροσύνη, δικαιοσύνη, δικαιοσύνη and ἀνδρεία) and sometimes five (ὁσιοτής added in), whereas the species of vice here listed are only three, and two of them (ὔβρις and μανία) would seem to be opposites of the single virtue σωφροσύνη, while the third simply has to be the opposite of ἐλευθερία used in the personal sense, rather than one of the standard four virtues. Some help is gotten from the nearby list of virtues at 395C4-5, which exceptionally does include ἐλευθερία in a list of virtues (cf. also 401B4-5 and 402C3); and some consideration should be given to the fact that in the recent context the virtuous behavior under consideration for emulation has been epitomized by virtues of ἀνδρεία and σωφροσύνη.

The real subject here is the inculcation of virtue and the role played by mimicry and imitation in that inculcation. Along the way we have discovered that mimicry does some inculcating of its own. Illustrations of virtue must therefore be drawn from the more palpable and grossly visible aspects of behavior (cf.397B6-C6 and nn). For this, ἀνδρεία and σωφροσύνη are especially appropriate (cf.399E11 and n.1569). Acts of ἐλευθερία might deserve exceptional inclusion for the same reason. The list of virtues reached below (402C2-4) continues in the same vein by adding μεγαλοπρέπεια, which is again absent in the usual list of cardinal virtues but again is easy to visualize in the figure cut by a man and his posture.

Returning then to the question of the list's form, since ὕβρις and μανία serve as alternative opposites of the single virtue σωφροσύνη, the form is: a1 καί a2 ἤ a2’ καὶ ἄλλο A, and the sequence of connectives (καί, ἤ, καί) is appropriate after all. Indeed although there are many Platonic lists in καί, καί, ἤ καί, there seems to be one in which καί and ἤ simply alternate (Charm.161D6-7, Leg.801C8-D1, Tht.175E4-5 only momentarily appear to be examples). The constellation a1, a2, a2’ is a favorite of Plato’s whether followed by a generalization as here or not: 411D3-4, 431B9-C3, 439D6-7 (incl.generalization), 476B4-5, 528A4-5, 598D4-5; Euthyd.271B4-5; Gorg.457D6, 483B6-8, 508C6-7; H.Maj.304B2-3; Leg.744B6, 766E1-2, 776D8-E1, 782A6-7, 803E1-2, 947E5, 950E5-6; Meno 75C8-9; Phdo 85E3-4; Phlb.17E4-5; Polit.262D3-4; Prot.325A6, 325E1; Symp.219D4-5.

1575

ἐνόπλιόν τέ τινα … καὶ δάκτυλον καὶ ἡρῷόν γε (B4-6): From their names at least (as γε suggests with the most obvious case) these rhythms might be acceptable.

1576

The sudden flurry of technicalities (B6-C1) might as well be taken to refer to the resolution of a longum into two brevia in the arsis of the dactylic foot, whose arsis is equal in length to its ictus; but it is hard not to agree with Shorey that ἄνω καὶ κάτω is satiric (Loeb 1.253, note f, comparing Phlb.43A and B).

1577

οἶμαι (C1) continues the οἶμαι of B8 which itself continues the οἶμαι with which the sentence began (B4). Socrates is careful to dispel the impression that the opinions belong to him, or that in repeating them he agrees with them.

1578

ἀναβεβλήσθω (C4). The perfect is dismissive: cf.369B4 and n.965.

1579

τόδε (C7). As with that of harmony, the treatment of rhythm casts technical learning as foil for the moral principle.

1580

ἀλλὰ (C7) finally answers the μέν of 400B1, which had been reiterated at C4, to close the digression on Damon and his kind of expertise with a dismissal. The real purpose for introducing the details is not to then derogate the expertise, but to stress the importance of what he dismisses it for (cf. n.523), namely, the meaning of music, which will soon occasion an enunciation of the Theory of Ideas. Relevance of course trumps mere prolixity, whereas the interest of the interlocutor is in turn the criterion of relevance and therefore allows it, as it did at 376D2-3 and 398C4-6, in those two cases occasioning an interruption by the other brother.

1581

The argument (C7-9) presumes that the postures of choreography must follow or reflect the rhythm in the way that both rhythm and melody had been said to follow the story (398D8-9). Melody had then been treated first (398E1-399E7), and rhythm “followed” melody (as the “next” topic at least: ἕπεσθαι is used, not ἀκολουθεῖν [399E8-9]; but cf. 400D2 and 7 below: ἕπεσθαι ἡμῖν at 399E8 is probably a pun). Rhythm was then made to conform not to melody but subject matter (βίος: 399E10-11). And now within rhythm (τὸ περὶ ῥυθμούς, D9) we have discovered with Damon’s help distinguishable components or elements of rhythmic pattern and steps of the foot (ἀγωγὰς τοῦ ποδός vs. ῥυθμούς, 400C1-2), each characterizable on its own and together. In then dismissing Damon we dismiss this anfractuosity by presuming that dance is composed to follow rhythm and focus instead on whether the quality of rhythmic composition also determines the “quality” of the choreography. The range of this quality is done by the prefixes εὐ- and ἀ-. The adverb εὖ directs the imagination toward an action that is well executed but also toward the adverb's noun, ἀγαθόν; the privative alpha suggests that the alternative is a privation or non-execution of that action, rather than the action being executed poorly. Hence Shorey translates “apt” and “unapt.” Socrates is not concerned about aesthetic rankings finer than these, though it would appear that Damon was (400C1-3).

1582

ἀλλὰ μήν … γε (D1), of the minor premise.

1583

εὔρυθμον (D1): εὐρυθμία conforms to καλὴ λέξις and ἀρρυθμία follows its “opposite” (ἐναντίᾳ, D2), which would be λέξις αἰσχρά or κακή. This mild oscillation between contrary (καλή and αἰσχρά) and contradictory (εὐ- and ἀ-) again draws attention to the tension between speaking of art good and bad versus art well done and not well done, two ways of speaking that an aficionado would keep separate but Socrates for his own purposes momentarily at least identifies. The εὖ of the cause creates εὖ in the effect: goodness (τὸ ἀγαθόν) is rather flatly being asserted to be transitive.

1584

εἴπερ (D3): Conformity of the harmony and rhythm with the λέξις follows a fortiori from the fact that λέξις follows λόγος. The point of rounding up all these parts and moving upward through them is to get back to what the next question asks, what do λέξις and λόγος follow?

1585

τῷ τῆς ψυχῆς ἤθει (D7): The mention of ψυχή is striking. Among other things it introduces a predicate for the term ἦθος, which will play a climactic role in the next sentence. Hitherto the βίος (399E10) or the human type (399A5-C1, 399A1, etc.), rather than the soul, had been the entity imitated by art.

1586

λέξει (D9): It comes to the same whether λέξις here represents both λέξις and λόγος (which have been placed together just above [D6] and will again be just below [400D11: εὐλογία]), or represents itself only so as to make the stricter point (which was forgone just above, D3-4) that the other things follow the λόγος only because they follow the λέξις which had previously been shown to follow the λόγος.

1587

εὐλογία (D11), a coinage produced by the logical mood and style of the passage, which has forgotten the meaning that the word already has, everywhere else it is used (i.e. praise).

1588

ἄνοιαν (E1) denotes a condition far more dire than the kind of simpleminded innocence envisioned by the supercilious use of εὐήθεια and glossed over by it. Socrates nevertheless uses the strong term because of its privative alpha (so as to continue the system of contradictories [rather than contraries] that he had articulated with εὐ- and ἀ- words by means of which he had set up the climactic string of εὐ- words), as because he wants to bring νοῦς into the discussion, as we shall immediately see.

1589

διάνοιαν (E3), where δια- emphatically denies the alpha privative of ἄνοια. and the common noun is given a new meaning of “entire mindfulness”. It is one of the characteristic techniques of Plato (and his Socrates) to speak directly to the reader’s (and the interlocutor’s) mind, by exploiting meanings latent in terms but brought to the surface by the process of the logos (the λόγος of language), against their standing and conventional meanings (the δόξα of language). Cf. εὐλογία above.

1590

ὡς ἀληθῶς (E2), etymologizing εὐήθεια with εὖ and ἦθος.

1591

τὴν … εὖ τε καὶ καλῶς τὸ ἦθος κατεσκευασμένην διάνοιαν (E2-3). εὖ having served its purpose may be replaced with καλῶς; but at the same time it is to be remembered that these are the adverbial expressions of ἀγαθός and καλός, the pair by which human goodness is traditionally expressed (perhaps as the combination of the moral and the aesthetic: cf. 466A9, 509A4-5 [and n.3222], 561C1, 581E7, 599C7 and n.4833, 601D4 and n.4886; Prot.319E4). Against the mendacious bendings of language that have found their way into everyday speech, Socrates bends language back, to an edifying usage of his own, and with this passage εὐήθεια is finally redeemed from the cynical abuse of Thrasymachus (343C6, 348C12), which had ruefully been continued in the speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus (e.g., 361B7), though its rehabilitation had begun in the argument about the honesty of the gods at 380D5 (cf. n.). This merely playful “etymological argument” involves the same term in connection with which the fallacious limitations of etymological argument had been exposed when Socrates used it in an argumentum ex contrariis in Book One (εὐήθεια / κακοήθεια, 348C5, and n. ad 348D1).

The present tour de force of language began when Socrates dismissed the complications of Damon’s theory and asked Glaucon a simpler question (400C7ff). At this point the language began to feel skewed (εὐ- vs. ἀ-) and now the end justifies, or at least explains, those means. This proleptic skewing of language is a salient feature in the philosophical rhetoric of Socrates and Plato, useful in any transition (e.g., Charm.173C3-7 [addition of μαντική]; Crat.410C4 [addition of ἔτος], 423D4-5 [addition of χρῶμα]; Gorg.467D1 [πλεῖν], 478E4 [ἀδικίαν, pace delentes!], 502C5-D9 [δῆμος], 504E7-8 [κάμνοντι leading to μοχθηρῶς διακειμένῳ], 521E8-22A2 [setting up 522B2-9]; Lach.191C8-192A6 [τάχος transitioning from body to mind]; Leg.694E6-7 [setting up shepherds], 797E-8B [body preparing for soul], 865B6 [ψιλῷ]; Phdo 89D6-8 [ὑγιής], 104E1-5 [strained repetition of ἀ- prefix, as here]; Phlb.29A10-11 [πνεῦμα slanting ἀήρ toward meteorology], 39E10-11 [εὐσεβής]; 55B3-4 [slanting σοφία into νοῦς against ἡδονή], 67B1-2 [slanting animals into beasts to parody Eudoxus]; Polit.306C10-D3 and 307A8-B1[use of φορά]; Rep.408E2 [σώματι σῶμα], 428D11ff [qualitative effect of few], 468B11 [φιληθῆναι], 442B2-3 [n.2306], 492A7 [n.2925], 499A4 [n.3034], 508B3 [n.3201], 547B3-4 [χρυσίου τε καὶ ἀργύρου], 585A3 [n.4548], 590E3 [n.4698], 601E1 [n.4892]; Symp.211E2-3 [reducing the list to its theoretically relevant minimum]; Tht.158D1 [χρόνος], 175E3-5; Tim.28B7-8 [sensation done with ὁρατὸς ... ἁπτός τε setting up the theory of four elements], 50B2 [τρίγωνον] and 53B5 [ἀριθμοῖς] prepare for analysis of the elements into polygons). Slanting is particularly serviceable in transitions from the lower to the higher, of which transitions the ultimate case is the analogia entis. Accordingly it plays a prominent role in the Line Passage (507C6ff, 509E1-10A3). We will see a paradigmatic instance of it below (402B5-7 and n.1629).

Such refinements in the use of language characteristically elicit such pleased and pleasing remarks as “Plato blends image and thing to which the image refers” (G.Billings, Art of Transition in Plato [Menasha 1920 = New York 1979], 80n.34, with references); and “By subtle introduction of these words the doctrine is pushed to the farthest limit” (Campbell ad Tht.157D8-9); and Socratic epagoge “often proceeds by minute steps through linked synonyms” (Shorey ad Rep.338E [Loeb 1.48.note a]).

1592

παντάπασι μὲν οὖν (E4), characteristically used to express agreement to a complex assertion.

1593

μέλλουσι (E5), μέλλειν used with present rather than future infinitive. Smyth (§1959a) accounts for the appearance of a future infinitive with μέλλω by saying in these cases μέλλω means “think (presumably accounting for the future infinitive as being a creature of indirect discourse, as elsewhere); when the present infinitive is used μέλλω is just itself, i.e., a verb of will.

1594

διωκτέα μὲν οὖν (E7). The point seems new but is implied in what came before. We had adopted a division of labor in the City in Words, and now we are being reminded that our young are likewise being groomed to perform a special job in that city, to guard it against the evils of its own desire for more. Their nature was what made it even conceivable that they should be able to perform this task, namely their dog-like inborn combination of brave resistance to the enemy and reliable loyalty to the friend. Their nurture must enable them to bring this twin endowment into action, the action being to “guard,” though this job has not been defined. In the event, the influences we have been seeking to guard them against appear to become the influences they will guard the city against. μελέτη goes with ἧθος.

1595

πλήρης δέ (401A2): The anaphora belongs to Socrates. His tone is rising.

1596

σκευῶν ἐργασία (A3) is contrasted (αὖ) with the δημιουργία of the visual arts (τοιαύτη). ὑφαντικὴ καὶ ποικιλία (A2) are metabatic, effecting the transition from merely decorative items to useful items (σκευή) that are decorated.

1597

The list (A1-4) is reminiscent of 380E4-381A9. Musical art has led him to graphic art, and from this he has backed upward into a list of “everything.” φύσις makes σωμάτων animate bodies (vs. the σύνθετα already listed), to which φυτά is the usual complement (ἄλλος complementary: cf. n.1494 ad 396D3, §2).

1598

καὶ ἡ μέν (A5-6): The article gives a place for postpositive μέν and is not repeated with the subsequent subjects (ἀρρυθμία, ἀναρμοστία); the predicate is then done with a neuter plural (ἀδελφά, 401A7). For a similar dropping of the article cf. B4-5 (where the initial article creates predicate position for the demonstrative and then can be dropped [as at Prot.357A-B1], analogous to the way it creates attributive position for a common modifier at 501B2, and Leg.727C4-5, 885D5-7). Lacking such an excuse are Alc.I.117A8-10; Crito 47C9-10; Euthyd.298D4; Gorg.450D6-7, 508E1-4; Leg.634A3-4 (metabatic), 645D7, E1-2, 733D8, E1-2, 863E6-8, 896D5-7 (and Stallb. ad loc.); Meno 79A4-6; Phlb.21A14-B1; Polit.258E8-9 (a true plurality), 274A2, 284E4-5, 295E4-5; Prot.312B1-2, 329C4-5; Rep.353D4-5, 537A9-10; Symp.202E8; 207D8-E1. The dropping of the article does not imply that the items on the list are any more intimately related than the very fact of listing them together already makes them out to be. For article repeated then not repeated, Euthyphr.7D1-2; Gorg.459D1-2; Leg.741A7-8, 765E5-6A1; Phdo 75C9-D2 (and Stallb. ad loc.); Phlb.11B4-8 (bis); Rep.582C5-6; Symp.207E2-3; Tht.202A2-5 (and Campbell ad loc.). Similarly the preposition might not be repeated: Crit.114E10; Leg.718A6-8, 777E2-4, 828B3, 830C9-D1, 957E2-3; Prot.353C6; Symp.192A4-5, 211D3-5; Tht.152D7, 172B2-3; Tim.55D7-8, 84D1-2, or a common modifier like πᾶν: Tht.171E5-6. For resumption of the article at the end or use at the end only cf. Alc.I.105B6 (but cf. B5); Leg.669B2-3, 723D2-3, 728D8-E1, 837C6-7; Phlb.45E5-6; Polit.297C1; Rep.545A2-4, 613C5; Symp.179B5; and Vahlen ad Arist.Po.1449A1. Though the thought can made clearer by the use of distribution of articles (e.g., Phlb.24AE7-5A1 and 25A6-B1), Riddell (Digest §237) sees in most cases no rhyme or reason beyond the aesthetics of variation and rhythm.

1599

κακολογία (A6): By being placed ancipitally between the aesthetic failures it causes and the failure of character (κακοήθεια) that causes it, this term is forced according to the argument to mean the “bad story” (λόγος and its implied λέξις) despite the fact that everywhere else the compound noun denotes calumny (cf. the converse coinage of εὐλογία at 400D11 and n.1587). The language is becoming streamlined for the thought, ideas are coming to govern words, and still the logic is being run by the prefixes.

1600

σώφρονός τε καὶ ἀγαθοῦ ἀδελφά τε και μιμήματα (A7-8). The word order presupposes that a symmetrical matrix of opposites has been articulated (Burnet's warrant for the comma he has inserted is only that he see this); but at the same time the expression of the entries in the matrix is allowed to vary with logical freedom: bad story and bad character (A6-7: derivative and cause) is redone with temperance and virtue (species and genus, with τε καί, though their derivative, εὐλογία, is omitted and understood); and the single predicate ἀδελφά (A7) is now expanded into a doublet by the addition of μιμήματα, more an interpretation of metaphoric ἀδελφά than its genus though the same connective (τε καί) is used. This combination of rational order in thought with semantic leisure in expression is perhaps the most characteristic feature and also the greatest virtue of Plato's prose style.

1601

παντέλως μὲν οὖν (A9).

1602

τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ εἰκόνα ἤθους (B2): The hyperbaton of ἤθους raises the stateliness of the expression another notch. εἰκών, a harbinger of the “theory of ideas,” repeated below and already suggested by exegetical μιμήματα above, begins to suggest that the prefixes can be detached from their nouns, a linguistic phenomenon roughly analogous to the discovery that ideas are “separable” from the world in which they appear.

1603

τοῦτο (B4), a striking case of the derogatory “second person” demonstrative (cf. n.3160), the derogation subsequently delivered by the three privative adjectives.

1604

τὸ κακόηθες τοῦτο ἀκόλαστον καὶ ἀνελεύθερον καὶ ἄσχημον (B4-5): The choice of items recalls 400B2-3 (cf. n.1574), with ἄσχημον added to emphasize the aesthetic aspect (cf. C5 below).

1605

ἐπιστατέον καὶ διακωλυτέον (B4): The policy (ἐπισταστέον) toward the craftsmen (δημιουργοί) is preventative διακωλυτέον– to make a useful product that is not ignoble. That toward the poets is proscriptive (προσαναγκαστέον) – to prevent ignoble imitations.

1606

ἐν εἰκόσι ζῴων (B5-6): Portraiture, by the same idiom as ζωγραφία.

1607

οἰκοδομήμασι (B6), still and again the paradigm of δημιουργία needed in the city (cf. A2-3).

1608

δρέπομενοι (C2) recalls Adeimantus’s ἐπιπτόμενοι at 365A8 and that entire passage along with it (cf. n.831). The discourse has now discovered the roots of the kind of environment Plato’s brother Adeimantus complained about being brought up in.

1609

ἕν τι συνίσταντες … ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ (C2-3) is perhaps imitated by Aristotle at the end of the Posterior Analytics (100A10-B5), a passage that likewise bluffs through the paradox of reaching the “universal” from the “particulars” – though here it is more a congeries of garbage that is achieved.

1610

ἐκείνους (C4), of the remote and august, in contrast with τοῦτο above (B4). This is the liftoff we have been anticipating.

1611

εὐφυῶς (C4), recalling Adeimantus’s εὐφυεῖς at 365A7: Socrates is reassembling the crucial ingredients in the right order.

1612

ἰχνεύειν τὴν τοῦ καλοῦ τε καὶ εὐσχήμονος φύσιν (C5) encapsulates the theory of ideas in language that is untechnical but whose sense is crystal clear.

1613

οἱ νέοι (C6): I adopt the singular in translation from here forward, for euphony and clarity. Socrates is referring to the guards in their youth.

1614

παντός (C6), in contrast with πολλά … ἀπὸ πολλῶν above (C1-2): A untended pasture of odds and ends is replaced by a well tended garden in which each (παντός) thing is choice. ἀπὸ παντός … ὅποθεν ἄν … τι προσβάλῃ is poetic for ἀπὸ πάντων ὃ τι ἄν προσβάλῃ (pace Adam). The contrast is not only between evil and good environments but also between neglect and care in managing them.

1615

ἢ πρός (C7-8): Again the anaphora is Socrates’s.

1616

λανθάνῃ … ἄγουσα (1-3): It is of course the αὔρα that is the subject of λανθάνῃ but I translate thus to evince that the contrast at issue is against what the young in the bad garden were doing unbeknownst to themselves, above (λανθάνωσιν, C3), and what unbeknownst to themselves is happening to them here.

1617

εἰς ὁμοιότητά τε καὶ συμφωνίαν (D1-2): The list introduces elements or ideas for which we have only partly been prepared (while συμφωνία is a metaphor looming throughout the passage, ὁμοιότης and φιλία are prepared only by the familiarity inherent in οἰκοῦντες, C6). The ὁμοιότης calls for, and the other two nouns easily tolerate, the dative τῷ καλῷ λόγῳ. Acclimation to beautiful sights and sounds prepares the youth for the beautiful story (λόγος) to which these correspond because it articulates them, once reason (λόγος) should arrive. λόγος is a special kind of entity for Plato, as spirit is for Christians, acting as both cause and substance.

1618

κυριωτάτη ἐν μουσικῇ τροφή (D5-6): Anarthrous subject as Pindar's ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, may seem striking for the way it leaves the attribute (ἐν μουσικῇ) in virtual predicate position, but in substance the attribute is doing the work of the definite article: to “fix” rather than invoke the noun, as already present to the mind.

1619

φέροντα (D7), neuter plural to agree with the compound subject taking singular verb (Smyth §1055-1056: cf. Hdt.3.57), echoes and brings forward the notion of φέρουσα above (C8). There, the αὔρα brought something from χρηστοὶ τόποι, an adumbration of the influence of the forms “beyond” upon the phenomenal world; here we have a further description of the influence, distinguishing the form (abstract adjective εὐσχημοσύνη) from its instantiation (adjective εὐσχήμονα sc. [τὴν ψυχήν]). The “metaphysics” is still in the background, but only because the foreground is the phenomenal world as experienced by the youthful soul before it acquires rational consciousness (πρὶν λόγον δυνατὸς εἶναι λαβεῖν, 402A2) – a cart-and-horse problem Aristotle describes with his paradoxical distinction between the γνωριμώτερα ἡμῖν and the γνωριμώτερα φύσει.

1620

παραλειπομένων (E2), “deficient” items (for which sense cf. Leg.772C2, 951C2). Since μὴ καλῶς δημιουργηθέντων ἢ μὴ καλῶς φύντων clearly refer to the second and third classes of items in the list above (A1-4), παραλειπόμενα should refer to the first class of items in the list above, namely, artworks, which in contrast with the second and third classes, have neither ulterior utility nor a natural generator (φύσις). Accordingly we positively compelled the artists (προσαναγκαστέον, B2) to imitate the good and the beautiful in their otherwise useless works; but negatively barred the craftsmen (διακωλυτέον, B4) from allowing anything un-beautiful into their otherwise useful works (cf. n.1605). That shift from positive to negative is reproduced here. Note that inclusion of the natural with the artificial is continued from the exuberant generalization at A1-4.

1621

μέν (E4), concessive. Cf. also Riddell, Digest §300(a).

1622

The moments here described in the development of the person (402A2-3) recall the statement at the beginning of the treatment of παιδεία that we must take care that the young guard be reared in such a way that the opinions he has reached at the end of childhood not be totally at odds with what we will need him to believe as an adult (377B7-9, and compare λαμβάνειν δόξας there [and at 378D8] with λόγον λαβεῖν here).

1623

δι’οἰκειότητα (A3-4), anarthrous because the likeness is reciprocal and belongs to both as much as to either.

1624

ἀσπάζοιτ’ ἂν αὐτὸν γνωρίζων δι’ οἰκειότητα μάλιστα (A3-4): The new ideas just broached by ὁμοιότης and καλὸς λόγος (401D1-3) are now being filled in. The recognition (γνωρίζειν) of like by like, as well as the instinctual or pre-logical reactions δυσχειραίνειν and ἀσπάζεσθαι, recall the natural orientation of the σκύλαξ as described at 376A5-7. From that context we can in turn bring back φίλος and ἐχθρός (376B3) to shed light on the appearance of μισεῖν at A2 and of φίλια in the list at 401D2. What then remains to explain in that list is συμφωνία, but of course it is music that has provided the occasion for the entire discussion! As to λόγος it now means not story as we thought but the ability to reason. Commentators since van Heusde (Specimen, 123-4) recognize the beauties of these sentences and note Plato’s broad use of the notions of harmony elsewhere in the corpus, but fail to mark the association of these decorations and this enthusiasm with his Theory of Ideas.

1625

ὥσπερ ἄρα (A7) introduces a not uncommon instance of “front-loading,” where the illustration is elaborated rather far before its application is revealed. Cf. Apol.40D2-D7. The imperfect tense (in a “past general condition” with optatives in the subordinate clauses) places the illustration into a recognizable because habitual past, out of which something new and unexpected will be made to emerge. The seemingly adventitious emergence of the theory of ideas (note ἄρα) at this moment in the discussion imitates its arrival in the young man (ἐλθόντος τοῦ λόγου, above), so it is an example of self-instantiation (cf. n.253 ad 335E7).

1626

στοιχεῖα (A8), is a convenient term for Socrates’s purpose, having its special meaning relating to written letters at the same time it has a general meaning which the analogy has been introduced to reach. We may say roughly that it is both a species and a genus.

1627

περιφερόμενα (A9) introduces the notion of confusion in the widespread distribution of the letters, by which a true ability to recognize them in their individuality will not be affected. Compare the term’s use in a similar context at Tim.49E5 and in a not unrelated metaphor at Rep.596E1. What is meant by the letters being in things, and in all of which things, is left unclear, and so is the sense of the things' size or magnitude (cf. ἐν μείζονι, 368D5) or – we may already guess – seeming importance (cf. Leg.793C7, 901B2-3; Polit.266D8-9, Soph.227A9-10; and then H.Maj.288D1-E2; Parm.130C5-D2). The framing of the analogy warms to the theory of ideas by emphasizing the characteristics of phenomenal experience (e.g., sameness in difference and the plurality of the unique) that the theory is meant to explain.

1628

ἐν ἅπασι οἷς ἔστιν περιφερόμενα (A8-9) = ἐν ἄπασι (sc. τούτοις) ἐν οἷς περιφερόμενα ἔστιν. For the single preposition “applying to both the antecedent and the relative” (Jebb), or the “omission of one of two parallel prepositions” (England), cf. 330C5, (ἔργον = περὶ ἔργον); Gorg.516C7 (ὅν = εἰς’ ὅν); Leg. 635E7, 659A7, 663B1, 669B6, 683E4, 710C7, 770B8, 816D9, 847A5, 905B5; Phdo.76D3 (ἐν τούτῳ ἀπόλλυμεν ᾧπερ καὶ λαμβάνομεν); Soph.OC 749 (ὅσον = εἰς ὅσον); Thuc.1.28 (αἷς = παρ’ αἷς); X.Mem.2.1.32 (οἷς = παρ’ οἷς); Lys.6.52 (ὅν = ἐφ’ ὅν).

1629

καὶ εἰκόνας γραμμάτων (B5): By interrupting the simile (whence the editors' dash at B3) with this exotic category of items, the “likenesses of letters,” Socrates extends the front-loading with a proleptic skew (cf. n.1591). Who has ever even thought of “likenesses of letters”? Socrates is requiring us to hold to the idea and persist; we are sailing very close to the wind and might be overpowered. The movement of the thought is from the known, upward to the unknown. Will Socrates lose Glaucon? Will Plato lose us?

1630

ἢ ἐν ὕδασιν ἢ κατόπτροις ἐμφαίνοιντο (B5-6). Further obscurity: these not the sort of places that letters or their likenesses, or anything else, are characteristically seen! Moreover (as Mr Morrissey notes) the reflection of letters in water or mirror appear backwards or upside down – and yet we recognize them immediately, just as we know that the stick in water is not actually bent. The Greeks moreover had regularly seen such letters in their boustrophedon (Mr. Theodoropoulos).

1631

γνωσόμεθα (B6), as well as γνῶμεν (B7) continue διαγιγνώσκειν (B2), and mean “distinguish” or “tell apart,” the prefix omitted according to the Indo-European rule.

1632

πρὶν ἂν αὐτὰ γνῶμεν (B6-7): The letters visible on the reflecting surface will suffer geometrical distortion in case the visible surface is not parallel to the plane on which the originals were written; and the letters, now “written on” or “written in” water or glass will subsist in a medium the inherent qualities of which might distort them, as for instance in the case of water or a mirror making them wavy or smudged. The point is that knowledge of the turbulence in the water or the flaws in the mirror, let knowing what they look like upside down or reversed, will not enable us to recognize the letters “written” there, unless we already know them as they are in themselves (αὐτά, B7) independent of all media, distortion, and angles of view. For the idea cf. Tim.49D4-E7.

The argument by implication calls into question the credentials of a discipline that would call itself “sociology of knowledge” on the one hand; as well as of any of the “comparative” -ologies, in which the waves or idiosyncrasies of the medium, as it were, purport to be the object of study while the thing conditioned by the medium is taken for granted as known. Socrates (and Plato) will revert to this problem in the Line Passage at the end of Book Six (510C6-D3).

1633

πρὸς θεῶν (B9) The oath in the genitive calls for divine aid (cf. n.4333): Socrates announces that the point he is making is as important as it is difficult to understand: he has reached a very new definition of the μουσικός from that of 398E1!

1634

τὰ τῆς σωφροσύνης εἴδη καὶ ἀνδρείας καὶ ἐλευθεριότητος καὶ μεγαλοπρεπείας καὶ ὅσα τούτων ἀδελφὰ καὶ τὰ τούτων αὖ ἐναντία (C2-4): The list, in an access of enthusiasm elaborates on the two virtues he has been thinking of (cf. 399E11 and nn.1569 and 1574), so as to include two unexpected and large-sounding items (ἐλευθεριότητος καὶ μεγαλοπρεπείας) and to complete the picture by mentioning their kindred values and opposing disvalues. Bare καὶ as connective is characteristic in such triumphant lists (cf. n.423 ad 342E9-11).

1635

μήτε ἐν σμικροῖς μήτε ἐν μεγάλοις (C6-7): A small bit of bright-white is whiter than a large swath of off-white, when measured against whiteness itself.

1636

τε (D1), in its sense and in its position after ἐν, indicates that εἴδει (D2) is metonymy for σώματι, as the (visible) complement of the soul (καὶ ἐν τῷ σώματι would have been clearer but crass). The placement of καλὰ ἤθη ἔνοντα between the two prepositional phrases it governs, enables the causal ὁμολογοῦντα … τύπου to function as an exegesis of (all) the καλὴ ἤθη though it is universally, erroneously, and indefensibly taken to modify only those that are in the body, as if ἔνοντα went only with the psychic ones.

1637

ὁμολογοῦντα (D2) advertises itself as an advance upon the notion of ὁμοιότης, above (401D2). I take it that the ὁμολογία is not within the man (pace Edd.: any harmony between the instantiations of the virtuous εἴδη within the two parts of man would be secondary, owing itself entirely to their separate and primary consonance or conformity with those εἴδη, anyway!) but between the ἤθη instantiated in his body and soul and the great εἴδη of the previous paragraph (to which ἐκείνοις refers, pace Edd.: see next note). Moreover the ὁμολογία is not just an harmonious “agreeing” but is now “having the same λόγος” (as those εἴδη), a metaphor pointing to the “Theory of Forms”: συμφωνοῦντα then fleshes out that conceptual leap with the sensory musical metaphor already in the air (compare its use after ὁμολογοῦντα here with its use after ὁμοιότης at 401D2), preparing for a second conceptual elevation with μετέχοντα, another metaphor conducive to and belonging to the Theory. The subtlety with which the sentence deploys so variously the single syntactical construction of the circumstantial participle achieves an elevation proportionate to its thesis.

1638

ἐκείνοις (D2) points back to the relatively remote and also relatively august εἴδη of C2. The standard interpretation, according to which it refers to ἤθη in the soul, would better and unambiguously be done with αὐτοῖς (cf. the use of αὐτόν at 402A3).

1639

καὶ μήν … γε (D6), introducing minor premise.

1640

ὅ γε μουσικός (D8), with γε causal (vi termini).

1641

ὅτι μάλιστα (D8), by virtue of its attributive position after the article, modifies τοιούτων not ἐρῴη ἄν.

1642

ἀσύμφωνος (D9): Etymologically, the term would bring forward, and negate, the harmony between the characters (ἤθη) instantiated in the man and the great characters (εἴδη) that make them fine by virtue of their participation in them (ὁμολογοῦντα ἐκείνοις καὶ συμφωνοῦντα, τοῦ αὐτοῦ μετέχοντα τύπου, D2-3), and this is the usual interpretation; but the term could just as well designate an ἄμουσος, a person who lacks the ability of the μουσικός to perceive the spectacular instantiation of beauty in the men who greatly exhibit it, and who thus would feel no desire. I see no grounds for deciding between these interpretations (change of subject between εἴη and ἐρῴη as required by the usual interpretation is awkward but not impossible; and Glaucon's οὐκ ἄν in response could deny ἐρῴη ἄν rather than corroborate οὐκ ἂν ἐρῴη, with less awkwardness, pace Edd.); and it may be said that the non-expression of an object with οὐκ ἂν ἐρῴη (which if expressed would have been either singular, clinching the former interpretation; or plural, clinching the latter) in itself suggests that the ambiguity is sought. Therefore I accept both and translate accordingly. Focussing on the loving subject’s own connection or harmony with beauty as well as that of the beloved object—on the beauty that is in the eye of the beholder (and it is with the subject that the passage concludes: ἀμουσία C1)—helps to remind us of Glaucon’s desire to talk about music out of a professed ignorance (398C7ff). He has a deep connection (συμφωνία, 401D2) with music that his technical learning could not articulate to his satisfaction; and so in the end Socrates is right to have suggested at the beginning that even he could have filled things out in the account of music “consonantly” (συμφωνήσειν, 398C6).

1643

ἐλλείποι (D10): Glaucon conceives not of a disharmony between psychic and bodily ἤθη, as the usual interpretation would expect; but of deficiencies in the soul's instantiation of the εἴδη on the one hand and the body's instantiation of the εἴδη on the other, which in either case diminish the sum of beauty, in accordance with the interpretation I have offered of D2-3.

1644

ἀσπάζεσθαι (E1) is required, by the context, to include the physical contact of an embrace, or else there would be no sense in ὑπομεῖναι.

1645

With μανθάνω (E2) Socrates indicates the statement means more to him than what it says on the surface (372E2 and n.1050).

1646

τόδε μοι (E3): The first person demonstrative warns that the idea resides in Socrates’s mind only and is in this sense new. The allusion to Glaucon and his coterie brings the discourse back from the impersonal heights it had reached, and next we have Socratic question and answer.

1647

κοινωνία (E4): The term and its cognate adjective, personal noun, and verb, have a wide range of meaning determined by the context. With the genitive (partitive) it denotes participation in, having a share of, and even familiarity with (Leg.802A2: cf. Eur.HF 1377); with datives (as here) or with a phrase like πρός ἀλλήλους it denotes a contract, a common endeavor, a basic agreement, a friendship between parties; with both a shared interest or participation in something (for which cf. 403B1, below).

1648

γε (E5) can be causal with the relative just as it can be with the article.

1649

οὐδέ γε μανικωτέραν (403A6), continuing the opening reference to σωφροσύνη and the connection he has drawn with being driven out of one’s mind.

1650

ὀρθός (A7): According to the word order κόσμιος bears the same relation to καλός as σωφρόνως bears to μουσικῶς, namely, the connection between the moral and the aesthetic, which the sentence claims is natural (πέφυκε), while also the character of the loving (σωφρόνως καὶ μουσικῶς) corresponds to the character of the beloved (κοσμίου τε καὶ καλοῦ). But these neat correspondences are not the justification for calling the desire in question ὀρθός, the sense of which is more rigid. The term was first used above (402A1, 401E4) of the correct but unreasoning attitude of the young before reason arrives, where it was itself an inference from the correctness of their upbringing (ὀρθῶς τραφῇ, 401E1). The criterion of the correctness, there, was the dictate of reason upon its arrival (402A3-4). Reason's function was then revealed to be the ability to recognize the εἴδη of virtues as they are instantiated (402A7-C8). Thereafter we contemplated the object that is truly (i.e., correctly) beautiful (by dint of having καλὰ ἤθη, 402D1-4) – a person – and therefore inherently desirable (D6), and then we contemplated the subject who desires him (D8-9). In the present passage, then, the “correctness” of the desire telescopes all those steps, which justifies its translation as “selon la raison” (Chambry) or “wahre” (Schleieramacher): indeed it is this correctness that guarantees the pretty correspondence articulated with the adverbs and the objects.

1651

προσοιστέον (A10): The sense of the verbal is active, as in the administration of a drug (n.2316), not passive (it is usually translated “approach”, as a ship may approach because “borne” by waves and wind, a metaphor I feel entirely inappropriate in this moral context). The dative is ambiguous and I translate it accordingly: it may either represent the properly loving agent administering (given the personification of ἔρως in the previous sentence: ἐρᾶν, A8) or the properly beloved patient being treated, a reciprocal and two-sided conception of ἔρως that is continued in the Socrates' next question (B2); and in that question two-sidedness becomes explicit, while the datives are again ambiguous as to whether they are the persons upon whom the duty not to share is incumbent or the persons being disallowed of sharing.

1652

Socrates’s μανικόν (A10) repeats Glaucon’s μανικώτερον (A6) and ἔκφρονα (402E5), whereas ἀκολασίας (ibid.) repeats his own ἀκολασία from A2.

1653

Reading αὕτη ἡ (B1) with A and Edd. The verbal is active, still and again, as it must be in each of its uses here, and as in Glaucon's consensual retorts ipsissimis verbis (A12, B3), despite the rule that if active it should agree in number and gender with nominative ἡδονή (for another disagreement of this sort cf. δοτέον with plural and feminine nominatives at 460B2).The admonition is directed primarily at the lover rather than the beloved, in this case Glaucon; his emphatic and serial approvals of Socrates' puristic severity on this point tests and exhibits his personal resolution to accept the law, in the aftermath of the fatefully anti-puritanical lassitude he expressed at 372C2 in his remark about ὄψον. Cf.n.1673, infra.

1654

κοινωνητέον (B1) of course brings forward the metaphor of κοινωνία at 402E4, and constructed with both datives and genitive, denotes both participating in the pleasure by either lover, and a sharing of it by both together.

1655

φιλεῖν μὲν καὶ συνεῖναι καὶ ἅπτεσθαι (B5). For the items, compare the κλῖμαξ at Phdrs.255E3 (ὁρᾶν, ἅπτεσθαι, φιλεῖν [= kiss], συγκατακεῖσθαι) and the more discreet 240D2-3 (ὁρῶντι, ἀκούοντι, ἁπτομένῳ, καὶ πάσαν αἴσθησιν αἰσθανομένῳ) which it recalls. In the present case the choice of terms and their order is looser, serving merely as foil for μηδέποτε … μακρότερα συγγίγνεσθαι, below (B7-C1).

1656

ὥσπερ ὑέος (B5): For the comparison compare E.Ion, 1365: ἴσον γάρ σ’ὡς τεκοῦσ’ ἀσπάζομαι; for the behavior compare Socrates’s treatment of Alcibiades as described by the latter at Symp.219C6-D2.

1657

ὑφέξοντα (C2) modifies the unexpressed accusative subject of the foregoing infinitives, the lover governed by the law, as if he were acknowledging the future outcome in case he disobeys; semantically echoing Glaucon’s ὑπομείνειεν at 402D11.

1658

οἷ γοῦν δεῖ τελευτᾶν τετελεύτηκεν C5-6): The need to respond to Glaucon’s fastidiousness (402D10-E1), as well as to his churlishness about the related topic of ὄψον at 372C, led to the controlled dialectical section about the propriety of erotic relations between “lover and beloved” in their pursuit of culture (E3-403B3); but the true flower of all music always was the erotic participation in beauty, and so to reach this topic was opportune.

1659

θρεπτέοι (C9): “nurture:” compare “education” (παιδεία, 376E2-7).

1660

φαίνεται (D2) repeated from above (C4).

1661

τῇ αὑτοῦ ἀρετῇ (D2-3): The stipulation expresses the fine observation that although a healthy body might provide a necessary foundation for psychic improvement, it cannot use its health or strength or beauty actually to improve the soul, whereas conversely the soul can use its temperance and its intelligence to improve the body. The argument is helped by the gradation of adjectives χρηστόν, ἀγαθόν (of which the noun is ἀρετή), βελτίστον.

1662

ἀλλὰ τοὐναντίον (D3): That mind can dictate to body lays the foundation for the ensuing treatment in outline, which will avoid tedious length by humor and satire, which distinctly appeals to the intelligence. Much of what follows serves as a sort of scherzo, after the sober and morally serious treatment of music.

1663

ἵνα μὴ μακρολογῶμεν (E1): Worry about prolixity naturally arises before beginning something new (cf.376C9-D10, 398C4-6), as does the expedient of using outlines (τύποι: cf. 378E7-379AA4). This time nobody objects.

1664

μέθης (E4): The point was already made in passing, at 398E6.

1665

μεθυσθέντι (E5) properly goes with εἰδέναι but according to the general rule the subject accusative is attracted into the case of the antecedent in the main construction, which is both παντί and φύλακι. The sentence does not mean we have no need for a drunken guard to be ignorant but no need for a guard to be so drunk as to be ignorant.

1666

σίτων πέρι (E8): Food is the second bodily need after drink (445A6-8; Crito 47B9-10; Leg.789D5-6), to which together, if sex is added we have the entire complement of bodily pleasures (cf.329A6 and n.51).

1667

τῶνδε (404A1) is almost deictic and makes ἀσκητῶν adjectival. The ἀθλητής contends for an ἇθλον; the ἀσκητής (perhaps the rhyme is felt) is a contender who spends the rest of his time preparing for his performance. The ἕξις is the condition he achieves by his training.

1668

κομψωτέρας δή τινος (A9), oxymoronic.

1669

ἁπλῆς μουσικῆς (B5), and ἁπλῆ που καὶ ἐπιεικής (B7), despite the assertion ἣν ὀλίγον πρότερον, were not used just above to describe the music-proper they came to recommend, but rather were used, during the criticism of λέξις, for describing the moral character and lifestyle they hoped to instill in their young guards-to-be (e.g., καλὸς κἀγαθός 396B11, μέτριος ἀνήρ 396C5, ἐπιεικοῦς 397D4, 398B2, 398E4; for ἁπλῆ, contrast διπλοῦς ἀνήρ, 397E1); but of course it was the latter that determined the former, and now shall likewise determine the regime of music's complement, gymnastics.

1670

ἡ τῶν περὶ τὸν πόλεμον (B7-8), sc. γυμναστική. The article is brought back, pace Adam et al., because this expression is a second subject for the common predicate ἁπλῆ … καὶ ἐπιεικὴς γυμναστική.

1671

καὶ παρ’ Ὁμήρου (B10): Despite his radical critique of Homer in the treatment of λόγος and λέξις Socrates easily reverts to the convention of citing Homer for corroboration, without the irony or condescension that has been read into καί and γε (B10-11) – though this connotation is present in the usage below (C7). καί has the same force it has with Damon at 400B1 (cf. n.1573); and if γε diminishes the importance of anything, it is the subject (τοιαῦτα) rather than the witness: Socrates is simply less concerned with the body than the soul.

1672

ἀυτῷ τῷ πυρί (C3): αὐτός proleptically creates a berth for ἀγγεῖα (C4): “with a simple fire, without a pot”. This instance operates at the semantic edge of the adjective: I know no parallel and it is not included among the hundreds of instances cited by Ast.

1673

ἔοικας (D2): With the personal construction Socrates acknowledges, just as with αἰνεῖς (for which cf. νομοθετήσεις, 403B4) he holds Glaucon responsible for, his vociferous confirmation. Indeed his newfound certainty, both here and above, is perhaps too resolute!

1674

μέλλουσιν εὖ σώματος ἕξειν (D6): cf. 400E5 and n.1593.

1675

These cities (D1-6) are all emblematic of luxury and lavishness. The metonymies afford him a way to arrive at Κορινθίαν κόρην (D5), a discrete way to speak of courtesans, with which the third element of bodily enjoyment is brought in after all (cf. n.1666 ad 403E8).

1676

πεμμάτων (D8) along with the κορή and the other luxuries, recalls the ἑταῖραι and the πέμματα listed after the μύρα and θυμιάματα, to please Glaucon, at 373A3-4 (compare also ὄψου, D2, with its fateful use by Glaucon at 372C2). We have returned to the place where luxuries had occurred to the mind, but this time he is quite immune!

1677

τὰς δοκούσας εἶναι εὐπαθείας (D8-9): The expression streamlines ταῦτα ἃ δοκεῖ εὐπάθειαι εἶναι with a complex noun – as in English “the seeming pleasures” – by means of attraction: “The articular copulative participle is regularly attracted into the gender and number of the predicate … and the resulting positions merely simulate attribution or predication,” Gildersleeve §635. For inclusion of εἶναι with δοκούσας, cf. Isoc.8.7.

1678

διαιτᾶν (D11) continues the allusion back, now to διαιτήσονται, 372A5.

1679

παναρμονίῳ (D12): Cf. 373A6ff.

1680

πληθουσῶν (405A1): Cf. ἐμπληστέα, 373B3.

1681

δικαστήριά τε καὶ ἰατρεῖα πολλά (A2): The flourishing of disease and the demand for doctors returns from 373D1-2, but legal contentiousness is new, added here to provide the psychic correlate to somatic excess (the reverse of the transition from τρυφᾶν to φλεγμαίνειν at 372E2-8!), and will now provide Socrates an opportunity to reframe the hero of Adeimantus’s speech (365D2-6).

1682

ἐλεύθεροι πολλοί (A3): The population envisioned is not the one we have constructed and the one for which we are preparing guards but the real or typical population of any city, with its typical class structure and self-understanding. Socrates contemplates how a given education will affect the guards by comparing how education affects people in everyday life. His δή signals rising impatience (cf.B9, below).

1683

ἄκρων (A8) echoes Glaucon’s use at 360E7.

1684

τοὺς ἐν ἐλευθερίῳ σχήματι προσποιουμένους τεθράφθαι (A9-B1), a phrase dense with eloquence. σχήματι suggests they have a picture what an educated person looks like, although in truth education is from the inside out and will show itself, unless it is absent in which case one needs to make a show of it (προσποιουμένους). The perfect τεθράφθαι adds their sense that they are done with the process of education and wear it like a cloak.

1685

Reading καί (B3) with ADM: to pair the borrowed justice with a lack of one's own is something of an oxymoron, as is ἀμαθιᾳ χρῆσθαι at Thuc.1.68. The man's lack of inner resources explains why his judge is also his δεσπότης. For a similar oxymoronic use of ἀπορία cf. Phdrs.239C7-D1.

1686

Compare Euthyphro’s presumption that Socrates would be a defendant rather than a plaintiff (2B1-2), and his utter intransigence to the ugliness of prosecuting the person he is prosecuting – his father (4A5-B3).

1687

ὑπὸ ἀπειροκαλίας (B8), another oxymoron, akin to ἀπορίᾳ above (B3): again he is driven by what is absent.

1688

δή (B9) indignant, again (cf.A3). For other examples cf. 561B2 and n. ad loc.

1689

ὡς (B9) virtual indirect discourse, taking place within his benighted mind.

1690

περὶ τὸ ἀδικεῖν (C1): The preference for injustice—the focus on the privation—hearkens back to the speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus. Here is what the astuteness praised by Adeimantus (365D2-6) actually looks like.

1691

ἱκανὸς πάσας μὲν στροφάς … πάσας δὲ διεξόδους (C1-2): For the twists and turns cf. Glaucon’s ἱκανὸς ἐπανορθοῦσθαι (361A2, B1-3), the use of ἱκανός in bravado going back to Thrasymachus (344C6 and n.454). For avoiding to pay the penalty (μὴ παρασχεῖν δίκην) cf. 365D6.

1692

νοσήμασιν (D3) rather than νόσοις: For this derogatory substitution of the verbal noun cf.435C4, 439D2, 445A6, 411C6; Phdrs.249D1 (σπουδάσματα), 269A7 (τεχνήματα), 274C3 (δοξάσματα).

1693

Chiasm of thesis (the factual symptoms, ῥευμάτων τε καὶ πνεύματων, D1-2) and response (the diagnoses, φύσας τε καὶ κατάρρους, D2-3): cf. 431E10-2A1, 576C1-2, 618B3-4.

1694

αὐτοῦ ὁ ὑεῖς (E1): Socrates means to insist upon the literal meaning of Ἀσκληπιάδεις that has been forgotten in the intervening centuries. The sons in question are Machaon and Podalirius.

1695

This scene (E1-406A3) does not appear in the Iliad as we have it: commentators emend, forgive Plato for quoting from memory, or suggest he has a different Homer. In Book 11, injuries to the Achaeans mounting up in Achilles’s absence, Nestor’s maid Hekamede made the potion here described (called a κυκεών: 11.637-41 and 408Β1) in Nestor’s tent, and gave it to the injured Machaon, a son of Ascelpius (11.612-13), not Eurypylus (as Plato himself avers at Ion 538B8, though the wounding of Erypylus and several others is adjacently mentioned: 11.582-9): the point is, it was not a medicament but a refreshment (641-2). In Homer, Machaon the Asclepiad simply drank it (and in Plato he presumably watched Eurypylus drink it) and did not question its medicinal effect for good or ill, in particular whether it might be phegmatic (406A1). In Homer Patroclus enters the scene a moment later merely to confirm, at the sulking Achilles’s request (605-14) that it was Machaon that was injured, and is detained by the loquacious Nestor who under the force of the κυκεών delivers a parable that might inspire Patroclus upon his return to persuade Achilles to pity his fellows rather than hope they are injured. Once he leaves, Patroclus does encounter the wounded Eurypylus and treats his wound, and with an assuredly rapid and perfunctory treatment (843-7: cf.9.841-7). Cf. n. ad 408A5.

1696

ἄτοπον (A4), the term he just used for the newfangled terminology of the Asclepiads (D5). Only fashion can find things unfashionable: Adeimantus soon learns he is insufficiently aware of his own.

1697

μακρόν ... τὸν θάνατον αὑτῷ ποιήσας (B4): the catachresis is satirical.

1698

δυσθανατῶν ὑπὸ σοφίας (B8), oxymoronic.

1699

The sentence (B4-8) describes his life in three clauses linked by οὔτε, τε, and then δέ, each moving from participle to indicative, with the last something of an anticlimax. That his cobbled wisdom (μείξας, A8) found a market is the salient point, as we can infer from Prot.316D10 (οὐδενὸς ἥττων σοφιστής).

1700

γῆρας/γέρας (B8-9): Glaucon joins in the satiric spirit with a sound-play.

1701

ἐκγόνοις (C3) gracefully combines both his sons and the guild that made a patronym of him.

1702

οὐδενὶ σχολὴ διὰ βίου κάμνειν ἰατρευομένῳ (C5), another oxymoronic phrase: Asclepius is of the same mind as Socrates.

1703

γελοίως (C6). The adverb goes with both μέν and δέ: our perception – in particular the comparison of the two perceptions – is laughable. For the adverb predicatively deriding the behavior of the verb’s subject cf.505B11, 527A6; Crito 53D4; Euthyd.278D5. In contrast to the perspicuous Asclepius (εἰδώς, C3), who sees that the principle is universal, we can only perceive its application to the working class, and so we cut a sorry figure relying on him for clarification, while he proves an elegant spokesman, in his way. Meanwhile we don’t know what to say about the rich since we don’t know what the rich and supposedly happy are supposed to be doing.

1704

τῶν πλουσίων τε καὶ εὐδαιμόνων δοκούντων εἶναι (C7): δοκούντων is attributive with the article and τε καί links cause with effect: their wealth makes them seem happy. They seem so to us, and this gently begins to explain ἡμεῖς γελοίως (C6).

1705

ἀξιοῖ παρὰ τοῦ ἰατροῦ (D1): As opposed to “going to the doctor”, as we put it, this person demands something from him. The expression throughout the paragraph closely imitates the direct and simple thought, manner and tone of the τέκτων. Note that he makes a bad “patient”, being the subject rather than the object, ordering the doctor rather than taking his orders (note especially χρησάμενος)

1706

προστάττῃ (D4), the verb used above for the assignment of tasks to individuals in the well-governed environment (C4). Herodicus’s illness diverted away him from gymnastics and into a new career, in which as it turned out he was his only client.

1707

πιλάδια (D4): After the list of four dispositive treatments (two pairs in a binary construction: πιὼν ἐξεμέσαι τὸ νόσημα ἢ κάτω καθαρθεὶς, ἢ καύσει ἢ τομῇ χρησάμενος ἀπηλλάχθαι), the single example of a lengthy and bothersome one (D3-D5) is enough to call for an impatient dismissal (καὶ τὰ τούτοις ἑπόμενα insouciantly abandons the construction with περιτιθείς). For other cases where a single example is for various reasons relied upon as sufficient, cf. 362E5-3A1, 412C7-10, 456D8-10, 467A2-5, 510A1-3, 551C3-11, 608A5, 618C8-D5; and Crat.423A4-5, 439D3-4; Gorg.447D3-6 (not enough for Polus: cf. Dodds ad loc.), 478A2-4, 478B7-C6; Leg.631C3-4, 697B8ff, 734E6-7, 816D, 832E5, 949A1, 957B5-7, 967A2-3; Lys.219D5 (an example esp. apposite for the interlocutor: cf.207Dff); Phdo.103E26-7; Phdrs.239D5 and 240A2 (adding swiftness), 261A8-9, 278C1-4; Phlb.29B, 53AC, and the back-and-forth of 54AC; Polit.258D4-5, D8-9, 288D8-9, 299D3-E2; Prot.342C6-7. There is heavy latent irony in the doctor treating his head and the patient having no time to mind his malady: cf.407C1.

1708

ταχὺ εἶπεν (D5): The standard account of the so-called “gnomic aorist” (e.g., Smyth §§1930-2, Goodwin GMT §§155-9; Gildersleeve §255) seeks by a bizarre epistemological tergiversation to link a past experience (presuming a preterital denotation for the aorist: “empirical” Smyth §1930) or for that matter an imaginary one (! Smyth §1932: cf. Rep.462D1, 495C3-4, 508D5, 586A4-5 and Gorg.484A6, 511D7, 524E4, 525A6, 526C), with a generalization the “reader” might infer from it (§1931). Most important however is that the Greeks, recognizing its primarily aspectual force, did not take the usage as establishing secondary sequence (§1931.b). Its abrupt aspect conveys that as the doctor is wrapping his head and narrating the rest of his recipe (presents προστάττῃ and περιτιθείς), the builder has already replied he has had enough: for which translate with the future (cf. K.-G.2.166 [§386.11], “wenn der Redende ein zukünftiges Ereignis als bereits geschehen darstellt”: cf. Gorg.484A6, Phdrs.255A7; Iliad 4.160-2, 9.413 and 415; E.Alc.386, Med.78; Thuc.6.80) He was already looking past the treatments (with his snapshot aorist participles, D2-3, and perfect ἀπηλλάχθαι), whereas the treatments of the doctor (D5) were rendered with time-consuming presents, as were those of Herodicus (B4, B6, B7 – something Aesclepius himself noticed at C5: κάμνειν ἰατρευομένῳ). Compare perhaps also the aorists in Book Eight describing the behavior that characterizes the types of men: 550B4-5 and n.3826.

1709

λυσιτελεῖ (D6), literally, to “frees one (λυσι-) from paying expenses incurred (τελεῖν)”, or to “pays off” as we now say – which in the craftsman’s case means paying his living expenses. But the verb regularly loses its monetary sense and is used of something “being advantageous” in general, and even “being the advantageous thing” among alternatives (e.g. Andoc.1.125: τεθνάναι νομίσασα λυσιτελεῖν ἢ ζῆν), and has been so used throughout the discussion by all parties so far (e.g.,344C7-8, E1-3; 347E7; 352D5-6; 354A8; 358B5-6; 367B3-5; 392C3: cf. also ὀνίνησιν at 367D3) as it will continue to be (455A1, 589D5-6 [cf. n.4668], 591A6). In this more general, demonetized sense, the criterion by which something might be advantageous of course becomes an issue.

1710

προσέχοντα/ἀμελοῦντα (D6-7): With his accusative participles the craftsman expresses his belief about himself as a principle in general (as Socrates does of himself with ἀγνοοῦντα at Phdrs.230A1), something that is rarely maintained in translation, while Socrates with characteristic scrupulosity remembers it when he quotes him below with a present general condition (407A1-2: cf. n. ad loc.). Cf. 369B8-C1, 604A8; Lach.184B4, 187E9, 200B2.

1711

τῷ τοιούτῳ ἰατρῷ (E1) again portrays the perception of the craftsman: he expected a medicine or a surgery. But in his very description Socrates to some extent participates in the attitude.

1712

εἰς τὴν εἰωθυῖαν δίαιταν ἐμβάς (E1) compares with εἴ τι τῆς εἰωθυίας διαίτης ἐκβαίη (B7-8), describing Herodicus, just as the factitious ὑγιὴς γενόμενος here compares with the factitious νοσώδης γενόμενος there (A8). Meanwhile the craftsman’s job has become his διαίτη, whereas for Herodicus it was an exceptional course of conduct that interrupted normal life. Where we had oxymoron before, we now have an oxymoronic inversion of terms.

1713

At first he demands release from the disease (ἀπηλλάχθαι, D3); failing that you find him already off and gone, relieved from the burden of living (another preemptive aorist, ἀπηλλάγη, E3). It is with touching humility that Socrates, speaking on his behalf, uses this metaphor for death, by which the craftsman acknowledges that πράττειν τὰ ἑαυτοῦ (E2) – his very life – is perhaps more trouble (πράγματα) than it was worth – a humility he shares with the best kind of man (604B9-D2).

1714

μέν γε (E4): With μέν Glaucon resumes Socrates’s μέν above, recognizing that he is treating, first, the craftsman; and with γε he invites Socrates to move on to the rich man (which Socrates acknowledges by adding δή to his δέ at 407A4). For the collocation cf. 461C, 475E.

1715

χρῆσθαι (E5): Glaucon in agreeing shows that he noticed χρησάμενος above, just as with τῷ τοιούτῳ he acknowledges that the craftsman’s characterization of the doctor (E1) characterizes himself.

1716

ἦν (407Α1), the “imperfect of citation” according to which what was said in the past is itself cast into the past, as if by a “sequence of tenses” of the sort we use in English: “He said living that way didn't pay” (cf.nn.135, 582). We see here that this idiom of the imperfect does establish secondary sequence (as for instance the “gnomic” aorist does not): πράττοι represents ἄν πράττῃ, Socrates supplying the craftsman with past general condition with a protasis in lieu of his circumstantial participles but scrupulously maintaining the generalizing force of their accusative case and their “present” aspect.

1717

ἀβίωτον (A5): By virtue of the analogy Socrates is drawing (announced by τοιοῦτον ἔργον: i.e., an ἔργον without the execution of which the bills won’t get paid [A1-2]) the term replaces the craftsman’s use of λυστελεῖ above (D6), where if it had been used ἀβίωτον would have meant one would die of starvation. This term is not as amenable to the generalized denotation available to the word it is replacing (despite Socrates’s unforgettable remark in the Apology to the effect that a life unexamined is ἀβίωτος ἀνθρώπῳ [38A5-6], where I take him to mean that one’s humanity is starved by unthinking complacency).

1718

With λέγεται (A6), Glaucon (pace Stallb.) is merely recasting into an impersonal passive Socrates’s “as they say” (i.e., his ὥς φαμεν, the “we” of course being not the two of them but the ἡμεῖς of 406C6, whose ludicrous perspective he is here at pains to portray): he means only to agree (and strongly so, adding δή and γε) that public opinion sees no duty incumbent on the rich. But according to the lively byplay of dialogue, which Socrates is always ready to exploit to the full, his shift to the passive provides Socrates with an opening to play at refuting him (note playful γάρ) by adducing a λόγος that is indeed said (λέγεται), namely the old saw of Phocylides – at least once it is suitably misinterpreted! The playful indirection is as perversely complex (Stallb. after almost solving it himself says, incredibile est quantopere vel criticos vel enarratores perturbaverit) as what we encounter at Phdrs.257C8-E6, and elsewhere.

1719

ὅταν τῳ ἤδη βίος ᾖ, ἀρετὴν ἀσκεῖν (A8). Socrates’s version, which doesn’t quite scan, is quite different from the complete hexameter attributed to Phocylides by Alex. Aphrod. (in Arist. top. 3.2, 118A=258W.): δίζησθαι βιοτήν, ἀρετὴν δ’ ὅταν ᾖ βίος ἤδη (Anth.Lyr.Gr. [Diehl] 1.59, fr.10 =PLG, fr.8 Bergk), “Find your livelihood, but virtue once you have secured it.” Socrates quotes the two clauses in reverse order and with an ironic simplicity that resembles his initial response to Glaucon’s request for ὄψον (372C4-D3), he infers that Phocylides advised men to take up the real work of practicing virtue (ἀσκεῖν) just as soon (ἤδη) as they could afford to, rather than postpone it until they were rich enough (ἤδη) to quit working. Phocylides’s use of βίος is also telling: as we know, those who are rich, no less than those who dream to be, are never quite sure how much money is enough to “live” the way they alone can afford.

1720

δέ γε (A9) signals that his remark is a retort: ‘A man once rich should indeed practice virtue, but earlier too!’ Socrates’s misinterpretation removes the bluff from Phocylides expression so as to leave it ambiguous, inviting Glaucon's to step into the breach and correct it.

1721

τοῦτο (A11): By replacing ἀρετὴν ἀσκεῖν with the vague neuter demonstrative Socrates prevents the obvious fact that all men should practice virtue all the time, from distracting his interlocutor away from the narrower question whether the rich man’s purpose in life is self-improvement in the same sense that making things is the purpose of the arts qua arts.

1722

ἀβίοτον τῷ μὴ μελετῶντι (B1): The article generalizes the statement beyond the rich man to include any man (contrast anarthrous ἀναγκαζομένῳ, above, pertaining only to the rich man): Socrates concedes Glaucon’s point (that the rich must practice virtue always) and more (that all men must), and now advances the notion of ἀβίοτον to the extraordinary sense he gave it in the Apology, as if it were as elastic as λυσιτελεῖ. Phocylides’s self-deluded notion of a “life” that does not include the practice of virtue is the very antipode of the livability Socrates has in mind.

1723

νοσοτροφία (B1), another oxymoron (a coinage) depicting the Herodicean life devoted to as a nurturing not of health but sickness, which pre-empted him from paying attention to anything else (406B6-7), and which a fortiori would leave no time for the practice of virtue, let alone living.

1724

οὐδὲν ἐμποδίζει (B3): This alternative (which [pace Stallb.] pertains both to the rich and anybody else, therefore including the craftsman!) cannot be true unless pursuing virtue requires less exercise of νοῦς than the crafts, a pretty pass indeed; and a point we have learned from no-one but the craftsman, who is the hero of this entire passage, outshining Herodicus, the “we”, his physician, and the rich man! In the aftermath we realize we were wrong to think his use of λυσιτελεῖ indicated he was interested only in money: it was just that only he needed it. As for the “practice of virtue”, his brief and gruff remarks to the physician present in his very person an adumbration of the virtues of wisdom (προσέχειν νοῦν), courage (accepting death), temperance (since he will listen to the doctor but not too long), and even justice (since he devotes his life to executing τὰ ἑαυτοῦ).

1725

Note Glaucon’s sputtering repetition of γε (B4, B5) and of the article (ἡ, B5 bis), as well as his asyntactical adverb περαιτέρω in attributive position (B5), and his self-interruption with the demonstrative αὕτη (B5) in derogation (for which cf. 506B5 and n. ad loc.)—all as if he were at a loss what to call it.

1726

δύσκολος (B7), sc. ἡ ἐπιμέλεια. With the personification Glaucon makes another joke of his own. It is noteworthy and somewhat problematic that Glaucon identifies pursuing virtue (ἀρετὴν ἀσκεῖν) with household, military, and civic pursuits.

1727

πρὸς οἰκονομίας καὶ πρὸς στρατείας καὶ πρὸς ἑδραίους ἐν πόλει ἀρχάς (B6-7): Despite the levelling repetition of πρός with each item, the items constitute an hierarchy: private-public dyad with subdivided second (war and peace). For the contents of the list cf. Apol.36B7-9, Leg.902Dff, Polit.258E8-9.

1728

τὸ δὲ δὴ μέγιστον (B8) capping Glaucon's σχεδόν γέ τι πάντων μάλιστα (B4). Socrates's close continuation is hardly sufficient grounds to believe Plato had to indicate change of speaker with ἦν δ’ἐγώ vel sim. (Slings, lacunam statuens). Socrates indicates and justifies his intervention, both to Glaucon and to us, by the extreme parallelism in the formulation of his reply, evincing that it is a retort (πρός governing a dyad with subdivided second [A, B1, B2] with predicate adjective in hyperbaton and omitted ἐστί) but the parallelism enables him to narrow the focus to the role of νοῦς in the pursuit of virtue where the distractions of the body are most disabling. Both are excited by what they are bearing witness to.

1729

πρὸς μαθήσεις ἁστινασοῦν καὶ ἐννοήσεις τε καὶ μελέτας πρὸς ἑαυτόν (B8-C1: reading τε with ADM, which is omitted by F), announcing the “subdivision of the second”. The most common position and use of τε in lists is after and enclitic to first item, where it announces the fact that a list is coming by indicating that the first item must not be considered alone (καί does not announce but already begins the movement forward). In the present case τε is internal to the list—i.e. enclitic to an item itself already added. Again it keeps its item from being thought of as standing alone, usually to indicate that the ensuing item or items will be an elaboration of its item rather than items additional to and coordinate with what had come before. Thus we find it forming a single item in the form of a polar doublet at 412B3-4, 431B9-C1, 503C2-4; and Meno 75C8-9; and in the form of another kind of hendiadys at 519B1-2 and Crat.407E6-8A1, Leg.950E5-6, Symp.206D3-5, 211D3-4. Note also that it can give a counterweight for subsequent elaboration, as Crat.408A1 (ἐν λόγοις) and here (πρὸς ἑαυτόν).

Distinguish from this the internal τε that substitutes for καί, as at Tim.28B7-8 ὁρατός … ἁπτός τε καὶ σῶμα ἔχον and 31B4 (σωματοειδές ... ὁρατὸν ἁπτόν τε), cf. Critias 107C3-4, 112C6-7; Leg.733B6-7[note rhyming], 809B4, 828B4[another rhyme]; Tim.43B2-4, 92C7-8: here τε achieves a more intimate connection than καί by a kind of elegance Demetrius called τὸ γλαφυρόν (de Eloc.138). Alternatively, varying καί with τε can be a means for indicating a transition within the list, to a new category of items (often but not always with αὖ: Crit.107C3-4, 114E10-5A1; Leg.679B8-C1[and Stallb. ad loc.], 872A7-B1, 899B3-4), to an exegetical pair (Leg.809B4 [cf. England ad loc.]), or to the penultimate item or closing generalization (370D9-10, 547B3-4; Leg.735B1-2, 738C6-7, 896C9-D1, D5-7).

Finally there is the question of the relation in this particular list between μαθήσεις and the subsequent pair—i.e. what is the force of the καί before ἐννοήσεις? The modification of the pair by πρὸς ἑαυτόν suggests that it constitutes the inner-directed and subject complement of outer-directed, objective μαθήσεις, emphasizing the conscious awareness of one’s state of mind: we learn just below that Socrates is moving in the direction of what he will call φιλοσοφία. For a similar exegetical pair with internal τε cf. the elegant Tht.176C3-4, δεινότης ἀνδρὸς καὶ οὐδενία τε καὶ ἀνανδρία, and cf. Rep.431B9, 519B1-2.

1730

ταυτῇ ἀρετὴ ἀσκεῖται (C3): How one would pursue virtue “with philosophy”, let alone what philosophy is, is left vague: the only time we have seen it or its cognates so far is in the striking passage about the philosophical dog (376B1). In the present passage we are to infer at least that it is a pursuit involving the sorts of study and contemplation mentioned above; but we should also register surprise at seeing it.

1731

γιγνώσκοντα φῶμεν καὶ Ασκληπιόν (C7) With first plural φῶμεν Socrates refers back to the ἡμεῖς who thought something else before this intervening argument (406C9-407C6). The reversion to Asclepius, who initiated that argument (406C1-5), and the mention of his knowledge (cf. γιγνώσκοντα with 406C1-2 and 3) initiate an annular review of the ground covered that will suggest coming closure. For καί otiose before a proper name cf. 408A3 below and n.1573.

1732

φαρμάκοις τε καὶ τομαῖς ἐκβάλλοντα (D2-3): An analogous but abbreviated list of the procedures imagined by the working man (406D2-3). Subordinate syntactical status is accorded what is strictly medical in his treatment: sending them back to their assigned “regime” – i.e., back to work, again echoing the workman’s point of view (406E1) – is given the indicative. καταδεῖξαι refers back to 406C3.

1733

τὰ δ’ (D4): We had expected οἱ δέ after τοὺς μέν (C7). Socrates sees them as bodies, not people, bodies utterly sick (νενοσηκότα), inwardly through and through.

1734

οὐκ ἐπιχειρεῖν (D5), in the same sense, with the negative, as at Phdrs.232B3 and 266DE2.

1735

ἀνθρώπῳ (D7), pathetic and impersonal. Contrast ἄνδρας (408A8 and n.1741).

1736

μακρὸν καὶ κακὸν … βίον ποιεῖν (D6-7), another oxymoron, given the presumption that long life is eo ipso good. Rousseau borrows much of the tone of this passage in the middle of the first book of Emile, as when he speaks of “des médicins qui leur donnent chaque jour le seul plaisir dont ils soient susceptibles, celui de n’être pas morts” (59, ed. Flammarion).

1737

ἕτερα τοιαῦτα (D7-8) the ἕτερον of mild aposiopesis (cf. n.1224).

1738

His language is more refined, but in substance the position Asclepius takes in this paragraph is the same as that taken by the more blunt craftsman above (406A1-E3).

1739

καί (408A1) ultimately goes with πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον: Socrates, answering Glaucon’s πολιτικός is adding the wartime application of Asclepian principles of medicine as the exhaustive complement of the peacetime ones he attributed to Asclepius above (n.b., τοῖς εὐνομουνοις … ἐν τῇ πόλει, 406C3-4).

1740

Iliad 4.218 made plural (A5), made plural. Reversion to Homeric “evidence” of the Asclepiads’ medical practice at Troy (cf.405E1-A3) continues the annular reversion (cf.n.1731, supra). The pertinence of the previous citation was from clear for many reasons (cf. n.1695 ad loc.); Socrates now does himself one better by citing a scene in which an Asclepiad (Machaon) actually did administer treatment, deftly changing the singular into a plural to accommodate his own plural. This second citation not only provides us a case with better focus but also enhanced by illumination of the rationale described in the intervening argument, showing by comparison how far we have come.

1741

ἄνδρας (A8) rather than the impersonal ἀνθρώπους used above, expressing fellow feeling or “identification.” Cf.361B6 and n.753.

1742

κυκεῶνα (B1) referring back to the mildly intoxicating potion from the previous citation, drunk by the wounded Machaon (or Eurypylus?) without regard to its salubriousness.

1743

νοσώδη δὲ φύσει τε και ἀκόλαστον ... (B2-5). For this pair of accusative singular masculine or feminine adjectives, which appear to agree with a subject accusative with ζῆν (B3), the mss. give no noun. The easiest omission (the one that requires least energy to supply) is an internal accusative with ζῆν; we need a feminine or masculine; I supply therefore βίον, echoing βίον in the parallel passage at 407D7—but the omission is unusual and peculiar. But for the plural αὐτοῖς we may have supplied ἄνθρωπον, parallel with closer ἄνδρας, A8). The shift from reflexive αὑτῷ in the parallel passage (constructed with λυσιτελῆ, 407E1-2) to the direct αὐτοῖς here (constructed with ᾤοντο) shifts the point of view so as to set up the ensuing οὐδέ clauses.

1744

Aesch.Ag.1022; E.Alc.3-4; Pind.Pyth.3.55-8.

1745

According to the story the man was dead and Zeus punished Asclepius for bringing him back to life and thus using his god-given gifts in a way that would abolish fear of the gods among men. With θανάσιμον ἤδη ὄντα (B9) Socrates attempts a compromise between the real story and the question at issue in the present context, treating a mortal disease for the sake of lengthening a life that will be useless as long as it lasts. Socrates’s insouciant disregard for the distinction between the two cases—it’s a matter of life and death after all!—makes his remark all the more comic.

1746

εἰ μὲν θεοῦ ἦν, οὐκ ἦν, φήσομεν, αἰσχροκερδής· εἰ δ’ αἰσχροκερδὴς οὐκ ἦν θεοῦ (C3-4): The formulation recalls both in form and content the reductio in Adeimantus’s speech where the imaginary young man asserts there is no need to fear the punishment of the gods. Either there aren’t any gods or if there are the same people who say so say also they can be bribed (365D7-E6, esp. οἷς ἢ ἀμφότερα ἢ οὐδέτερα πειστέον). προειρημένα (C2) points to 391BD where the principle was first applied. By hearkening back so far, to a matter so tangential and yet so fundamental as the correct theologia, Socrates (Plato) prepares a transition away from the issue of an inordinate reliance on medicine.

1747

γε (C5), limits the range of ταῦτα and the adjacent τοῦδε reveals his self-consciousness.

1748

ἐν τῇ πόλει (C6): The article bespeaks Glaucon’s shift of interest from the previous topic – Socrates’s sociological observation about cities in general (anarthrous ἐν πόλει, 405A1, Α6) – to a notional city, an interest entirely of a piece with their interest in designing a city to find justice in it.

1749

ὡμιληκότες (D3), bespeaks the kind of familiarity people get by working and partying with each other. The perfect suggests that after a while we “get each other’s number.”

1750

φύσεσιν (D2), with derogatory παντοδαπαῖς, is a sort of euphemism for the menagerie of human types ranging from virtuous to vicious (on analogy with the healthy and the sickly in connection with medicine, D1).

1751

ἂν εἴπῃς (D6): Glaucon’s sudden self-distancing reminds us that all along there are two minds at work in the conversation: Plato tends to remind his reader of this, in preparation for an unforeseen development. For the gesture cf. 573D1.

1752

σὺ μέντοι (D7), is strong and direct, asserting Glaucon’s false analogy is more imporant that who Socrates thinks would make good doctors.

1753

ἰατροὶ μέν (D10) suggests already that the complexity Socrates has accused Glaucon of overlooking consists of a distinction he should have drawn between doctor and juror, which Socrates will now do.

1754

ὁμιλήσειαν (D12): Socrates transfers Glaucon’s ὡμιληκότες (D3) from juror (D2) to doctor (D12), to set the comparison of the two professions into stronger relief.

1755

πονηροτάτοις (D12): The adjective more often refers to moral than physical corruption but is made to carry a generic denotation in contexts making an analogy between body and soul (e.g., Gorg.477B5) – as does κακά just below (E3). With πλείστοις it forms a superlative version of the quantity / quality hendiadys, idiomatic and casual: Socrates easily agrees with Glaucon’s notion that empirical experience should be wide.

1756

ἀρξάμενοι … φύσει (D10-E1): Socrates extends Glaucon’s notion of empirical range (D1) to its limits, characteristically making a better case for the opposing view than its advocate had, before finding the gravamen elsewhere.

1757

σώματι σῶμα (E2): The denial will not even make sense until the correct assertion arrives (, E3): as such it is what I call a “proleptic skew” (cf.n.1591). Note that the “before and after” the prolepsis creates is acknowledged by the chiastic ordering of εἷναί ποτε καὶ γενέσθαι in the after-version (γενομένην τε καὶ οὖσαν).

1758

καὶ γενέσθαι (E3) countenances the distinct deleterious effect due to the addition of ὑγιεινοὶ φύσει.

1759

τεθράφθαί τε καὶ ὡμιληκέναι (409A2-3), an hendiadys combining a new term with the old one, by which Socrates now reveals the deleterious effect (in τροφή) of the ὁμιλία unguardedly proposed by Glaucon. That the exegetical elaboration should come first is not unexampled, and shows that καί is not always logically “proclitic,” in the sense of introducing epexegesis. Cf. n.440 on “reverse καί.” ἐκ νέας reformulates ἐκ παίδων (408D10).

1760

πονηραῖς ψυχαῖς (A2) parallel with πονηροτάτοις σώμασι (408D12), above.

1761

γεγονέναι (A6), corresponding to γένοιτο (408D10). νέαν οὖσαν brings forward the importance of youth from ἐκ νέας above (A2), but now inverts its importance: they are innocent and unsullied in their youth, rather than collecting experience from the earliest moment, and must be allowed to stay that way.

1762

κρίνειν (A7) recalls the theme of κρίσις in Glaucon’s speech (360E1, cf.358C4). Since that speech we have learned that making the right judgment about justice depends on character, not the unexamined consideration of “self-interest” that remains invisible to itself without even needing the ring of Gyges, avoiding its own conscience by restricting its consideration to an evaluation of externals.

1763

ὑγιῶς (A8). By borrowing what he can from medicine to shed light on justice, he sets into greater relief their differences and what they do not share, which is the primary burden of the passage to illuminate.

1764

εὐήθεις (A8), drawing a contrast with κακῶν ἤθων (A6). After arrogating εὐήθεια into his own arsenal by forcing it to bear its “literal” meaning (400E2-3 and n.1590), Socrates now goes the rest of the way to show how the term took on the connotation that makes it serviceable for the cynic, by glossing it with εὐεξαπάτητοι.

1765

νέοι ὄντες (A8) echoing νέαν οὖσαν continues the valorization of unsullied youth, now with the effect that it is threatened as life goes on.

1766

παραδείγματα ὁμοιοπαθῆ (B1-2), the latter term may be a coinage but might be another term borrowed from current medical fashion. Cf. 464D4. The expression is telescoped, as the commentators have seen but have inaccurately explained. Sullied judges would feel (πάθος) the similarity (ὁμοιο-) of the defendant’s ἀδίκημα to a deed within themselves (ἐν ἑαυτοῖς) that they had committed, which similarity would bring their deed to their consciousness and thereby provide them with what they would (erroneously) use as a model for understanding (παράδειγμα) the defendant’s behavior.

1767

καὶ μὲν δή (B3) emphatically agrees and the emphasis is then explained by αὐτό (rather than τοῦτο, or even τοῦτό γε), by which Glaucon isolates this mistreatment as a fact so as to acknowledge it without yet accepting the larger point Socrates is in the course of making, which if anything it weakens. What after all does he have in mind, if the ideal judge is to be pure at the expense of being gullible?

1768

ὀψιμαθῆ (B5): literally “learning late;” but all the ὀψι- words are derogatory, so it tends to mean “late, if at all,” as at Soph.251B. The man’s vice is therefore a virtue and we have another oxymoron. The term stands in rhyming contrast with ὁμοιοπαθής above and adds a play on πάθος μάθος. Theophrastus makes a character of the ὀψιμαθής (Char.8).

1769

οὐκ … (Β6) There is no asyndeton, but rather an ecphrastic sequence of four circumstantial participial phrases, naturally calling for the perfect tense, and typically set down without connectives. Cf. nn.3813, 4264, 5422.

1770

διαισθάνεσθαι (B8), syntactically the complement of μεμεληκότα, is semantically contrasted by its prefix and tense with ᾐσθημένον (B6). διά adds the sense of making out one particular tree among others in a forest, and the present tense suggests an investigative process leading to that result. οἷον πέφυκε κακόν intensifies the previous parallel, οἷόν ἐστιν (B5-6): he now knows what ἀδικία is φύσει. Its tense suggests that the result is both certain and surprising because it was always there before his eyes.

1771

ἐπιστήμῃ οὐκ ἐμπειρίᾳ οἰκείᾳ κεχρημένον (B8-C1): Socrates’s expression recalls his παρ’ἄλλων … τῷ δικαίῳ … χρῆσθαι καὶ ἀπορίᾳ οἰκείων from the beginning of this treatment of doctors and lawyers (405B2-4), to which Glaucon had vociferously agreed, so as to buttress his current, more controversial thesis. The climactic mention of ἐπιστήμη fulfills the meaning of μεμεληκότα: the great triad – φύσις, μελετή, ἐπιστήμη (cf. n.885) – has been operating behind the scenes and now emerges explicitly. The better jurist will come with an unsullied φύσις (hitherto represented by the concentration on youth: A8), and become competent to judge through a practice extended over time (μελετή) of judging individual cases through the use of principled knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). The mention of time redeems the commonsense respect for “experience” by specifying that in this case lengthy experience is an active refinement of an ability to fit particulars to principles rather than a passive undergoing of admixture (cf. ἀκέραιον, A6; and ὁμοιοπαθῆ, B1) of the very element it will only understand at arm’s length.

1772

Glaucon’s γοῦν (C2) recognizes the idealism in Socrates’s description, if only it could be realized.

1773

ἀγαθούς (C6). But it was a good doctor that he had asked about, and had unguardedly thrown in the need for a good juror just by way of illustration, which indicates how much he took the matter for granted.

1774

πανοῦργος (C5) with some sensitivity to its etymology making it mean that he has not only done many bad things in the past (πολλά … ἠδικηκώς) but would also do others in the future—indeed, anything. It mocks the inductive leap the doer of unjust takes from many to all, whence he further infers his σοφία. In the balance of the argument σοφία will be reappropriated to the side of virtue (E1-2).

1775

τε (C5), “internal,” (n.1729 ad 407B8-C1), draws the last two attributes together and therefore separates them from the first (ἠδικηκώς), of which they are the result, according to the conception of A2-5.

1776

πρὸς τὰ ἐν αὑτῷ παραδείγματα ἀποσκοπῶν (C7): This πονηρός is looking off to something that is inside himself (cf. ἀπ’αὐτῆς, A4). The ἀπό of ἀποσκοπῶν usually denotes the remoteness of the object contemplated, as at 460A5 where ἀπό is used of the temporal remoteness of a foreseeable result that is to be avoided. But remoteness can also, as here, serve as a metaphor for the invariance of the paradigm (C7; cf. B1) over against the moving circumstances that the contemplator is trying with its help to manage or understand. The fact that the model is within instead of outside the πονηρός therefore makes no difference.

The language and the conception are pregnant with Plato’s theory of ideas and as such beg the question once again that was begged by Thrasymachus and then by the brothers, whether injustice has a nature after all or is merely the privation that its name bespeaks. Within the context of the theory, ἀποβλέπειν rather than ἀποσκοπεῖν is the usual term (e.g., 472C7, 501B1, 530A4, 532A4, 540A7; Phil.61E1). A distinction in flavor between the terms can be sensed at 432E1-2.

1777

πρεσβυτέροις ἤδη (C8), referring back to the gullibility of younger good men (409A7-C1) that has been redressed with late-learning secured by μέλέτη and ἐπιστήμη.

1778

The second construction with φαίνεται and circumstantial participles (C8-D1) redoes the first (C6-7), with ἀβέλτερος echoing δεινός, ἀπιστῶν παρὰ καιρόν echoing ἐξευλαβούμενος, and ἀγνοῶν … ἅτε οὐκ ἔχων echoing ἀποσκοπῶν. The pairing helps to define the terms, as the substitution of synonyms has been doing all through this passage. The focus is on the difference in the appearance the πονηρός makes in different groups. There is no allusion to Socrates’s condemnation, though the event at Apol.24E3-25A11 fills the bill, when Meletus’s unguarded eagerness to flatter the jurors in his answers to Socrates’s dialectic leads him into an absurdity he does not foresee.

1779

τὸν ἀγαθόν τε καὶ σοφόν (D6): The postponed attributive position (after τὸν δικαστήν) brings forward the question what would make a jurist good (408C6, D4; 409B5) but now is paired with it (τε καί): here begins the retrieval of that two headed term from δεινότης (C6) to ἀρετή (D8).

1780

φύσεως παιδευομένης χρόνῳ … ἐπιστήμην (D9): Now more explicitly the triad φύσις / μελέτη / ἐπιστήμη appears (cf. n.1771), φύσις extraordinarily denoting a newly spawned youth in service to the triad, and μελέτη represented by χρόνῳ (cf. ἐν πολλῷ χρόνῳ at B7-8 above). With the arrival of ἐπιστήμη, moreover, the pair of opposites finds its proper home, since knowledge, as here emphasized by ἅμα, is a μία δύναμις τῶν ἐναντίων.

1781

With this (D7-E1) we have reached, as a conclusion, a marvelous inversion of what had been hypothesized as ἔνδοξον by Socrates in Book One (349B-50C)—that only the ignorant would try to be more than smart as well as more than ignorant.

1782

γίγνεται (E2) “dialectical” (cf. n.205): the transformation was brought about by the argument.

1783

οἷαν εἴπομεν (E4): This pointing back to ἀδελφή τις (404B4) suggests that the digression on doctors and lawyers is coming to a close.

1784

αὐτοί (410A4): the arts (f.pl. αἵ, 409E5) have in the interim, by a mild anacoluthon, been replaced by their practitioners, the doctors and judges (m.pl.). Exactly the same phenomenon above with οὗτος at (E1).

1785

πέφανται (410A6): “dialectical” φαίνεται in the perfect (n.205 ad 334A10), of what has become manifest in the argument.

1786

405A1ff. σοὶ, the familiar (ethical) dative of “theoretical interest”, here clinches that the reference of οἱ νέοι is to “our” youths and with it to the return to the topic of educating their young.

1787

Reading αὐτά γε μήν (B5) with Burnet and Galen (γε om. omnes), γε focussing on the internal substance of gymnastics after it has been likened externally to music.

1788

τὸ θυμοειδὲς τῆς φύσεως (B5-6): The idea and the expression suddenly refers back to the inborn potential for fierceness required of those whom we will educate (375A10-B7).

1789

Galen’s μεταχειρίζονται (B8) must be read, rather than the μεταχειριεῖται with all mss. read by Burnet and Robin, not only because “more idiomatic” (Shorey) but to avoid a run-on asyndeton. He will labor not as the others manage; he will do this, not as they do that: see next note.

1790

οὐχ ὥσπερ (B7): ὥσπερ can introduce a “clause of comparison” (Smyth §§2461ff). When as here the clause is negatived, we get what we might call a negative clause of comparison, a paradox since the more the clause argues that the comparanda are not comparable the less comparative it will be. The paradox is resolved by combining syntactical parallelism with semantic differentiation. What is being said is that our musical guard will pursue gymnastics in a way that is different from (οὐχ ὥσπερ) that of the athlete-in-training (alluding to 403E8-4A7), in the same way that πονήσει (main verb) is different from μεταχειρἰζονται, τὰ γυμνάσια καὶ τοὺς πόνους (internal accusative) is different from σιτία καὶ πόνους, and the ἰσχύς in which the musical man is not interested is different from ῥώμη in which the athlete is interested. ἄλλοι is adverbial (and translated as such), for our μουσικός (B1) is not a γυμναστικός: he might even leave out gymnastic altogether, as ἐὰν ἐθέλῃ (B2) already intimated.

The straightforward work of πονεῖν with its quasi-redundant internal accusative and its cut-and-dried outlook (βλέπων), is contrasted with being immersed in the constant management and adjustment of diet and exercise as if they were external to the management process itself (μεταχειρίζονται denotes methodological mastery [Phdrs.277C4, Prot.316D4, Tim.20A4] sometimes to the point of distraction [529A6, Leg.967A2] or out of proportion to the subject’s worth [346E9, H.Maj.304B6, Phdrs.240E2], so that it is used of Penelope’s endless busywork, weaving and unweaving: Phdo.84A6). For elaborate diet as opposed to just eating cf. εὐωχῆται εὖ μάλα, 411C4-5. ῥώμη is the athlete’s more recondite word for what the musical man would call ἰσχύς—the standard term for “strength” as a somatic good alongside health, beauty and stature (432A4-6, 491C1-4, 618A7-B2; cf.Crito 47A13-B3; Gorg.451E3-5, 452B6, 477B1-C2, 495E6-6C5, 499D6-7; Leg.631C1-5, 696B2-4, 715B8-C2, 728D8-E1; Meno 87E6-7; Phlb.26B5-6). The only two cases where ῥώμη stands in for ἰσχύς as a bodily good are metonymies seeking special effects: Leg.789D6-7, ὑγίειαν καὶ κάλλος καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ῥώμην, where as here medical satire is in the air; and Rep.361B4-5 (cf. n.751 ad loc.).

1791

καθιστασιν … θεραπεύοιντο (C2): The settled policy exists in the present (thus is still relevant), but the original intent it embodies commands the optative in virtual secondary sequence: compare the coalescence of past and perfect in the expression with which the policy was first introduced (ἡ ὑπὸ τοῦ πολλοῦ χρόνου ηὑρημένη, 376E2-3). Madvig’s emendation into the imperfect (καθίστασαν) is unneeded.

1792

τινες οἴονται (C1): The commentators predictably try to name names, needlessly, since Socrates himself has been acting as if he believed this. Now that that hypothesis has yielded what it can (in particular the asymmetry of body and soul in the argument about the doctor and the juror that comes up almost by accident) he can move to a new division of things and advance a new idea.

1793

ἀλλὰ τί μήν; (C4).

1794

αὐτήν (C8). αὐτός instructs us to isolate and focus on the denotation (and therefore plays a role in the expression of the “theory of forms”): 331C1, 372A2, 373B2, 391D4, 412B9, 437D3, 439A5, 507B5, 507D12, 510D6, 511B4, 517E1-2, 532A3, 539C8, 545D1 and D2, 556C11, 559B1, 571A1, 581E8, 585C2, 585D5, 586C8, 600E1-2, 601A1, 603B10, 604C1, 611C1; and nn.3196, 3953.

1795

διάνοια (C8) is “state of mind” (cf.400E3), not a process of thinking-through (διανοεῖσθαι) as elsewhere: here, the prefix has the same force as in adjacent διατιθέναι, of a state or condition resulting from continual practice but still subject to change.

1796

ὁμιλήσωσιν (C9), the term introduced above by Glaucon (408D3), ready to connote too great a familiarity (409A2-3): it continues the connotation of μεταχειρίζονται, above (B8).

1797

διατίθενται … ἅψωνται (C8-10): In the first limb the disposition (διατίθενται) is presented in an apodosis and the habits that bring it are presented in a protasis. In the converse or contrapositive second limb (ἢ αὖ ὅσοι ἂν τοὐναντίον διατεθῶσιν, C10) the corresponding disposition, although strictly an effect, is moved into the protasis and the apodosis is dropped. Such telescoping or truncation is roughly analogous to the phenomenon of catalexis in monostichic meters by which just enough closure is secured for each line that its monostichic individuality is preserved.

Because the mind usually anticipates a contrast at the same time it is being made explicit, a continuation of the expression immediately verges on prolixity. This is why isocolia comes off as an affectation rather than the norm. One may therefore truncate the second or the final limb in a variety of ways that range from brachylogy to dismissive generalization (e.g., πλούτου χρῆσιν καὶ πενίαν, Leg.744C2, and cf. Apol.19D2 [sc. ἀλλήλοις with φράζειν]; Leg.625C3-5, 735B1-2, 819E13-820A1 and 820A7-8; Phdrs.252C3-3C2; Phdo.62A5 [ἔστιν ὅτε dropped with οἷς δέ], 98A [ἂ πάσχει for ἃ πάσχει καὶ ποιεῖ]; Polit.306C10-D3 [its rhythm]; Rep.439D6-7 [with an ulterior motive to introduce the genus: cf. n.2273 ad loc.]; Soph.258B10-C3 [the editors’ supplements are unneeded]; Tim.82A8-B2 [abbreviation, then dismissal]). Alternatively, one may expand it, whether with periphrasis (e.g. ἤ … πόλεμος … ἢ πενίας χαλεπῆς ἀπορία, Leg.709A3-5, and cf. Leg.794C7-D2 (ὅπλων χρεία); Polit.267E7-8 (τὸ τῶν ἰατρῶν γένος), 290B1; Rep.361B4-5), serial subdifferention (cf. n.1464 ad 395A4-10 and Gorg.468E4-5; Leg.747A2-5; Polit.299E1-2; Prot.354A4-7), ampliative generalization (e.g., … καὶ πάντων τῶν τοιούτων κακῶν δηιμουργοί, Rep.552D4-5, and cf.Phdo.75B10-11; Rep.580A3-5; and cf. n.2152), or other types of elaboration (Leg.831D8-E2; Polit.239B2-3; Rep.491D [addition of article]; Leg.715C1-2, Tht.174D4-5 [insertion of τι]). The range of these phenomena is nicely surveyed by Riddell (Digest §§231-261 [abbreviation] and §§262-269 [pleonasm]).

1798

ἀγριότητός τε καὶ σκληρότητος, καὶ αὖ μαλακίας τε καὶ ἡμερότητος (D1-2). Note chiastic arrangement (helped by αὖ: cf. nn.2107, 5132) of the more behavioral and psychic (ἀγριότης / ἡμερότης) and attributes expressed with physical metaphors (σκληρότης / μαλακία). The chiasm is not the usual chiasm of before and after, but a complicating chiasm instead. With his interrupted and inchoate statement Socrates nevertheless establishes the playful comparison of psychic and physical that governs the sequel.

1799

ἀκράτῳ (D3): The allusion to undiluted wine suggests intemperance.

1800

τοῦ δέοντος (D4): This genitive of comparison in the first limb is varied with an ἤ construction in the second, but instead of the positive grade καλόν we have the gratuitous comparative, hinting at the esthetic preoccupation of the music-lover ironically being taken further than he might be seemly.

1801

καὶ μὴν … τό γε ἄγριον (D6): καὶ μήν … γε, as usual introduces a second premise: Socrates is turning Glaucon’s ἀγριώτεροι, a διάθεσις of διάνοια (C8), into the middle term between γυμναστική that enhances it and the element in the proto-guardian’s nature, namely the θυμοειδές, that is its basis, providing for an aggressiveness, τὸ ἄγριον, needed in the guard. The neuter singular subject (or subjects!) of the balance of the sentence (καὶ ὀρθῶς μέν, κ.τ.λ) can be τὸ θυμοειδές, τὸ ἄγριον, or even both – viz. ὀρθῶς τραφὲν (sc. τὸ θυμ.) ἀνδρεῖον ἂν εἴη (sc. τὸ ἄγριον), as my translation exhibits. Socrates takes no pains to disambiguate this and neither should the translator.

1802

ἡ φιλόσοφος … φύσις (E1): A compendious version of the expression τὸ θυμοειδὲς τῆς φύσεως just above (D6-7, repeated from B5-6) and insofar as that expression recalled the discussion of the two-fold inborn φύσις required in those we would educate as our guardians (374E6-375B7, esp.375A11), it also recalls the other quality there required, gentleness (375C1 and following), the inborn psychic basis (φύσις) for which was there semi-seriously dubbed, with some humor and irony based on the canine analogy that discovered it, (τὸ) ὡς ἀληθῶς φιλόσοφον (375D10-376B1, immediately humanized in the sequel, 376B3-C3). This is the sole and entire precedent for Socrates’s striking use of the all-important term φιλόσοφος at this point, to designate the complement of τὸ θυμοειδές within the soul (Its use here has nothing to do with its use at 407C3, where it was associated passing with mental work); though striking, it is not easy to imagine what term would have been less striking or less controversial, what else to point to in the primary nature or structure of the soul as the principle of tameness. Cf. 411C5 and n.1820, infra.

1803

ἔχοι (E1), repeating παρέχοιτο (from D7), the specific prefix, and here even the specifying voice, dropped in repetition (n.1567).

1804

ἀνεθέντος (E2), means “given free rein,” the antithesis of ἐπιτείνειν (cf. ἐπιταθέν above [D8]), as confirmed by its repetition below (412A1). Notice the semantic parallelism in contrast with the syntactic difference, between ἀνεθέντος αὐτοῦ μαλακώτερον εἴη (E2) and ὀρθῶς μὲν τραφὲν ἀνδρεῖον ἂν εἴη, κτλ, above. The striking shift in case to a genitive absolute, enforced by αὐτοῦ, and the less striking shift to the neuter (whichever of the two neuters, the genitive or the nominative, is referring to ἡ φιλόσοφος φύσις, itself notionally parallel to the neuter τὸ θυμοειδές τῆς φύσεως and feminine only in outer expression) now emphasizes a distinction between the psychic basis (we may style it τὸ τῆς φύσεως) and the διάνοια for which it is the basis, operant in both cases (ἄγριον / ἥμερον), a distinction which it is the burden of this passage to illustrate, at the same time that it conserves the ambiguity created by the neuters in D4-5 (on which cf. n.1801). As for the absence of ἄν at E2, it is “continued” from the ἄν with which the whole sentence is introduced (E1), for which cf. Smyth §1767, and thus its omission in AM (against the ἄν of FD) qualifies the reading of AM as the lectio difficilior.

1805

ἥμερόν τε καὶ κόσμιον (E3): In contrast to the dianoetic excesses and defects caused by unmixed gymnastics and music (D3-6), hitting the mark can be expressed without comparatives. κόσμιον suggests the virtue of σωφροσύνη, which pairs up with the ἀνδρεία (D7) that can be developed from the thumoeidetic aspect of the guard’s inborn nature. That the ἥμερον (E1) should be preserved (E3) by good nurture (taking, for the moment, the genitive expression to refer to the innate element rather than the διάνοια of tameness) is no mere redundancy and cannot be used to “help” to reduce the ambiguity as most commentators have inferred: the point is that it is worth preserving, a point made by κόσμιον. As to the ambiguity we may only wait for it to be resolved in the sequel.

1806

δέ γε (E5) introducing as minor premise a principle that had been established before (376C4-5!).

1807

ἡρμόσθαι (E8) / ἡρμοσμένου (E10): The very formulation predetermines that music as harmonizer will play the hegemonic role in the reconciliation of the psychic element (hitherto the special province of music) with the bodily (hitherto the province of gymnastic), a theme that becomes explicit at the closure of this section (412A6-7).

1808

παρέχῃ (411A5) sc. ψυχήν which appears in the genitive at A6. For the hyperbaton cf. τὸν θυμόν at 411B3 and B8.

1809

θρηνώδεις (A8) has been established (398D11-E1), but to call this harmony sweet and soft is new. For the “reverse” καί, where the exegesis or expansion of the original concept is placed first, cf. n.440 ad 343C6.

1810

μινυρίζων (A8): The scholiast gives us a choice between θρηνῶν and ἠρέμα ᾄδων (Greene 217), which have nothing to do with one another. The point of μινυρίζων is that it combines a mood with a sound whereas γανόω combines a mood with a look. Socrates is wading among the “psychosomatic” effects of music.

1811

εἴ τι θυμοειδές (A9-10). The enclitic τι properly modifies θυμοειδές but is attracted back to the proclitic εἰ. Cf. the parallel passage, 411D1. For reversion to a proclitic cf. 460C2; to the first word, 357B9, 460C3, etc. On the displacement cf. Smyth §3028(B), 380D8 with n.1238, 430E7, and 431A7.

1812

εἶχεν (A10): Note shift to imperfect indicative within the subjunctive protasis that began at A5 (also ἐλέγομεν, A7). This imperfect will be followed by an aorist indicative (ἐμάλαξεν, A10), as if we had a simple past condition describing what comes (or came) first (τὸ μὲν πρῶτον, A9), in order to set into relief what happens if the surrender to music goes too far (B1,ff: n.b. ἤδη marking a point of no return), at which point the construction reverts to the present general condition with which the paragraph began (apodosis in τήκει καὶ λείβει, B2). The same construction-within-a-construction is used in the parallel paragraph below (B6-C2), beginning with a present general protasis (ἐάν … λάβῃ ...) followed first by aorist indicatives for the medial results (διεπράξατο … ἀπῃργάσατο) and then the final result given with a proper apodosis in the present (i.e. the perfect γεγένηνται).

1813

ἀχρήστου καὶ σκληροῦ (B1) reverses the order of cause and effect (or, postpones the explanation) under the force of the proleptic χρήσιμον. The idea was already planted by the metaphor of iron.

1814

ἐπέχων μὴ ἀνιῇ (B1-2). For ἐπέχειν J.-C. cite Tht.165D8-E1: ἤλεγχεν ἅν ἐπέχων καὶ οὐκ ἀνίεις. Perhaps this uncommon meaning is idiomatic when the verb is connected with ἀνιέναι.

1815

μαλθακὸν αἰχμητήν (B4): The phrase is proverbial (cf.Symp.174B) and comes from Homer (Il.17.588) where it is used of Menelaus.

1816

ἄθυμον (B6), sc. τὸ θυμοειδές from A10. The privative ἀ- can represent the contrary or just the contradictory, as here.

1817

θυμοειδῆ (B7), sc. τὸν θυμόν, constructed ἀπὸ κοινοῦ with ἀσθενῆ ποιήσας (B7-8), or in hyperbaton after it. Cf. Smyth §3028(e).

1818

ἀντὶ θυμοειδοῦς (C2) anticipates δυσκολίας as the filling (ἔμπλεῳ) it replaces: remove Burnet’s distracting comma.

1819

γυμναστικῇ πολλὰ πονῇ καὶ εὐωχῆται εὖ μάλα (C4): Cf. σιτία καὶ πόνους (410B8) in contrast with πόνους only (B5), and note that the distraction of a scrupulous diet there (cf. n.1790 on μεταχειρίζονται) is here replaced by the equal and opposite distraction of opulent feasting!

1820

μουσικῆς … καὶ φιλοσοφιας (C5): One could seek to justify the latter term by connecting the naming of the second required aspect of soul φιλόσοφον, with the association of music with soul in the commonplace policy of education, but even that naming was a leap (cf. n.1802 sub fin.). On the other hand, the leap and the term are fully justified by a reminiscence Socrates is seeking to arouse in Glaucon (and Plato in us) of an experience of what will later be called φιλοσοφία, for those who have had it, invoking it here by name before it is defined, if it can be.

1821

φρονήματος τε καὶ θυμοῦ (C6) as well as ἀνδρειότερος (C6) represent psychic effects caused by the physical regime. The downgrading by verbal noun (φρόνμηα vs. φρόνησις: cf. n.1692) acknowledges that the effect is only a bodily image of what is essentially a psychic state.

1822

ἀνδρειότερος γίγνεται (C7): The predicative expression reminds us that it is not the virtues that are inborn but certain raw materials out of which they evolve or become. The comparative is parallel with κάλλιον (410D5 and n.1800), suggesting that his newfound braveness is braver that he is.

1823

μαθήματος / ζητήματος (D2): For the characterization of mental activity cf. the list at 407B9-C1, there loosely associated with “philosophy” (407C3). The connection with φιλοσόφια is now more intimate (having to do with the φιλόσοφος φύσις of the soul) and allows for the addition ζήτημα, which pushes μάθημα in the direction of φιλοσοφία as an impulse or natural drive.

1824

μετίσχον (D3) begs to be compared with εὖ ἴσχων (C6), as the metaphor γευόμενον (D2, accepting with Burnet the testimony of the recentiores), redoing ἅπτηται (C5), establishes an ancillary connection with εὐωχῆται (C4), in the manner of negative comparison (cf. 410B7-8 and n.1790).

1825

οὔτε τῆς ἄλλης μουσικῆς (D3): Not “nor music besides”, even though there is no Muse of Logos or Reasoning! Socrates is allowing λόγος to be the focus of, or even a synecdoche for “music”, a notion broached above at C5, though by tradition the Muses provide σοφίαι, not φιλοσοφία!

1826

ἀσθενές τε καὶ κωφὸν καὶ τυφλόν (D3-4): The list presents a paradoxical item (ἀσθενές: the athlete would think himself strong) and then explains it with a polar doublet (cf. Gorg.479B8-C1). In the case of soul, weakness is cognitive deficiency. For the constellation A/B1/B2 cf. 329A5-7, nn.2544, 3496. Placing the paradox first instead of second makes the καί after it a “reverse” καί (n.440 ad 343C6).

1827

ἅτε οὐκ ἐγειρόμενον οὐδὲ τρεφόμενον οὐδὲ διακαθαιρομένων τῶν αἰσθήσεων αὐτοῦ (D5), reading the genitive plural with AFM (against διακαθαιρόμενον [D], which would strictly require αὑτοῦ). Both οὐδέ 's are illative: unaroused (cf.410B6), his mentality receives no sustenance to thrive on, and therefore his perceptions remain unvetted (ζήτημα often aroused by a paradox arising from sensation: cf.,523BE, 602CE). In another paradox, he believes whatever he hears and sees because his mind is deaf and blind. αὐτοῦ corroborates the switch to the genitive absolute (τῶν is not possessive but creates predicative position for the participle) and closes the sentence by returning to the mention of the man (αὐτοῦ, D1) within whom this metaphorical event is taking place.

1828

γίγνεται (D7): As above (C7, C2), a three part argument: the raw material (φύσις), the process it is put through (τροφή), and the state (διάνοια) that comes to be.

1829

μισόλογος (D7), a coinage of Plato’s that is not improved with translation. In Lach.188C it appears in a tellingly similar context. In 537E-9A and Phdo.89Dff it is explained from scratch with great psychological acuity.

1830

ἄμουσος (D7): after μισόλογος. confirms λόγος as the criterion of μουσική.

1831

δύ’ ὄντε (E4): The dual stresses the two aspects (θυμοειδές / φιλόσοφον) as distinct elements in the human make-up, and again brings us back to 376C4ff, where the τροφή of these ingredients was taken up (cf. φύσιν, 376C5, and ὑπάρχοι, C7). The surprise is that in the interim our interlocutors have indeed found reason to revise the time-honored educational theory there mentioned, according to which gymnastics was for the body and music for the soul (376E2-4).

1832

μουσικήν τε καὶ γυμναστικὴν ἐπὶ τὸ θυμοειδὲς καὶ τὸ φιλόσοφον οὐκ ἐπὶ ψυχὴν καὶ σῶμα (E5-7). Double chiasm (A, ~B / B, ~A / A, ~B) is too common to warrant a comment per se (cf.Crito 47C9-10; Gorg.459D1-2, 474D1-2; Ion 540B3-5; Leg.714E4-5 [including syntax]; Phdrs.277D10-E1); but in this case there is a logical reason for chiasm, that music is not for soul but for perfecting the essentially philosophic element thereof, and gymnastic not for the body but for perfecting the essentially thumoeidetic element of the soul. The traditional view is corrected by a chiasm. Contrast the double chiasm at 372B2-4 which is purely decorative (cf. n.1026).

1833

προσφέροντα (412A5): For the intransitive use (to “treat”) cf. Charm.165B6, Phdrs.252D, Tht.151B8, which suggests ongoing management and care, while μετριώτατα suggests adjustment.

1834

κάλλιστα / μετριώτατα / ὀρθώτατα / μουσικώτατον καὶ εὐαρμοστότατον (A4-6): Superlative piled on superlative. It is noteworthy that the argument culminates with the vision of a perfect (τέλεως) harmonizer rather than the perfectly harmonized soul of our young guard. Throughout the argument the soul was depicted as passive to its παιδεία and we had assumed we ourselves, if anyone, were the παιδεύοντες.

1835

συνιστάντα (A7), perhaps a technical term in music (cf. Phdo.92C2, Phlb.17D2, 26A4; Symp.187C6), chosen to contrast the specialist with the harmonizer in the broad sense (τέλεως).

1836

πολιτεία (A10) used here for the first time in the conversation.

1837

ἐπιστάτου (A10): The supervising had been “our” job since 377B11 (ἐπιστατέον), and was continued thenceforward by depersonalizing verbal adjectives in -τέον. But now emerges a need for ongoing, continuous supervision and adjustment (ἀεί) of the guardians’ souls in order that the city they are guarding should survive being guarded by them. We had hoped their nature, properly educated, would suffice once and for all, that the harmonizing would be permanent (note perfects, 410E8,10), but at the last moment this has been turned into a matter of constant adjustment, as is the tuning of a lyre: who then will be the overseers of the guards? This is the right question to ask since it is answered, in a way, almost immediately (cf. n.1867).

1838

οἱ μὲν οὖν τύποι τῆς παιδείας τε καὶ τροφῆς οὗτοι ἂν εἶεν (B2-3): Closure of the topic of education is done by looking back, and naturally the steps are seen in reverse order: τύποι as the method of παιδεία (379A1-4) which played the role of nurture or τροφή (θρέψονται … καὶ παιδευθήσονται, 376C7-8), once the requisite inborn nature had been established (οὗτος μὲν δὴ ἂν οὕτως ὑπάρχοι, 376C7). To the extent that the language preserves the reference to the model of φύσις, μελέτη, ἐπιστήμη (cf. 366C7 and n.885), the third question begins to loom: τίς ἡ ἐπιστήμη;

1839

χορείας γὰρ τί ἄν τις διεξίοι τῶν τοιούτων καὶ θήρας τε καὶ κυνηγέσια καὶ γυμνικοὺς ἀγῶνας καὶ ἱππικούς; (B3-4): The list diminishes the items being dismissed by pairing them with other items very close to each other, as if there were a distinction without a difference, and with the plurals, which are mildly derogatory. They are all divisions of gymnastic, by the way, and for τοιοῦτοι (B3), i.e., those who have been educated in the way we have just described, gymnastic has been put in its proper place.

1840

αὐτῶν (B9), narrowing the focus, as at 410C8: cf. n.1794. διαιρετέον (B8), like διεξιέναι, is another metaphor for the way the logos might move, and indeed the immediate sequel does proceed by division: first the older of them, then the best of the older (Stob.’s αὐτῶν τούτων at C5 is more than necessary); leading to the division of these best according to the metier of the guard, leading to a division of the ὑπάρχοντα of the competent guard (C12-13), the third of which (κηδόμενος) is then derived from φιλία (D2), derived in turn from a sense of common interest (συμφέρειν, D4-E1).

1841

ὅτι μέν (C2) answered not by δέ (C3) but by καὶ ὅτι γε (C5). As we look among the group for those most fit to rule, their relative ages presents itself as an obvious criterion. But on further reflection it is their “phylacticity” or “guardliness” that is the core credential, and the elders were preferable only because age is likely to confer it. As often, concessive μέν introduces the transitional idea. J.-C. fail to understand the μέν and turn the passage into an awkward revision by Plato (v.2 [Essays], 8-9).

1842

For ἀριστούς (C5), as the superlative of ἀγαθός, cf. 408C6-9B3; for πρεσβυτέρους (C2), vs. νεωτέρου, cf. 409B4-C1.

1843

γεωργικώτατοι (C7): There is no call for the translator to mitigate the strangeness of the diction with a periphrasis. The word φυλακικός never appears in Classical Greek before or later. Its use in Plut.Mor.1136F is a virtual quotation from the Republic and Mor.620C is a direct one. Socrates has coined the word to suit the simple logic of his argument perfectly – as he coined ὑφαντικώτατος at Gorg.490D7. Given the fact there are many qualifications of a farmer or a guard the best farmer or guard would be the person that satisfies the largest number of them to the largest degree.

1844

φρονίμους τε … καὶ δυνατοὺς καὶ ἔτι κηδεμόνας τῆς πόλεως (C12-13): The argument from the superlative provides an umbrella for the introduction of the various attributes without constellation. Intelligence and effectiveness have perhaps been provided by the education of the φιλόσοφον and the θυμοειδές; solicitous care is introduced as a new item (ἔτι κηδεμόνας, C13), though loving loyalty was surely present in the original concept of the dog in which the other two elements had been found side by side. The parallelism with the Hebrew schma is notable.

1845

Reading καὶ ὅταν μάλιστα (D5), with mss. AD (Stob. καὶ ὅτι μάλιστα). ὅταν μάλιστα was excised by Hermann and then Adam, J.-C., Burnet, and Slings (who incidentally is first to report ὅταν μάλιστα, without καί, from F). ὅταν μάλιστα, with or without preceeding καί, threatens to shift the construction from the ideal optative protasis (ἥγοιτο) without ἄν to an anticipatory subjunctive protasis with ἄν, but is immediately interrupted by a sub-protasis done with genitive absolute; after that interruption the construction abandons the expected οἴηται (printed without comment by Stallbaum!) with a constructio ad sensum that redeems the overall parallel by reverting, with οἴοιτο, to the optative. On μάλιστα see next note. Compare another such shift below (E1-2).

1846

συμβαίνειν (D6), denoting an intersection of interests – a so-called win-win – is climactic, capping, with μάλιστα and anticipatory ἄν, the more conceptual and general “parallel interests” denoted by συμφέρειν.

1847

ἄνδρας (D9) emulative and sympathetic: cf.361B6 and n.753.

1848

πάσῃ προθυμίᾳ ποιεῖν (E1-2) represents a present indicative apodosis to the present general protasis ὁ μὲν ἄν … ἡγήσωνται … . It is answered, after the second present general protasis, ὁ δ’ ἂν μή, with μηδενὶ τρόπῳ πρᾶξαι ἂν ἐθέλειν, where ἐθέλειν corresponds semantically to προθυμία (as μηδενί to πάσῃ and πρᾶξαι to ποιεῖν) but syntactically to ποιεῖν (as the main verb of the apodosis). The addition of ἄν at πρᾶξαι ἂν ἐθέλειν (E2), however, alters the condition from present general to “future less vivid” (or “ideal”). We will watch to see that every time an action promotes the city’s interest he carries it out with all eagerness; but that when it does not, he not only does not but would not do it. μηδένι, outside the protasis, negates not just the fact but the very conception (cf. n.137).

1849

δόξα (E8) drawn from δόγμα (E6), itself referring to the attitude described in so many words at E1-3, which is itself based on underlying beliefs described at D4-7 (n.b. ἥγοιτο, D4; and οἴοιτο, D6).

1850

His addition of ἐγώ (413A4) reminds us more forcefully than the first and third persons ἔφην and ἔφη do, that Socrates is telling us about the discussion the day after it occurred.

1851

τῆς ἀληθείας (A6): The genitive is ablatival and brings ἐψεῦσθαι as near as possible to a privation of good (ἀγαθῶν ... στέρεσθαι, A4-5); at the same time the expression prepares for drawing a verbal contrast between ἐψεῦσθαι and ἀληθεύειν.

1852

The set of questions, which each expect yes-answers, present in reverse order the propositions of two syllogisms, to-wit:

Believing the true is having truth,Having truth is a good:Therefore believing the true is a good.Nobody is willingly deprived of a goodTherefore nobody is willingly deprived of believing the true.

Thus the sequence of questions, although uninterrupted by the yes-answers they plainly expect, constitutes a virtual induction. In response to Glaucon’s request for μάθησις Socrates plays the animated teacher.

1853

ἀλλά (A9) “assentient” (Denniston), with καί adding a second assent..

1854

κλαπέντες ἢ γοητευθέντες ἢ βιασθέντες (B1): The list seems to add a third item (κλαπέντες) to the previous two (γοητευθέντες and βιασθέντες: cf. μήτε γοητευόμενοι μήτε βιαζόμενοι, E7).

1855

οὐδέ (B3), adding to his request at 413A2-3.

1856

τραγικῶς (B4), referring to the metaphorical use of κλέπτειν (the new item) and perhaps to the inherent vagueness of γοητεύειν. Cf. his remark οἴει γάρ τί με σεμνὸν λέγειν (382B1): it is another instance of Socrates buying time by being obscure (cf. n.1285).

1857

τοίνυν (B9) as usual “cashing in” on the warrant to continue given by the interlocutor’s assent. The give-and-take of question and answer has become an explicit theme in itself since 412E9.

1858

ὀδύνη τις ἢ ἀλγηδών (Β9) internal debilitation from mental or physical pain. Cf.XXX.

1859

καὶ τοῦτ’ (B11) acknowledges this is a second time he came to understand just as οὐδὲ νῦν above (B3) had said he had needed clarification a second time. More explicit byplay.

1860

Reading the lively μήν (C1) with AD, rather than deliberative μέν with F. It corresponds in liveliness to the τοίνυν used in the explanation of the second category (B9). The particles express Socrates’s continuing didactic enthusiasm in response to Glaucon’s request for guidance.

1861

ὡς ἐγᾧμαι (C1) points to κἂν σὺ φαίης εἶναι: remove Burnet’s comma. Continuing the byplay of give-and-take Socrates fancies (with a bit of telescoping) that Glaucon too could aver (φῆναι) this step – i.e., would agree without help.

1862

πάντα (C4): Glaucon is agreeing to both alternatives (pleasure and fear) by responding to Socrates’s catachresis of γοητευθέντας upon which they are both made to depend (C1).

1863

φύλακες τοῦ παρ’ αὑτοῖς δόγματος (C5-6): the objective genitive makes the noun φύλακες function as a verb. The more natural expression would be ‘best able to guard (or protect) the opinion,’ as done above with the adjective (φυλακικοί, 412E6) but Socrates is pushing toward the definition of an office with a title.

1864

Retaining αὑτοις ποιεῖν (C7) in the mss. (except for αὐτοῖς Ven.184): τοῦτο … βέλτιστον is the subject of εἶναι αὑτοῖς ποιεῖν, constituting an infinitival phrase to express the δόγμα, as above, δόξαν τὴν τοῦ ποιεῖν δεῖν, κ.τ.λ. (412E8). The δόγμα within themselves we need them to preserve against alienation is that the duty to do the best for the city belongs to themselves.

1865

τηρετέον (C7): Mr Morrissey notes that the test Socrates now formulates (βασανίζοντας, Ε1) – to watch them from youth, to require of them unfailing consistency in the face not only of toils but pains and bewitchment – recalls the test of the just man Glaucon suggested in his long speech (361B5-362A3· βεβανισμένος) but hugely perverts his intention there to a good purpose. There, Glaucon imagines the severest legal penalties being imposed upon a just man by an envious mob to break him down to their level; but now our team of founders (ἡμεῖς) hope for the victory of a conviction, deep-seated in a finely tuned soul facing a similar series of debilitating tortures, in hopes of the opposite outcome. The great difference between the cases is that there it was the man like you and me that was being tested for his devotion to virtue, whereas here, within the experimental myth of a just city, it is the man who is its highest functionary we are testing, and the fate of all of us and of civilized life in general lies in the balance, and here no trace of envy for the ruler we are grooming, but only the hope that his advent remain credible; and yet in this difference we return to the same for it was exactly a challenge to our credulity that Glaucon brought, as to a just man unfairly despised being able to hold to his course (ἴτω ἀμετάστατος, 361C7; cf. ἀκήρατον ἐκβαίνοντα, 413E6-414A1). In a sense it is the audience observing the just man that has changed, and particularly the group within which Glaucon now finds himself: indeed, in both cases it is the credulity of Glaucon that is dispositive.

1866

θετέον (D5) repeating προτιθέμενος (C8), with characteristic omission of the prefix (cf.399E8 and n.). From ἀλγηδόνας we confirm our suspicion that this is the second threat: force (cf.B9).

1867

βασανίζοντας (E1): The dative (ἡμῖν) proper to the verbal adjectives is here abandoned for a bland accusative and in the next line what had been the plural subjects of scrutiny become singular (δυσγοήτευτος, etc.) for the sake of isolating the paradigmatic case, syntactical shifts accompanied by a sudden elevation of tone achieved by climactic word order (φύλαξ αὑτοῦ ὢν ἀγαθὸς καὶ μουσικῆς) announcing (with καὶ μουσικῆς) that the ἐπιστάτης about whom so much was made just above (412A4-B1) will in his case at least no longer be needed (cf. n.1837).

1868

εὐάρμοστον (E4) recalls the culminating step in the education, the harmonizing of the influences of gymnastic with music in the soul (412A4-7).

1869

kαί (E5) is breathless: the elevation continues with extended attributive position distributed to two participles, and the climax of καταστατέον, the culminating announcement of the paradigmatic ἄρχων καὶ φύλαξ.

1870

ἔν τε παισὶ καὶ νεανίσκοις καὶ ἐν ἀνδράσι (E6): The plurals are auxetic. The tests of character continue into the experiences of maturity (cf.387B4 and n.1343), though “we” are no longer around to administer them.

1871

ἀκήρατον (414A1): cf.417A1.

1872

ἄρχοντα τῆς πόλεως καὶ φύλακα (A1-2), cf. τῶν ἀρχόντων τε καὶ φυλάκων (A6), an hendiadys about to become an identity after B4-6.

1873

λαγχάνοντα (A4): The participle replaces the verbal adjective in praise.

1874

ἐκλογή … καὶ κατάστασις (A5-7) connects the final or culminating step with the entire process that led to it, starting with their selection because of their dual native gift (ἐκλέξασθαι, 374E7) and culminating, after the education and testing, in the κατάστασις. The construction is “distributive-binary” (cf. n.2410): both ἐκλογή and κατάστασις go with both τοιαύτη and εἰρῆσθαι;, and chiastic: Voilà (= τοιαύτη, the first word), the whole story has been told (= εἰρῆσθαι, the last word).

1875

Both παντέλεις and the superlative ὀρθότατον (B1-2) refer back to the argument from the superlative (412C5-13).

1876

οἱ μέν … οἱ δέ (B3): Chiasm at closure: enemies as such will want and plan (βούλεσθαι) to harm the city, and the guards’ job is only to prevent them from being able to (δύνασθαι); internally however their job will be to maintain unity of purpose and friendship among the citizens. For the distinction between citizens and foreigners as the friendly and the inimical cf. Symp.221B4, Menex.243C5-6.

1877

ἐπικούρους τε καὶ βοηθοὺς τοῖς τῶν ἀρχόντων δόγμασιν (B5-6). They help not the rulers but their δόγματα, but the rulers will of course preserve their own states of mind: δόγματα has now come to mean the enactment of these beliefs or the city’s they will be help enforce.

1878

δόγμασιν (B6): The inward δόγμα παρ’ αὑτοις (413C6) embraced most irrefragibly by the ruling guards leads them to recognize spontaneously what is best for the city on every occasion; those whose embrace has proved less intimate or less mature (being νέοι) will perceive the operation of that inward δόγμα in the plurality of commands issued by the ruling guards, which as such are here called δόγματα.

1879

389B4, B7-9.

1880

γενναῖον (B9): I owe the translation, “whopper,” to Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle (= Order and History III [Baton Rouge, 1957]) 105 n.17. Cf. γενναία, 454A1 and 348C12 with n.540. It is used of a lie at H.Min. 366E3.

1881

ποῖόν τι (C3): The derisive ποῖος in quasi-interruption: Socrates’s question, “How?,” has not been asked until the lie has been described – and indeed is not asked until 415C6-7. Replace editors’ question mark at C2 with a dash.

1882

μηδέν (C4), rather then οὐδέν, does not import the tone of an imperative (Stallb., J.-C.. et al. ad loc.) but denies the fact from higher ground by denying the very idea. Glaucon’s ποῖόν τι has set Socrates to apologizing, which he already began to do with ἕν (C1). There will be only one lie and nobody can say we made it up (καινόν), either.

1883

Φοικονικόν τι (C4): i.e., the Cadmus legend of the sown men who sprang from the dragon’s teeth, again deemed hard to believe at Leg.663E,

1884

γεγονός (C5): Socrates easily shifts from the story, as a Phoenecian one, to its content as telling something that “happened:” the poets are witnesses of lies, as often, and by their skill make lies believable (πεπείκασιν).

1885

ὀκνεῖν (C9): Plato makes Socrates act like a poet in presenting the story, beginning (at D1-2) with the conceit of ὄκνος in face of the difficulty and gravity of his task (cf. P.P.9.79-82; N.7.17-30, 8.19-34).

1886

καὶ μάλ’ εἰκότως ὀκνεῖν (C9): καί though common with μάλα here goes with ὀκνεῖν, acknowledging repetition in retort.

1887

ποίοις λόγοις χρώμενος ἐρῶ (D1-2): The lie is not just a false proposition but a performance, placed by ἐρῶ into a future separate from the present presentation of content and purpose (ἐπιχειρήσω, D2). The distinction enables him to move Glaucon into the position of helper (n.b. ἡμεῖς, D4) in the endeavor to persuade the rulers (“them,” αὐτούς), and suddenly he has replaced the original goal of persuading “especially the rulers but failing that at least the rest of the city,” with a two-step strategy of persuading the rulers first and then the others second. In a moment (415C3-6) the rulers will in turn be moved into the position of helpers in achieving the second step, persuading the rest of the city.

1888

τοὺς στρατιώτους (D3), already an alternate designation for the ἐπικούρους τε κὰι βοηθούς of B5, setting up the image for their emergence from earth, below (D7-E1).

1889

πλαττόμενοι (D8): The theme of metallurgy is here introduced, which is of course the only industry underground: its pairing with τρεφόμενοι in respect to the guards, just after παιδεύειν was above paired with τρέφειν (D4-5), helps the segue from the almost purely psychic τροφή of the education to the mythical corollary of a purely physical molding from earthly elements, a global shift in what they are, for now they are made of mud.

1890

αὐτούς (E4) is an adjective with the understood subject of the infinitives: cf. n.1864.

1891

βουλεύεσθαί τε καὶ ἀμύνειν (E4): The pair (note τε καί) represents the gamut of civic duty with peacetime and wartime activities, broached above at B2-4.

1892

ὡς περὶ μητρὸς καὶ τροφοῦ τῆς χώρας (E3), a telescoped expression for περὶ τῆς χώρας ὥσπερ περὶ μητρὸς καὶ τροφοῦ. According to Stallb. placement of the comparans first as well as omission of second preposition with the comparandum, are both idiomatic (cf. 553B1; Euthyphr.2C7-8, Phdo.67D1-2, 83E3, 115B9; Phdrs.255D5-6; Tim.79A3); but the latter point is undermined by the presence of variants in several passages, and vitiated by Tim.79A3, ὥσπερ αὐλῶνος διὰ τοῦ σώματος (which he emends to ὥσπερ δι’ αὐλῶνος τοῦ σώματος vetantibus mss!). Noteworthy in addition is the idiomatic presence of the definite article with the comparandum, which appropriately casts the ὥσπερ phrase into predicate position. About τροφός LSJ notes (s.v.,2) it is often a metaphor for one’s city. When so used, the metaphor commonly includes a reference to the earth (A.Choeph.66, χθονὸς τροφοῦ; Th.16, Γῇ τε μητρί, φιλτάτῃ τροφῷ [of Thebes]; S.OT 1092 [of Cithaeron]; cf. also H.O.9.27), which is perhaps the middle term that underlies the metaphor in the first place.

1893

γηγενῶν (E6): The lie has so far provided a sanction for duty to the city (as to one’s mother) and duty to one’s fellow citizens (as to one’s brothers) that is deftly attached, by the term χώρα, to the political geography one finds oneself in.

1894

οὐκ ἔτος (E7): Glaucon is responding to the metallurgical account of man’s nature. The expression is common in Aristophanes (Ach.411; Av.413; Thesm.921; Eccl.245; Plut.404, 1066), from the epic term ἐτώσιος, “vain, fruitless.” What makes it comic is that it is faint praise implying a criticism more damning still. 'You were not wrong to be ashamed to do it' implies 'You should be all the more ashamed now that you have gone on and done it.' Used again at 568A8.

1895

τὸ ψεῦδος λέγειν: τό with λέγειν. Glaucon acknowledges how far out on a limb Socrates has taken himself, and himself along with him, by this speech.

1896

πάλαι (E7), of an event just a moment earlier, stressing how quickly he has come to be of a different mind (cf. n.1414). It is his surprise at what he has just heard that makes Socrates’s expression of ὄκνος seem more remote than ἄρτι would designate.

1897

πάνυ εἰκότως (415A1): A degree more emphatic than μάλ’ εἰκότως (C9).

1898

μὲν ... δή (A2) resumes what had been said before: addition of δή makes μέν more concessive and prepares for a δέ-clause that will add something quite new – indeed it prepares for ἀλλά instead of δέ. Meanwhile, γάρ is “programmatic”: like μεν … μυθολογοῦντες, it is part of what Socrates is saying to Glaucon rather than to the citizens.

1899

ἐστὲ ... πάντες (A2) He has found the language he worried he would never find just a moment ago (ποίοις λόγοις, D1). As he proceeds his confidence increases.

1900

αὐτοῖς (A5): He is addressing all the rulers in the second person (ἐστέ ...). A remark to them about a subsection of themselves (the rulers-proper) must go into the third.

1901

τιμιώτατοι (A5), refers back to 414A2 (τιμὰς δοτέον) but incorporates also the meaning of “value” that is pertinent to gold, as again with τιμήν at C2.

1902

Four metals are mentioned (A4-6) though only three are needed, perhaps in imitation of the four metals of Hesiod (WD 109-201: they are listed in the same order, though Hesiod inserts the generation of heroes between the bronze and the iron and assigns them no metal). Neither here nor at 547AB is there any distribution of iron and bronze to the farmers and the artisans, respectively (pace Adam): the word order here and at B7-C2 is no criterion at all, and indeed in the present case given the form of the listing and its progressive abbreviations, closure by chiasm is more likely than not, which would yield the opposite assignment with nothing to contradict it.

1903

ἅτε οὖν συγγενεῖς (A7): The μέν clause is concessive, but the ἅτε phrase is not, and so it maintains its force through to the δέ clause (J.-C., Adam): their generic identity might sometimes trump their specific differences; indeed the emphasis is nicely nuanced, for in “truth” (outside the fiction) though any father wishes his son to be like him and succeed him, the developed psychic state of the guards will never be congenital!

1904

παραγγέλλει (B3-4), a shift from the second plural of direct address by “us” telling them the story (A3), to the third person of narration, the persons addressed being placed in the dative (τοῖς ἄρχουσι, B3), and god being the speaker for us, completing that first step of our persuasion of them (D2-3). His admonition is presented in the present tense for vividness: the young guards need us no more. See note below on Glaucon believing. The god’s admonition to the guards is of course metaphorical: he knows they have the capacity to recognize the state of διάνοια they have themselves evinced so as to have the honor of gold, though they know not how. This inner stability is of course not genetically transferred to their sons though fathers would like to think it is: the emphasis of the admonition is to countervail the ill effect paternal love might have upon this fictional polis which, to remember the purpose of the entire fiction, must survive at least long enough for us to “see justice in it.” The myth does not at all some reveal some strong prejudice for a class society within Plato, as the commentators have come to believe.

1905

The admonition begins (B4-6) with a severe prolepsis of an indeterminate negative (μηδένος οὕτω, continued with μηδ’ οὕτω σφόδρα and redundant μηδέν following) leading to a lilies of the field construction (τοὺς ἐκγόνους ὅτι αὐτοῖς...). Again the emphasis is appropriate.

1906

σφέτερος (B7): The indirect reflexive stresses the necessity that they remain disinterested and choose to act on principle (n.b., προσήκουσαν, C1).

1907

κατελεήσουσιν (C1): The force of the prefix may be to make the pitying blameworthy (J.-C., citing καταχαρίζομαι in a sense it has in later Greek; perhaps καταχρῆσθαι would be a better example: cf. Gorg.490C3) or to designate the sudden and unexpected onset of pity.

1908

ὡς χρησμοῦ ὄντος (C5): This is the guards’ reason and justification in speaking to the people. At first we had to convince them, but now they have become our partners in persuasion.

1909

οἵ τ’ ἄλλοι ἄνθρωποι οἱ ὕστερον (D1-2): For τε adding (more exactly, attaching) the final item to a list we find three logically distinct uses: the final item forms a pair with the penultimate item (A καὶ B καὶ C1 C2 τε: Leg.733B6-7, 766E1-2, 947E5; Tim.31B4, 82B6-7, 88B4); τε attaches not another item but a generalization that culminates the list (a1 καὶ a2 καὶ a3 … A te: 370D9-10, 465C6; Leg.776D8-E1 [δεσπότας καὶ κτήματα τάς τε οἰκήσεις αὐτῶν ὅλας], 942C1; Tim.60A7-8); or τε attaches not a final item but an appositive exegesis of the penultimate item (A καὶ B καὶ C C’ τε: Leg.633C1, 801D; cf. Denniston, 502). Other cases in Plato exhibit no distinctly logical structure (e.g., Leg.792E-6-7, 889B3-4, 901A3; Tim.18A9-10, 24A7-8, 75B5, 76D4, 79E10) but belong to the wider use of τε that characterizes Plato later style (Denniston, 498). The present case can be placed within any of the three categories, depending upon whether we view οἱ ὕστερον as the complement, or a generalization, or an exegesis of οἱ ἔπειτα: ἄλλοι excludes none.

1910

ὅπῃ … ἡ φήμη ἀγάγοι (D6). Glaucon’s unstated conception that the guards have come on board with us as persuaders and no longer require us to persuade them but will take up the matter of persuading their sons (D1-2), continues the trend of rising confidence we have seen in Socrates’s presentation. Socrates can then adduce the rulers’ inner solicitousness for the city’s needs (κήδεσθαι, D4: cf. κηδεμόνας τῆς πόλεως, 412C14) as a support for Glaucon’s hopes they will succeed at it. Now that all of them—Socrates, Glaucon, and the guards—have navigated around the reef, he (and they) can let φήμη do the rest.

1911

ὁπλίσαντες (D7) and στρατοπεδεύσασθαι (D9) continue the image or characterization of the guards and their helpers as constituting an army, which was how the search for the φύλαξ began (373E9-4A3,ff) and whither it reverted at 414B2-4 with noticeable emphasis and corroboration at 414D3 (στρατιώτας). Intervening (376E-412A) was the education that prepared their dispositions to reach a balance between the two necessary but apparently incompatible traits of culture and high-spiritedness which would enable them to behave with peaceable loyalty to the citizens and rise in quick opposition to the enemy (410E5-6: cf. 375B9-6C5). The outcome of the education was that having found this deeply rooted and fine-tuned balance in themselves these men become the men most able to preserve the city (412A9-B1). It is in the last step of their preparation, where their relative ability to preserve the necessary solicitude about the city becomes an issue and is resolved (412B8-414A7), that a military kind of training and temper comes back to the surface. Still, it must be said that pressing them into a military life is an image that barely suits them, despite the fact that it has been set up in what came before. We can therefore expect some backfilling on this point.

1912

τούς τε ἔνδον μάλιστ’ ἂν κατέχοιεν … τούς τε ἔξωθεν ἀπαμύνοιεν (D9-E3) The doublet is repeated from 414B3-4. Note how easily ἄν may be dropped in the parallel apodosis (E2) despite the intervening protasis (cf. 382D11 and n.1306).

1913

εὐνὰς ποιησάσθων (E4): a synecdoche for their shelters: soldiers spend the lives outdoors; but the phrase may mean “go to bed” (as at Xen. Kyn.5.9: sic Fr.Portus apud Sturz, Lex.Xenoph. s.v. εὐνή) rather than build their beds, despite the isolation of the noun in the next paragraph. For such use of the plural (where we use the singular) cf. Prot.321A6; Thuc.3.112, 4.32.

1914

ἢ πῶς (E4): The mention of the beds recalls the fatefully provocative description Socrates had made of the citizens’ idyllic home-life in the πολίχνιον (372A5-C1, and D7-8). His pause after εὐνὰς ποιήσασθων, to make sure Glaucon is still with him, is therefore pregnant and dramatic.

1915

χειμῶνός τε στέγειν καὶ θέρους ἱκανὰς (E6): distributive use of τε καί: the two genitives of time each modify the phrase, στέγειν ἱκανάς, distributed between them.

1916

His term οἰκήσεις (E8) despite being a maximally abstract term (“shelter”), brings back the image and the setting of the idyllic description, as does Socrates’s initial description of the εὐναί in terms of winter and summer with winter requiring more protection (E6-7, cf. 372A8-B1). That Glaucon uses an abstract and functional term shows he is thinking of what is needed rather than creature comforts.

1917

γε (E9) limits or qualifies Socrates’s assent to Glaucon’s presumption. Shorey cites 430C3, and there cites Leg.710A5. If Denniston had cited these passages he would have done so on p.136 under his §11(vi) but cf. also his comments on “double duty,” pp.132 and 135. Socrates and Glaucon are sailing very close to the wind at this moment.

1918

Glaucon’s αὖ (416A1) expresses his awareness of the fact that Socrates’s cryptic answer to his question has forced him to ask another one, and by expressing his awareness in this way he shows some enervation (cf. n.2611). Compare less enervated καὶ τοῦτο at 392D7 and οὐδὲ νῦν at 413B3, and contrast 377D2-3 where Adeimantus apologizes for having to ask a second consecutive question with ἀλλά (rather than αὖ). Conversely at 393D2 where Socrates acknowledges his responsibility for being obscure, his αὖ is apologetic.

Glaucon’s τοῦτο and ἐκείνου may refer to the money-maker and the soldier, but they may also refer to Socrates’s limitation of his assertion (E9) as opposed to his original assertion (E8), i.e., “And just how is this qualification of yours meant to alter that presumption of mine?”

1919

τινος ἄλλου κακοῦ ἔθους (Α5): λίμος, hunger in an individual or famine at large, is hardly an ἔθος (the metaphorical use λίμος of Eur.Electra 371 is exceptional); ἄλλου is therefore adverbial (= “besides”). The first two items have to do with appetite (within the metaphor, the κακουργία to avoid is that the dogs becoming wolves will eat the sheep), but to clinch the analogy with our guards and their relation to the citizens we need something besides feeding (τρέφειν, A4) and gastronomics. ἔθος is the most general term available for acquired inner disposition or habits that might drive behavior (395D2, 518E1, 522A4 [regarding the education of the guards], 619C7, Phdo.82B2).

1920

αὐτούς (A5) focusses on the dogs by isolating them from their upbringing, which by then will have become their second nature (ἔθος). For this isolating use of αὐτός cf. n.1794.

1921

ἐπιχειρῆσαι τοῖς προβάτοις (A6): Madvig laconically wrote that κακουργεῖν plus dative is not Greek and deleted it against all mss. (Adv.Crit.[1871]1.419), attributing its presence as a marginal exegesis of ἐπιχειρῆσαι which is indeed rather vague (indeed the inspiration for it might have been its use in D1 below). But once we remove it we can see that ἐπιχειρῆσαι τοῖς προβάτοις καὶ ἀντὶ κυνῶν λύκοις ὁμοιωθῆναι, as well as the list above that prepares for it (ἀκολασίας, κ.τ.λ.) is an elaborate aposiopesis for the horror (n.b., δεινότατον καὶ αἴσχιστον) of the πρόβατα being eaten by the dogs – confirming Madvig’s excision. The substitution of πρόβατα (livestock) for ποίμνια (herds) is thus explained. For aposiopesis regarding cannibalism cf. 571D2-3, βρώματός τε ἀπέχεσθαι μηδένος; 574Ε8, οὔτε βρώματος οὔτε ἔργου with n.4342; 565E6-7 and n.4172; and Crat.395B3-4; regarding dipsomania, 439C2 and Phdrs.238B2-3; regarding violence against parents, 377E8-8a6, Alc. II 143C8-D1. Noteworthy are the use of διαπράττεσθαι (n.4362) and ἕτερον (n.1224) in such contexts.

1922

ἡμῖν (B1) is the usual dative with the verbal adjective, and the assistants are “ours” both in the sense parallel to that dative (i.e., that it is we who are forming the city), and in the sense that they are assisting us (since the metaphor of the shepherd pertains to the regime we will be imposing on the “assistants”). Indirectly it is becoming clear that “we” are playing the role of the “rulers” (or vice-versa) that we just distinguished from the “rulers’ assistants” whose job it is to “guard the beliefs of (i.e. policies decided upon by) the rulers.” (Cf. 414B5 and n.1877).

1923

ἐπειδὴ αὐτοὺς κρείττους εἰσίν (B2): That the remarks above (A2-7) allude to Thrasymachus’s remarks about the fattening of the sheep (343B) now becomes undeniable.

1924

φυλακτέον (B4): Glaucon’s answers (besides this, A8, B7, C4) are short and without affect.

1925

πεπαιδευμένοι εἰσίν (B6): The shift to the indicative places the onus on “ourselves” as the educators.

1926

καὶ ἐγὼ εἶπον (B8), emphatic: cf. n.1211. Note also the terminal position of the vocative.

1927

τὸ μέγιστον (C2): Here and at B5 (τὴν μεγίστην), a noun is left out. The effect is auxesis.

1928

This interlude (416B5-C4), begun by Glaucon’s protestation ἀλλὰ μὴν εἰσίν γε (B7), prepares for the severe prophylactic measures to be imposed upon the guards just below. Socrates drew the protestation out of Glaucon by his shift to the indicative (B5-6), and now he exploits the opportunity to make a fine and crucial point. We cannot take for granted that our best efforts will guarantee success: for this we need to be right. It is not (with Shorey) a “refusal to dogmatize” nor (with J.-C.) a “touch of unlooked for modesty” that elicits this remark from Socrates (though both are right to see a disowning of pride). Socrates recognizes that without their being right the whole thing will collapse. The fact that the crucial ingredient at this stage is their believing a nearly incredible story (about the underground pre-life) is an index of how much more work is to be done in the conversation, and even suggests where the work is needed. Still, Adam goes too far to read into Socrates’s diffidence an indication from the author that he is holding out a need to be filled by the higher education of the subsequent books, since even thereupon there is a danger of decline, as we see in Book Eight.

1929

πρὸς τοίνυν τῇ παιδείᾳ ταύτῃ (C5): That education was superlatively important (μέγιστον cf. C2, B5) indirectly implied there are other important μέγαλα that can also help.

1930

Reading Cobet’s conjecture, ἐπαρεῖ (D1): The verb is common in Plato for stimulation to covet wealth or reputation (434B1, 608B6; Leg.716A5; cf. Thuc.7.13.2).

1931

His remarks on the γενναῖον ψεῦδος were longer (414D-5D) but there was a breathing interruption in the middle (414E8).

1932

I.e., 372A5ff, τίνα τρόπον διαιτήσονται … .

1933

τοιόνδε (D3) first person demonstrative adjective of quality.

1934

σώφρονές τε καὶ ἁνδρεῖοι (D8-E1): The dispositional virtues that were the burden of the paideia to instill: cf. 412C12 and n.1844, 399A5-C4.

1935

ταξαμένους (E1), middle. The idea may be that they are preoccupied with holding their post and can ignore where their remuneration will come from but we will arrange it; or very differently the verb might have the meaning it has at 551B1, that they institute a monetary arrangement for their compensation, for which Shorey compares Meno 91B45, Thuc.1.108.4 for the sense, and cites GMT §857 for the participial construction.

1936

φοιτῶντας (E3) moves the men from work (ταξαμένους or φυλακή) to bivouac (συσσίτια). Within the previous description (372AC) this move was done with παραβαλλόμενοι and κατακλινέντες, 372B4-5.

1937

ἐκείνοις (417A1), like ἐκείνου (E7) indicates that our remarks to them (εἰπεῖν αὐτοῖς, E5) will be couched in paraenetic terms.

1938

ἀκήρατον (A1). LSJ gives both κεράννυμι and κήρ as etymons of ἀκήρατος and claims (s.v. ἀκέραιος) that ἀκέραιος is the prose term for the poetic ἀκήρατος (despite ἀκήρατος in Hdt.2.86.5, 4,152.3, 7.10.a1; Xen.Hiero 3.4; as well as in Plato; and despite ἀκέραιος in E.Hel.48, Or.922) and classes its uses under two heads (pure, unmixed, etc. vs. unharmed, unravaged, etc.) that might derive from these same two etymons. Passow cites κεράννυμι only as the etymon of both terms. The Souda s.v. ἀκέραιος has ἄφθαρτος. Timaeus Sophistes glosses ἀκήρατοι with καθαροί and ἀκέραιοι with οἱ ἔξω κήρας (sic: for the latter cf. Tim.Locr.95B: ἀκήρατον τῶν ἐκτὸς κήρων, and 105C). Latin sincerus is a calque.

Plato’s uses of ἀκήρατος include only one instance where the meaning plainly depends on κεράννυμι (Tim.41D6). Its use at Leg.735C2 may refer to what we might call the mixed breed as opposed to the pure (cf. γενναῖα καὶ ἀγεννῆ, 735B5), but ἀκηράτων may be a new, ethical idea to go with ἤθων as opposed to ὑγιῶν with σωμάτων. In the present passage he places the idea of admixture adjacent to his use of the term (συμμειγνύντας μιαίνειν, 416E7-8), but a truism enunciated in Leg.937D6-8 (πολλῶν δὲ ὄντων καὶ καλῶν ἐν τῷ τῶν ἀνθρώπων βίῳ τοῖς πλείστοις αὐτῶν οἷον κῆρες ἐπιπεφύκασιν, αἳ καταμιαίνουσίν τε καὶ καραρρυμαίνουσιν αὐτά) reveals that this connection with admixture derives not from the κεράννυμι etymon but is an extension of the religious notion of miasma that itself derives from the influence of the Κῆρες in human affairs (for the sentiment cf. “Democrates” in DK 68B191 and 68B285 and cf. 68C7). A notion of religious purity likewise underlies Leg.840D5-6 (ἠιθεοὶ καὶ ἀκήρατοι γάμων τε ἁγνοί, where with England, γάμων ἁγνοί explains ἀκήρατοι). The text is uncertain at Phdrs.247D1, but mixture is not at issue though something like transcendent purity is.

Polit.303E cites ἀκήρατον χρυσόν as a locution (λεγόμενον) for the gold that emerges from the process of smelting (cf.Hdt.7.10.a1). That use is clearly close to the use at 414A1, a passage so recent it must in turn govern the meaning of the present use. There it was decided that it is the guard who emerges from the torture tests (βασανίζειν) ἀκήρατος will be installed as ἄρχων. He has been tested as gold by fire (413E1-2). He is not purified but discovered to be pure. This theme of unsullied innocence itself goes back to Glaucon’s offhand remark about good jurors (παντοδαποῖς φύσεσιν ὡμιληκότες, 408D2-3) and Socrates’s correction of it (ἄπειρον αὐτὴν καὶ ἀκέραιον δεῖ κακῶν ἤθων νέαν οὖσαν γεγονέναι, 409A5-6), where we encounter ἀκέραιος, the doublet of ἀκήρατος. There the associated term ἄπειρον confirms the meaning of untested and virginal purity. The present use of the term brings forward this notion of innocent purity from 413E-4A and rediscovers in the ascetic life of the guards another metaphorical application of the λεγόμενον ἀκήρατον χρυσόν cited in Polit.303E4.

In his treatment of the ill effects of philotimia on civic life (κῆρας ἔχει ἐν πολιτείᾳ, Praec.ger.rei. 819E) Plutarch quotes the present passage and glosses ἀκήρατον with ἄχραντον ὑπὸ φθόνου καὶ μώμου τιμήν (820A).

1939

καὶ ἅπτεσθαι (A2-3) marks a climax in the remarks about gold that began at E4. μεταχειρίζεσθαι has a derogatory ring that “dealing with” can have.

1940

ὑπὸ τὸν αὐτὸν ὄροφον ἰέναι (A3-4): The rule resembles rules about pollution (μίασμα), and so continues the theme of the κῆρες from above. Prudence and prophylaxis are the rule here, not enlightenment and philosophy. J.-C. suddenly see humorous extremism in the provision, but Socrates is dead serious.

1941

περιάψασθαι (A4) perhaps to remind Glaucon of the fateful moment Gyges stole the ring (περὶ δὲ τῇ χειρὶ χρυσοῦν δακτύλιον ὄντα περιελόμενον, 359D8-E1).

1942

ἀργύρου ἢ χρυσοῦ (A4-5) count chiasms

1943

καί (A5): This connective (vs. δέ) indicates that the sequel is a continuation of the construction in ὄτι from 416E5: He is still talking to the guards and now will admonish them.

1944

ὅποτε δέ αὐτοί … κτήσονται (A6-7): The ensuing future indicatives are emphatically monitory after the optative of the μέν clause; for αὐτοί cf. αὐτούς at 416A5 with note.

1945

γῆν τε ἰδίαν καὶ οἰκίας / οἰκόνομοί τε καὶ γεωργοί (A6-7): The chiasm of before and after (cf. n.14) There is a lurking pun in οἰκόνομοι since next to γεωργοί it should have been οἰκόδομοι.; but the focus on the rest of the citizens has shifted from the differences between them and the several tasks they do, to their difference as a group from the guards: they have all become χρηματισταί.

1946

δεσπόται δ’ ἐχθροὶ ἀντὶ συμμάχων (B1), recalling ἀντὶ συμμάχων εὐμενῶν δεσπόταις ἀγρίοις, 416B3. ἔσονται gives way to γενήσονται as result; and in a climactic third de clause (done with δὲ δή) the outcome is expressed “adjectivally” with participles (διάξουσι being semantically otiose: cf. its use at 561B3). For this “ecphrastic” use of participles and otiose main verb, cf. 443D1, 560B4-5, 565E3-6A4, n.3672, and Appendix 7 Section 3E.

1947

πολὺ πλείω καὶ μᾶλλον (B3-4): For the combination of adjectival neuter plural comparative πλείω and adverbial neuter accusative singular comparative μᾶλλον, combining extension with intensity, cf. Thphr. HP 3.2.4: Plot.6.1 (2.280 Volkmann), and ἐλάττω καὶ ἧττον (396D1-2, and n.1495; Ar. Cael.313Α18, PA 696B22, Met.1028B19). πολύ here goes with both.

1948

οἰκήσεως τε πέρι καὶ τῶν ἄλλων (B7-8). οἴκησις, placed prominently by the anastrophe, reminds us that the question that initiated the description of their regimen was their εὐναί (415E4), or their οἰκήσεις (415E8), the vision of which in the πολίχνιον had triggered the reaction in Glaucon that made the entire education necessary!

1949

ἴσως οὖν κακῶς ἔχει (372E4-6).

1950

373E2.

1951

His remark at 378B6-7 (οὐδ’ αὐτῷ μοι δοκεῖ ἐπιτήδεια) poignantly reveals his awareness of the ambiguity of his own position.

1952

366E3-9, 367B4-5 vs.5-6, D3-4.

1953

His account includes the confession that the promising young man conceives of his own choice in life as devolving into choosing what sort of man he will imitate and how he will himself appear (365B5-6, C1-2; 366B3-C2).

1954

Rousseau’s remark (Emile I.40 [ed.Flammarion]) that the Republic “n’est pas une ouvrage de politique comme le pensent ceux qui ne jugent des livres que par leurs titres mais le plus beau traité d’éducation qu’on est jamais fait,” is truer than Rousseau realizes.

1955

συμφωνήσειν (398C5).

1956

σωφρονοῦντές γε ἡμεῖς (399E7).

1957

There is no need to worry over the terminology nor about Damon himself but only the rhetoric of the dismissal (cf. n.523) and the focus and stress it places upon the sequel.

1958

Indeed it is nothing less than the Theory of Ideas that animates this passage which Shorey in his reassuring tone calls Wordsworthian and Ruskinian (Loeb 1.253 note g, and 1.254 note b), since he sees that the Theory is for Plato more a vision than a set of falsifiable propositions.

1959

ἀπορίᾳ οἰκείων, 405B3-4.

1960

405D3-6.

1961

Cf. 359A5 and 360E1-3 and nn.716, 740.

1962

359A4-B4, 362B5-C1.

1963

His first mention of doctors was that with luxury we would have a greater need for them (not that we would need more of them: 373D1-2); he has reverted to complaining about the greater need and now Glaucon asks the fundamental question, whether there is a need for any that are good.

1964

μάλιστ’ ἂν αἰσθανοίμεθα (359B6), οἷοί τ’ ἐσόμεθα κρῖναι ὀρθῶς, 360E2-3. Socrates has now broached the issue of the juror's credentials for Glaucon. He will require him to specify what they are, when Glaucon re-enters the discussion in Book Nine (576D6-577B8 and nn. ad loc.).

1965

τούτους τοὺς ἄνδρας (419A3). ἄνδρας again suggests fellow feeling, as it did in the mouth of Glaucon at 372C2-3: cf.361B6 and n.753. Adeimantus’s use of the second person (ἀπολογήσῃ A2) points blame at Socrates even more resolutely than Glaucon’s personal constructions ποιεῖς and κατασκεύαζες / ἐχόρταζες did when he interrupted in Book Two (372C2-3: cf. n.1036), but in just a moment he pulls his punch by imagining the charge is being brought by some “third person” (τις, A2).

1966

ὧν (A3): The bare predicate genitive (rather than dative) endows the guards with a sort of possession of or sovereignty over the city that is global at the same time that it is indeterminate (cf. gen. at Lach.207D7). The pairing of ὧν and οἱ (A4: I am tempted to read the relative rather than the article) with μέν and δέ points up the inconsistency between this privilege and their actual role that ridicules them personally (δι’ ἑαυτούς: “They have no one to thank but themselves”). Adam’s comparison with X.Mem.2.1.17 is more misleading than helpful. For the shame attending their forgoing the opportunity to take more, compare Glaucon's remark at 360D4-5. Callicles's remark at Gorg.492C3 (καὶ ταῦτα ἄρχοντες ἐν τῇ ἑαυτῶν πόλει) expresses the same indignation and does so by identical means.

1967

These ἀγαθά (A5-10) are not “goods” in the sense of economic goods, but merely “good things,” and we need to wait for specification (again, Callicles uses the same rhetoric at Gorg.492B6). It turns out that they are not the needful things that the city had been brought about to supply. Even though he begins the list with fields and houses in order to allude to the primary δημιουργοί, the farmers and house-builders (echoing 417A6), it is not food and shelter but land ownership and lavish homes that here count as ἀγαθά, as the rest of his list corroborates. He follows by filling the house with furnishings suitably grand, and then adding a private altar and inviting foreigners to stay, as if one’s personal home were the center of the divine and human universe, a polis unto itself—all this in sharp contrast to the εὐναί of the guards where no corner is sequestered from public scrutiny as a private storeroom (416D6-7).

1968

With οἷον (A5), its antecedent ἀγαθόν, Adeimantus sets out to exemplify the goods of the city of which they possess not a one (μηδέν emphatic), but then immediately, and only half-consciously, shifts the construction because what bothers him is not the things they forgo so much as the sight of others getting them.

1969

ἄλλοι (A5): Adeimantus drops the article to depict the embarrassment the guard feels when he compares himself to the people around him, forgetting for a moment that his condition and theirs are the result of the new and unprecedented τάξις imposed on them all (for the contrast cf. ἡ ἄλλη πόλις, etc.[414C2,D3-4, E5; 416E1]; and μόνοις αὐτοῖς τῶν ἐν τῇ πόλει, 417A2). Socrates will represent the situation more accurately by restoring the article at 420A3, below.

1970

ἀγρούς τε κεκτημένοι καὶ οἰκίας οἰκοδομούενοι (A5-6): The two-item list evokes the occupations of farming, housebuilding, (and therefore weaving) that initially appeared as providing the basic needs for life (369D1-5) but later reappeared in various dialectical contexts (specialization [374B, 397E], competence [381A], the manufacture of better and worse looking things [401A]). Here, Adeimantus bends the occupations of farming and housebuilding so as to portray their practitioners as amassing capital from them (in contrast with the guardians who serve year in and year out but have not even a sou to show for it: 416E1-2). While one can imagine a capitalistic farmer getting possession of larger and larger fields, Adeimantus’s concept becomes inarticulate in the case of the housebuilder who must be imagined building larger and larger houses for himself.

1971

The list of possessions (A5-10) is done with a sequence of six participial phrases. The first and last are governed by perfects (κεκτημένοι), and this one, the third, is governed by the present (κτώμενοι). Those before and after it are also present (οἰκοδομούμενοι, θύοντες, ξενοδοκοῦντες). The effect of the presents is to portray the process of accumulation and expenditure.

1972

θυσίας θεοῖς ἰδίας (A7): Private sacrifices are an occupation of the rich, who can afford them. They might think they need them, too, as Cephalus does (331B2-3, cf. nn.829 and 44ad 365A3 and 328D6), and as this same Adeimantus repeatedly says the unjust do (362C2-3, 364B5-C5, 364E5-5A3, 364E5-5A3, 365E4-6A4).

1973

ξενοδοκεῖν (A7) is an hapax in Plato.

1974

With ὅσα νομίζεται (A9) Adeimantus seeks to disown responsibility for his complaint with exactly the same formula Glaucon used at 372D7 (ἅπερ νομίζεται)!

1975

Climactic μακάριοι (A9) replaces the εὐδαίμονας of A2 (cf.335E9 and n.254) as he becomes more excited by his own list.

1976

φαίη ἄν (A10): A tone of satirical speculation replaces the threatening tone of the subjunctive condition in which the opening accusation was couched (A1-2).

1977

φρουροῦντες (420A1) along with καθῆσθαι ridicules the prophylactic work of the guards by reducing it to a somatic posture, stationary and staring (φρουρᾷ, Phdo.62B), Moreover, φαίνονται presupposes someone else in turn observing them, someone in fact indistinguishable from Adeimantus (though he speaks impersonally of a τις [A2], that is also the subject of φαίη ἄν [A10]), who was himself distracted by the mental image of the “others” reaping the “good things of the city.” Adeimantus portrays the power of others’ envy to create desire in the person being envied so accurately that we can be sure these forces are acting or have acted within himself. There is no hint of parody or irony in his remarks. As at the beginning of Book Two, he finds himself “in between.”

1978

With ἀπολογήσῃ (419A2) he implies Socrates will be blamed for something; Callicles actually articulates the moral reproof (Gorg.492B4-5, αἴσχιον … οἷς ἐξὸν ἀπολαύειν τῶν ἀγαθῶν ...).

1979

Goods are divided differently in different dialectical contexts. When the external goods (τὰ ἔξω, the goods besides those of body and/or soul) are represented by a single item, the item is wealth (πλοῦτος: 495A7-8, Euthyd.279A7ff, 280D2; Gorg.467E4; Leg.631B6-D1, 660E2-5, 661A5-B4; χρήματα: 443E3-4, Leg.870A; Phlb.48E1-9A2). When represented by a set of items the characteristic ones are πλοῦτος and γένος (491C1-4, Charm.157B7-8; Phdrs.239-40A8), πλοῦτος and ἀρχή (445A6-8, Prot.354B3-5), or πλοῦτος, γένος, and ἀρχή (494C5-7, 618C8-D5; Alc.I 104A4-C1; Tht.175D3-5A5). In outlying dialectical contexts we find clothing (Phdo.64D), οἰκία and πλοῖον (Gorg.504A7-10), δόξαι, τιμαί, δωρείαι (Rep.366E4-5), and horse, dog, gold, honor, friends (Lys.211D8-E1).

1980

With καὶ ταῦτα (A2) Socrates directly echoes Adeimantus’s at A3, which he himself notes with γε. He takes Adeimantus’s point even further, just as he had acquiesced to Glaucon’s request for ὄψον by adding acorns and nuts (372C4-D3). And just as Glaucon’s impatience there brought on the need to sicken and then heal the state in order to reach the goal of looking for justice within it, Adeimantus’s impatience here not only threatens the progress that has been made toward that same goal but also postpones our taking the final step until 427D.

1981

With ἐπισίτιοι (A2) he echoes the derogatory tone of Adeimantus’s ἀτεχνῶς … ὥσπερ ἐπίκουροι μισθωτοί, but corrects him. They work for food, not money!

1982

οἱ ἄλλοι (A3): His re-use of Adeimantus’s ἄλλοι receives the article and begins to restore the structure by which the two groups are defined. Adam seeks to justify his previous interpretation of ἄλλοι (419A5) by giving this one a different reference, choosing without any basis οἱ ἐπίκουροι, who however received the same treatment as the φύλακες in this regard, as 416E4-5 and 417A3 confirm (χρυσίον δὲ καὶ ἀργύριον).

1983

ἀποδημῆσαι (A4) is the luxury that is the converse to ξενοδοκεῖν (419A7), and an equal badge of autonomy from the petty concerns that preoccupy one’s neighbors.

1984

ἑταίραις (A4), another reminiscence of Socrates’s reply to Glaucon at 373A3 (cf. also κόρη, 404D5 and n.1675).

1985

ἀναλίσκειν (A5), which is placed in the position of the criterion of the list, is actually a criticism of all the elements leading up to it. It is virtually a “specious genus” (on which cf. n.2810). For formulae of the criterion cf. 431C1-3 and n.2152.

1986

τῆς κατηγορίας ἀπολείπεις (A7): Socrates makes Adeimantus responsible for bringing the complaint, despite his attempt to dodge it by using τις (419A2 and n.1965).

1987

ἀλλά (A8).

1988

ἀπολογησόμεθα (B1): The plural is ambiguous. Socrates begins to suggest that the complaint Adeimantus brings is a complaint he must also help answer.

1989

οἶμος (B3), an hapax in the Platonic corpus outside quotations from poetry, sounds like οἶμαι, which is used below (B4, B8, C2) to trace the steps the thought has taken back to the beginning question, What is justice in itself and its effects? (Book One having been a προοίμιον, 357A2), as well as to depict an erroneous way of thinking going forward (D2).

1990

εὐδαιμονέστατοι (B5): The plural makes them a group; the superlative (I take καί with εὐδαιμονέστατοι not with οὗτοι) only suggests comparison. Socrates begins by “denying the predicate.”

1991

διαφερόντως (B7) continues the suggestion of envy by its etymology: a happiness that sets apart one apart from the others.

1992

ὅτι μάλιστα (sc. ἔσται εὐδαίμων) ὅλη ἡ πόλις (B7-8). The city was brought into existence as a κοινωνία in which the needs of the individuals would be best served by cooperation rather than their staying apart and “minding their own business” (369C1-70C6). It is that maximization (ὅτι μάλιστα, B7-8) of quality and supply and ease (370C3-4, for which the term here is εὐδαίμων, implied but not explicitly predicated of the city until 420C2) which is brought about by cooperation (κοινωνία is here done with ὅλη), that Socrates is referring back to. Indirectly he has defined εὐδαιμονία not as having money beyond need, as Adeimantus has just suggested, but as enjoying an efficient fulfillment of needs. So much becomes more explicit below, at 421C3-4.

1993

κατιδόντες (C1) repeats καταμαθεῖν (368E8) and ἴδοιμεν (369A6).

1994

πάλαι (C1), referring to a previous phase in the argument, the phase before they began the construction of the city, when Adeimantus asked the question, What is justice as it exists in the soul and what is its effect within those who have it? With the back-reference Socrates admonishes Adeimantus that his interruption at envy's behest has threatened his chances of getting an answer to his own original question.

1995

ὀστρείῳ (C8): Plutarch’s remark at QC 5.5.618A suggests that it is the cost of the paint rather than its special color that is the issue.

1996

μὴ ἀνάγκαζε ἡμᾶς (D5): The second singular imperative is addressed to Adeimantus (pace Burnet and Chambry who postpone closing the quotation to 421A4), whom Socrates's argument here pushes into the position invented by the imaginary interlocutor who objected to the painter (even though as above Adeimantus is also included in the first plural ἡμᾶς, and below [B1] the person Socrates has corrected is referred to as ὁ δ’ ἐκεῖνο λέγων).

Socrates (along with Plato’s other conversationalists) commonly finesses the tension between the individuality or independence of the two conversants (expressed by first and second person singulars) and the partnership of their project (expressed by the first plural which denotes their joint effort), by introducing imaginary interlocutors and imaginary objections (332Cff, 337AB, 341E; Apol.28B, 37E; Charm.165C10-E2; Gorg.450-1; Ion 538D7-9E1ff; Leg.648Aff, 662C7ff, 807B7-8; Lys.216A5ff; Phdrs.261A3ff; Phlb.63B-4A (prosopopoeia); Prot.330C-31Aff, 352Eff; Stallb.ad Leg.628B, Thompson ad Meno 72B). Sometimes the purpose is to ensure that a position is adequately articulated (Rep.453A7-9, 476Eff), especially in such cases as the present where the partnership of joint search is threatened (cf.Crito 50A6ff [after the challenge of 49C11-E2]; HMaj.287Bff; Leg.628E-9B8ff). The case of 588B1-8 is illustrative in its extremeness (cf. n.4632), since there the hypothetical interlocutor is plainly Glaucon himself though neither he nor Socrates admit it. The present case is of the same nature and the circumspection is used for the same reasons.

1997

προσάπτειν (D6), commonly used of pinning on an award or decoration in the aftermath of great deeds, in contrast to the distribution used in setting things up (τὰ προσήκοντα ἀποδιδόναι [D4]).

1998

ἐκείνους (D6), approbative: “the guards as we made them.” Giving them a dose of happiness could only (πᾶν μᾶλλον) disable them from performing their task, as pretty paint on the statue’s eyes would ruin the contribution we need the eyes make to the whole statue.

1999

ἐπιστάμεθα (E1) often used in dismissive praeteritio, meaning “we already know” (e.g., Phdrs.230E, Alc. I 106C, H.Maj.285C, Meno 85C).

2000

περιτιθέναι (E2) suggests a ring (as at 360B4) or a crown (as at 406D4).

2001

μακαρίους (E6): Socrates picks up Adeimantus’s climactic use of μακάριος (cf.419A9 and n.1975). With these humorous sketches Socrates parodies Adeimantus’s envious portrayal of the δημιουργοί by presenting the real outcome if Adeimantus’s irresponsible conception of the specialists’ roles (n.1970 ad 419A5-6) actually came about.

The overlapping substitution of exemplary material (there, farmers and builders; here farmers and potters) is characteristic (cf. n.155 and n.1970, supra). For Adeimantus the earth-tiller was turned into a landowner followed by a house-builder who becomes a lord of the estates; here he is depicted out at work impeded by the nonsensical accoutrements of wealth, followed by a potter leisurely at table with his tools within reach, in order to show that work does not mix with leisure nor leisure with work. Disagreement may be expressed on the level of principle and ideas, or in terms of the very different qualities that different principles impose on the exemplary material. Though as here the latter can bring the abstract point home, it may also devolve into exemplomachy.

2002

σχῆμα (421A2): The term, according to Mr Karabatsos, strikes a corrective contrast to its complement, χρῶμα in the choice of paints, as line to color, essence to accident, and substance to affect. Cf. n.1062.

2003

ἄλλων (A2) with μέν proleptic, as often.

2004

νευρορράφοι (A3), a derogatory specification for σκυτοτόμοι, itself no less specific but not derogatory merely because it (i.e., “leather-cutting”) is in Greek the common and received synecdoche for the shoemaker (n.4882). For derogatory specificity cf. Thrasymachus at 348D7 and 450B3, Charm.163B6-8 (ταριχοπωλοῦντι), Euthyd.294B6-7 (vs.B3-4); Gorg.491A1-2 (κναφεύς replacing ὑφάντης); Leg.842D3-5, D7-8 (μελιττουργοί); Phdrs.240A7 (γλυκύ); Symp.211E1-4, 221E4-5 (βυρσοδέψας); Tht.147A. Rep.455C6-7 uses derogatory specificity for dismissal.

2005

ὁ δ’ ἐκεῖνο λέγων (B1), the “third person” pronoun distancing Adeimantus from the position he has just taken: cf. ὁ δ’ ἐκεῖνα λέγων at 588B10-11, distancing Glaucon from the position he had taken in Book Two.

2006

ἐν πανηγύρει (B2): The image is reminiscent of Adeimantus’s description of the rewards for virtue in Hades (363C4-D2).

2007

ἄλλο ἄν τι ἢ πόλιν λέγοι (B3): The sentence does not need emendation. It is the contrast between the two behaviors depicted in the protasis (ours and his) that warrants the apodosis being inferred.

2008

τοῦτο (B4), implicitly second person.

2009

τοῦτο (B6), again.

2010

θεατέον (B6): “watch and learn” (as 369A5) almost “wait and see.”

2011

βλέποντας (B6), repeated from above and going with θεατέον, becomes redundant in the concessive μέν clause, so as to prepare for the contrast to the active ἀναγκαστέον and πειστέον of the δέ clause.

2012

τούτους (B7), referring to 419A10, and followed by corrective epexegesis καὶ τούς φύλακας.

2013

ἐκεῖνο (C1), referring to the more remote antecedent, but also approbatory, referring to the whole course of the argument that Adeimantus and the interloper Socrates replaced him with would have us abandon.

2014

αὐξανομένης καὶ καλῶς οἰκιζομένης (C4): With this hendiadys the expedient of associating the city’s good order with its happiness which he introduced without apology above (420B7-8 and n.1992) becomes explicit.

2015

μεταλαμβάνειν (C5): participatory happiness as natural result, in contrast with a happiness arbitrarily added on as an adornment (προσάπτειν, 420D6). Compare how in the analogy rendering to each part its due makes the whole come out beautiful (τὰ προσήκοντα ἑκάστοις ἀποδιδόντες τὸ ὅλον καλὸν ποιοῦμεν, 420D4-5).

2016

ἀλλά … καλῶς μοι δοκεῖς λέγειν (C7): With ἀλλά Adeimantus acknowledges how far he has been brought to agree. At 50 lines (420B2-421C6) Socrates’s “apology” is by far the longest continuous statement made in the conversation so far. Its length is due to its rhetorical complexity. Adeimantus’s objection faulted the policy Socrates and Glaucon had formulated as providing too little εὐδαιμονία for the leading class, the guards—but his examples revealed that εὐδαιμονία was for him only a euphemism for wealth (for which cf. e.g., Charm.157E7-8A1)—and revealed also that his main worry was the prospect of being ridiculed by others. Socrates’s lengthy response separates any policy concerning happiness from the policy concerning the guards, first by redefining happiness as a natural result instead of a reward, and second by returning to the basic ground that the guards as citizens have their own job to do and a life that will yield its own peculiar happiness alongside the happinesses yielded by the different lives of the other classes. At the beginning happiness is slanted toward a happiness of the city that substitutes for what we had previously conceived to be its being well ordered. By the end happiness does come to belong to the individual citizens (420B6-8), but only as a result of the orderliness of their city. In the middle (420C4-421A2) is placed a parody of Adeimantus’s concept of the δημιουργοί as profiteering from their work, in the images of a crowned farmer and a potter’s wheel at banquet—a ridicule akin to the ridicule Adeimantus had imagined the guard might be subjected to—which was softened by introducing the analogy of statue painting and an imaginary interlocutor. By the end the tables are turned and the guards can be depicted as δημιουργοί themselves (C1-2), and we are left to hold our breath and see whether Adeimantus agrees.

2017

τὸ τούτου ἀδελφόν (C8): With this curious expression he begins a series of cryptic and playfully worded questions and remarks: 421D1-2, 422A8-B1, and especially 422E3-5 with the paragraph that follows (422E7-3B2). For the technique cf. n.1285.

2018

τί μάλιστα (C10) is bemused.

2019

τοὺς ἄλλους δημιουργούς (C10): The δημιουργοί, as opposed to the φύλακες or ἄρχοντες and their ἐπίκουροι, with ἄλλους picking up the ἄλλων of A2. As the articulation of the city advances into sub-groups the vocabulary needs to be adjusted.

2020

αὖ (D1): The point of the long speech was that a distracting concern for wealth might corrupt the guards (διαφθείρει, D1: cf. A4); the complementary point (αὖ) is: what would be its effect on the others?

2021

καὶ μὴν καί (D13) is not essentially adversative; here it is cumulative.

2022

παρέχεσθαι (D13): The middle voice does not (following Riddell, Digest §87) denote that the father does not teach his son: it adds a connotation that he is makeshifting. Cf.Campbell in J.-C. and his apposite citation, Ar.Nub.783.

2023

νεωτερισμός (422A2) : The strong aversion will not seem a psychological idiosyncrasy of Plato's if one consider the reasons given at 563E3-564A1.

2024

τόδε μέντοι (A4), first person demonstrative.

2025

πολεμεῖν (A5). Adeimantus has forgotten they discovered that the origin of war is concupiscence (not poverty, but a desire for wealth: 373D7-E7), but at the same time he is aware of it since he imagines a large and wealthy city, which is not poor but rich, desiring nevertheless to conquer a poor one. His question reveals the same blind spot that affected the conversation before, where the description of our own expansion was described in a tone wholly different from that used to describe the expansion of our invading neighbors (373D7-10, 374A1-2, and nn.1076 and 1083).

2026

πλουσίοιν δὲ καὶ πιόνοιν (B8): At this point, wealth, which Adeimantus had euphemized with εὐδαιμονία, comes in for an edifying shellacking.

2027

τὸν πρότερον (B10): The argument begs the question by presuming the two will not attack simultaneously, just as does the argument of Diomedes, according to which two scouts are better than one because one will see before the other (Il.10.224), an argument Socrates happily quotes to encourage joint scrutiny, as at Symp.174D and Prot.348C (cf.Rep.432C2, 595C10-596A1 and n.4750, and cf. n.3641)—though the opposite reason is given in Phdo.89C5-10.

2028

στερεοῖς τε καὶ ἰσχνοῖς alongside πίοσί τε καὶ ἁπαλοῖς (D5-7), a chiasm; ἔχετε τὰ τῶν ἑτέρων, a brachylogy. These dogs talk swift and tough.

2029

οὔ μοι δοκεῖ (D8). μοι sets up a contrast, more emphatically than οὐ δοκεῖ and less emphatically than οὐ δοκεῖ ἐμοί would have, between what Adeimantus would like to think and what prudence requires him nevertheless to countenance. We may compare his move at A4.

2030

ὅρα μὴ κίνδυνον φέρῃ (E1), a more anxious expression than the σκόπει plus future vivid condition with which he first introduced this concern (A4-7).

2031

τῶν ἄλλων (E1), as plural, refers to other monied-cities that a single monied-city may go on to conquer and swallow up, not just the one city of fattened sheep, while τῇ μὴ πλουτούσῃ refers to a city like our own, presuming (μή at E2 is conditional) it remains unmonied.

2032

μειζόνως … προσγορεύειν (E7): the periphrasis with adverb strains to create an ambiguity. They are larger than a polis but also they are painted with a broader brush. The paragraph brings to a climax Socrates’s play on the tension between quantity and quality, size and substance, and finally appearance and reality (εὐδοκιμεῖν vs. ὡς ἀληθῶς, 423A7), which is in a sense the problem that underlies all of what Adeimantus has been worrying about since the beginning of this Book.

2033

ἀλλ’ οὐ πόλις, τὸ τῶν παιζόντων (E8-9): This allusion to the game called “city” or “cities” (cf. scholiast ad loc.) remains obscure. If we knew what every Greek casually knew about it we might understand what is hopelessly obscure in the sequel, just as a Greek would be stumped forever if we made an allusion to Contract Bridge and started talking about north and south slamming east and west.

2034

χρήματά τε καὶ δυνάμεις ἢ καὶ αὐτούς (423A4): The list starts as a list of external goods, since (strictly, at least) only these can be transferred. χρήματα begins the list, as usual; δύναμις then stands for what is more often done with ἀρχαί or τιμαί or οἰκία and γονεῖς, and slants these in the direction of Adeimantus’s underlying conception of prerogative as a good; but the final item, ἢ καὶ αὐτούς, “even themselves if this were possible,” bluntly strains toward something else (and it is something ominous, whether Thrasymachus’s καὶ αὐτούς [344B6] or the trouble with oligarchy, τὰ αὑτοῦ ἀποδόσθαι [552A7, 556A5]). αὐτούς may be part of the vocabulary of the board game (just as we would call them “men”), which would mitigate the bluntness of the expression, but the inescapable meaning that Adeimantus and we along with him must grasp is that the guardians will be deprived not only of any personal wealth but even their personal “autonomy,” something tantamount to slavery. Contrary to Adeimantus’s objection, the guards, who are the few, will indeed appear to have subordinated themselves in every way to “the rest of the polis” (n.1969) not only in wealth but in every aspect of their personal lives.

2035

σοι (A6), the ethical dative of the theorist creating the imaginary city (usually ἡμῖν: cf. 371A8 and n.1004).

2036

σωφρόνως (A6), here prefiguring what it will mean below, the harmonious acquiescence of the city’s two groups to rule and be ruled (431D9-E6, 442C10-D1). Cf. the prominence of ἄρχειν in the formulation in Book Two (389D9-E2).

2037

οὕτω μεγάλην (A8) repeats the ambiguity of μειζόνως above, but to different effect: “having the largeness that is conferred by unity.” Socrates does not attempt to reduce what is paradoxical in his formulation of the controversial point, but flatly asserts that one is more than many.

2038

πολλαπλασίας (B1): The very term makes the large larger by the crippling power of its greater plurality.

2039

ἢ ἄλλως οἴει (B2), Socrates asks; οὐ μὰ τὸν Δία, Adeimantus replies (B3). Adeimantus had acquiesced in Socrates’s theory that wealth is neither good for the guards nor the rest of the citizens, in the same breath that he introduced new worries about war (τόδε μέντοι σκόπει, 422A4ff), as if he agreed in principle but objected only on prudential grounds. The series of jocular and paradoxical arguments with which Socrates then replied (422A8-D7) elicited his agreement but also and again, his prudential reservation (οὔ μοι δοκεῖ ἀλλ’ ἐάν ..., D8, and cf. n.2029). But now after this capping argument in which Socrates strains the distinction between the quantitative and the qualitative meaning of “one,” both sincere and a huge bluff, Adeimantus agrees without reservation. The arguments Socrates has here used resemble his remarks to Glaucon during the gymnastics section (in particular his digression into medicine and litigation) in their combination of sincerity and bluff irresponsibility. There as here they are essentially protreptic, designed to edify, persuade and even cajole Adeimantus to throw over his doubts rather than seeking to command his assent through exhaustive reasoning. Adeimantus’s emphatic answer announces he has accepted them on their terms.

2040

ὅρος (B4): The term courts ambiguity. The city’s boundary (ὅρος) will be determined by the population and the population by a qualitative criterion (ὅρος). The term echoes τὸν τῶν ἀναγκαίων ὅρον, 373D10.

2041

μέγεθος (B5), in the new qualitative sense, whatever size (in population) it happens to have taken on when it has achieved the maximal temperate organization. This population in turn will determine the required amount of land.

2042

οἶμαι μέν (B9): The μέν is solitarium, indicating uncertainty.

2043

τοῦτο αὖ ἄλλο (C2), i.e., in addition to 421E3ff. As in the discussion of poetry with its τύποι, the theoretical conversation precipitates formalizable and countable results (380C6-7).

2044

μήτε σμικρά (C3): Corresponding to the apparent largeness of the rich city was the apparent smallness of the one that had no wealth (422D8-E2), apparent size being only relative, while true size is absolute, and quantity becomes quality (μία, ἱκανή).

2045

ἀλλά τις ἱκανὴ καὶ μία (C4): He repeats from 423A6-7 (ἀληθῶς μεγίστη) the peculiar correlation of quantity with appearance over against quality (i.e. unity) with truth or reality.

2046

καὶ φαῦλός γε (C5): Adeimantus again answers with καί ... γε (cf. C1).

2047

φαῦλον ἴσως (C5). The underlying lesson to which Adeimantus has now acquiesced is that what seems large is not eo ipso large in truth. He indicates his awareness of this very serious underlying theme by playfully adducing the converse: he calls something small that does not seem small if you know what’s truly large. The byplay continues up to 423D8-E1.

2048

καὶ τούτου γε ἔτι φαυλότερον (C6), Socrates continuing the byplay a καί … γε of his own.

2049

φαῦλος ἔκγονος (C8) a third time.

2050

οἱ ἄλλοι (C8) by now is almost a technical term for the general public (cf. 421A2 and D1).

2051

σμικρότερον (D7) varies φαυλότερον (C6).

2052

φαῦλα (E1): Socrates returns to the term one more time, now to make his most telling point.

2053

ἱκανόν (E2): Again quantity (μέγα) is not allowed to stand unqualified, but is replaced by the meet and proper (ἱκανός). For the catch-phrase ἓν μέγα φυλάττειν, cf.Polit.297A7, and Shorey’s brilliant suggestion (Loeb ad loc.) that it is excerpted from the proverb about the fox and the hedgehog (πολλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα, cf. Zenobius 5.68). On ἱκανός in this approbatory sense cf.371E3 and n.1013, and contrast its use in brash understatement (344C6-7, 361A2, 361B2 and n.454). Another of the value terms has been redeemed from prior abuse!

2054

τὴν παιδείαν (E4): The emphasis on education now reappears from 416B5-C3, from which Adeimantus’s interruption had forced a digression. The addition of τροφή only specifies that the παιδεία is identical to the maturation process once they have been selected for their φύσις (cf. παιδείας τε καὶ τροφῆς [412B2] and θρέψονται καὶ παιδευθήσονται at the beginning of the education [376C7]). The enduring physiological effect of the education moreover becomes thematic in the next paragraph. One needs not go so far as to argue that by slanting παιδεία toward τροφή and μελέτη, Plato means here to make place for the third (φύσις, μελέτη, ἐπιστήμη), taken up some fifty pages from now (cf. n.1838 ad 412B2-3).

2055

παραλείπομεν (E6), the present commonly used in praeteritio as in any programmatic remark.

2056

τήν τε τῶν γυναικῶν κτῆσιν καὶ γάμων καὶ παιδοποιΐας (E6-7). I take παιδοποιΐας to be accusative plural, and therefore take the list to be genetic, depicting the results coming from “women” who enter “marriages.” The list begins as if it were a series of κτήσεις because possession and the management or reform of possession is the current theme. Although marriage, expressed by the second genitive dependent on κτῆσιν can be viewed as an “asset” (e.g., 363A3), its closer association is with the plurals γυναικῶν before and παιδοποιΐας after. For the metabatic logic we may compare the restatement of this list at 502D4-6 (τήν τε τῶν γυναικῶν κτήσεως δυσχέρειαν καὶ παιδογονίαν). The reading Burnet reports from Vat.1029 (γάμον), later supported by the Vindobonensis 54 (apud Chambry) ill suits the plurals γυναικῶν and παιδοποιΐας; Richards’s accusative plural γάμους breaks with the theme of acquisition too abruptly while Hartmann’s excision of the offending words lacks warrant. For genetic lists cf. 387B4, 395A1-2, 608A5. Socrates glides through the list quickly, in exactly the same manner he glides through θήρας τε καὶ κυνηγέσια καὶ γυμνικοὺς ἀγῶνας καὶ ἱππικούς, at 412B3-4 (cf. n.1839). The list, in concert with the proverb, constitutes a dismissal of further particulars for the sake of closure and transition. What is being finished is the interruption of Adeimantus, and so we are back to the vision reached at the end of Book Three.

2057

κοινὰ τὰ φίλων (424A1-2) asserts that the intimacy and importance of friendship leaves little room for a person to own things external to the relationship, a notion wholly at odds with the vision of private wealth that Adeimantus found so friendly at the beginning of the Book, where the happy man sequestered himself along with his belongings apart from the rest of the world and entertained foreigners and even the gods within his own house, but quite of a piece with the purified outlook of the guardians as described at the end of Book Three, which elicited that response.

Is the proverb (παροιμία, A1) meant as a truism? An exhortation? A utopian ideal? The scholiast (apud Greene, 222) says it was first used to describe the Pythagorean community in Sicily where Pythagoras requested his followers to live together without private possessions (ἀδιανέμητα κεκτῆσθαι χρήματα), for which he quotes as evidence the statement of Timaeus (FHG 1.211.77) that Pythagoras required those who wanted to study with him first to give up their private possessions. Pythagoras is also credited with related formulas of friendship such as φιλία ἰσότης and ἄλλος ἐγὼ ὁ φίλος, so that it is not clear to which proverb Cicero is referring at de leg. 1.12.34.

The proverb is included in the collections of the Paroemiographers (e.g.Zenobius 4.79). Apart from the askesis of a religious community, we have allusions to it at Eurip.Or.735 (Pylades taking the good with the bad in solidarity with his friend Orestes), and Androm.376-7 (Menelaus perverting the meaning from equal non-ownership into equal prerogative); and we have a rediscovery of its inner truth at Arist.EN 1159B31. Cf. also Ter.Ad.803-4 (nam vetus verbum hoc quidem est, communia esse amicorum inter se omnia—perhaps a borrowing from Menander); also Cic.de off.1.16.51; Dio Chrysost.3.135.

Within the Platonic corpus, at Lys.207C10 Socrates uses it playfully to assert that though friends might be rivals in age, nobility, and beauty (bodily goods) they could not be rivals in wealth (external goods) since they are friends; and all this leaves the question which of the two is more wise or just (psychic goods), which was of course Socrates’s desired topic all along. At the end of Phdrs.(279C) Phaedrus does not need to make his own prayer to Pan since his friend Socrates’s prayer will do the job for both of them. But there is more: since the prayer was a prayer to bear possessions gracefully, Hermias (ad loc.) is moved to infer that the proverb can apply to prayers as well as to external goods since we hope that our friends will have the same things we hope to have for ourselves.

To adduce the proverb presumes that a great high-mindedness, indeed, has been reached by the guards.

2058

ὀρθότατα γὰρ γένοιτ’ ἄν (A3), the superlative (like παντάπασιν), acknowledging complexity and expressing complete agreement (cf. 376C6, 396A7 (and n.), 400E4, 442D4, 444A3, 453E3, 495B7, 507B11, 511D6).

2059

πολιτεία (A4) now used a second time (cf. 412A10).

2060

κύκλος αὐξανομένη (A5): What is “circular” or “cyclic” is that A leads to B and then B leads back to A, but by a different path and without a stop to turn around (that would be oscillation). The process continues by repeating and repeats by continuing. Combine this with the “increase” that accrues and you have a spiral. Better children become better parents and better parents in turn make better better children.

2061

διὰ βραχέων εἰπεῖν (B3): I.e., in the form of a πρόσταγμα.

2062

… ἀοιδὴν μᾶλλον ἐπιφρονέουσ’ ἄνθρωποι | ἥτις ἀειδόντεσσι νεωτάτη ἀμφιπέληται, a version of Hom.Od.1.351. In response to Penelope asking the rhapsode Phemius not to sing the “Return of the Achaeans,” Telemachus suggests she not begrudge the rhapsode pleasing his audience with whatever song his mind spurs him on to sing. That newness is good, is an old saying (e.g., Pindar Ol.9.48-9). ἀμφιπέληται suggests the rhapsode’s choice is divinely inspired. The text of Homer has ἀκουόντεσσι for ἀειδόντεσσι and ἐπικλείουσ’ for ἐπιφρονέουσ’.

2063

ἐν ὅλῳ κινδυνεύοντα (C4): cf. 618B6-7 and n.5335.

2064

πολιτικῶν νόμων τῶν μεγίστων (C5). He makes a pun on the musical and political senses of νόμος that we almost get with the English term, “mode.”

2065

καὶ ἐμὲ τοίνυν θὲς τῶν πεπεισμένων (C7) almost means, “You’re not the only one who agrees with Damon!”

2066

Reading αὑτή (D3), with mss.FD and Stobaeus rather than αὐτή with mss.AM. The demonstrative is meant to specify the species—the παρανομία against the νόμοι of music—just as the indefinite pronoun τις can (Gorg.447D1 and Dodds ad loc.): Madvig’s conjecture ταύτῃ is therefore not needed. For the metaphor of formative influence, cf. παραδύντα (421E8) and ἐνδύεται (377B2); for the peculiar power of music to penetrate, cf. 401D5ff and καταχεῖν τῆς ψυχῆς διὰ τῶν ὤτων (411A6). With γοῦν Adeimantus agrees that something must certainly be done, given the peculiar power of musical innovation.

2067

οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐργάζεται (D7): Again Adeimantus agrees with Socrates through ironic understatement: compare the byplay on φαῦλος above (413C5,C6, etc.). οὐ γὰρ (ἐργάζεται) would have meant, “You’re right, it doesn’t;” οὐδέ adds an edge that could almost be misinterpreted.

2068

ἐκ δὲ δὴ τῶν συμβολαίων (D10): Tethering together the items in the list with epanalepsis makes the list a κλῖμαξ (cf. n. ad 395A4-10) that has a rising and cumulative effect. Without it, the list would devolve into a splash, which is quite a different thing.

2069

ἀσελγείᾳ (E1), being an hapax (cf. ἀσελγαίνειν, Symp.190C and Leg.879D) in hyperbaton, is climactic.

2070

Adeimantus’s list (D7-E2) begins with understatement and terminates in a global generalization. Its purpose is not to list what is to be included but to assert that there is nothing to be left out. The logical sequence is necessarily from small to large or particular to universal, and so the list may be called “anagogic” (for which compare, on larger and smaller scales, 401A1-4, 437B7-8, 510A1-3, 519B1-2 ; Charm.173B7f; Crito 47B1-2, 47C1-3; Crat.411C4-5, 423E2-5; Gorg.479A2-3, 500C5-7, 524E3-4; Leg.645D7-E2, 696B2-4, 716B4-5, 792B6, 818C4-D1, 859B7-8; Lys.215D4-7; Phdo.70D7-9, 105A6-B3; Phlb.21D9-10, 50B1-4, 54C1-4; Phdrs.278C; Polit.301A8-B1; Symp.186A3-7, 211A6-B1, 211C1-D1; Tht.157B9-C2). ἄλλος in its various uses (including οὐ μόνον … ἀλλὰ καί ...) naturally plays a role in moving things upward in such lists.

2071

εἶεν … οὕτω τοῦτ’ ἔχει; (E3): Socrates acknowledges Adeimantus’s ironic indignation by giving him (with εἶεν) a little extra room.

2072

ἐννομωτέρου εὐθὺς παιδιᾶς μεθεκτέον (E6): The reference must be to Socrates’s remark at 377A12-B9 (compare σπουδαίους ἐξ αὐτῶν ἄνδρας αὐξάνεσθαι with 377B7-9), though παιδεία is more the subject there than παιδιά. In the immediate context the more general notion of παιδεία has been replaced by παιδιά, a specific aspect of it, because of the dangerous supposition that innovation is merely a form of harmless play (D5-6). The etymological connection between παιδεία and παιδιά is an undercurrent of the whole passage, as is the semantic ambiguity of νόμος in its musical and political meanings.

2073

ὡς plus participle (E6-425A1) used to express the correct supposition and outlook in contrast with the incorrect one, expressed by the same construction above (D5-6). The shift within the ὡς construction from genitive absolute to accusative absolute is striking, and may serve as an index of how strong the rule is that the accusative is used for impersonal verbal constructions (Smyth §2076).

2074

For the selection of items embodying σωφροσύνη (B1-4) we may compare Hdt.2.80, X.Mem.2.3.16, and Charmides’s compact definition of σωφροσύνη at Charm.159B2-6.

2075

αὐτά (B7) envisions isolating each of the behaviors for separate legislation. The form and content of the foregoing sample of behaviors (B1-4) already suggests how tedious and complicated such legislation would be. A comparison of the list with the desiderata of the ridiculously conservative Just Logos in Aristophanes’s Clouds (961-1023) likewise shows how old-fashioned this list might sound. Socrates’s demurral to legislate such “right conduct” would probably offend his more reactionary readers, just as much as his insistence on its importance would offend his more liberal ones.

2076

Taking γίγνεται (B7) to mean what it meant in 414C5 and 6, where γεγονός is the opposite of καινόν.

2077

λόγῳ τε καὶ γράμμασιν (B8): γράμμασιν corrects λόγῳ. Socrates seems to be familiar with the way legislators sometimes think they have accomplished something once they get the wording just right.

2078

ὁρμήσῃ (C1) goes back to 424A4.

2079

Reading ὄν (C2), with AD and with F as emended, which makes τὸ ὅμοιον ὄν the predicate of παρακαλεῖ. It sounds like a proverb but the versions of the proverb ὅμοιος ὁμοίῳ recorded by the paroemiographers lack παρακαλεῖν (cf. PG 1.350 [=GC1.15 and notes], and PG 2.559 [=Ap.12.68 and notes]).

2080

τάδε τὰ ἀγοραῖα (C10): In his account of the effects of innovation Adeimantus had similarly moved from ἤθη and ἐπιτήδεια to συμβόλαια (424D8-10).

2081

χειροτεχνικῶν περὶ συμβολαίων (D1): the prolepsis begins a disorderly presentation which suggests that the field of business is more complex than the naive and eager legislator realizes.

2082

δικῶν λήξεως καὶ δικαστῶν καταστάσεως (D2-3). The etymological parallelism and the homoioteleuton (reading λήξεως with M as the lectio difficilior) suggest a parallelism in meaning that is not there, and thus satirize the inanity of bureaucratese. Socrates here moves from the realm of private συμβόλαια to the public realm of νόμος and πολιτεία as Adeimantus had (cf. 424D10-E1).

2083

τελῶν τινες ἢ πράξεως ἢ θέσεις (D3), τινες being as awkwardly proleptic as χεριτεχνικῶν was above.

2084

κατ’ ἀγορὰς ἢ λιμένας (D4): The plurals are generic (cf. πολιτείας, 424E1).

2085

ἀνδράσι (D7) again used for the types we “identify” with (361B6 and n.753).

2086

εὑρήσουσιν (E2), re-applying the point made by ἐξευρίσκουσιν at 425A9.

2087

τῶν νόμων (E4): Again the play on the musical and legal meanings of νόμος (cf. 424C5).

2088

πολλά (E5): an instructive instance of πολλά implying futility (a usage is not noted in LSJ s.v.) as in the famous maxim of Solon, γηράσκω δ’ αἰεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος, and the proverb οὐ πολλὰ ἀλλὰ πολύ. Compare the derogatory use of πολλά (473D4, 479D3, 489D10, 576C3-4 and n.4373, 604A6-7), and the idiomatic use of οἱ πολλοί.

2089

ἐπανορθούμενοι (E6): The idea is repeated from A5 (ἐπανορθοῦσα) but the voice has changed to the middle of the busybody.

2090

χαριέντως διατελοῦσιν (426A1): English lacks a single etymon that joins the ludicrous (χαριέντως here) and the graceful (χαρίεν and χάριν, 426B3-4). “Charming” (D.-V., Shorey) gets the etymon but misses the joke; “rich” produces something of a joke at the expense of introducing a new etymon. The expression is used similarly at 602A11.

2091

τὸ τῷ εὖ λέγοντι χαλεπαίνειν οὐκ ἔχει χάριν (B3-4): The meter suggests that Adeimantus is quoting a line of wisdom from tragedy.

2092

οὐ πάνυ χαρίεν (B3): Socrates’s lighthearted attitude (τόδε αὐτῶν οὐ χαρίεν, A6) elicits a puritanical response from Adeimantus. As before (424E3) Socrates makes room for it, but this time he teases it out (οὐκ ἐπαινέτης [B5-9], οὐκ ἄγασαι [D2] and οὐ συγγιγνώσκεις [D7]) in order to give it a proper response (E4ff).

2093

κατάστασιν (C1): This time English has a pun (regime, regimen) lacking in the Greek (κατάστασις compared with διαίτης, 425E10).

2094

σφᾶς (C3) reflexive (along with σφετέρας and σφῶν below, and the passive [in sense] τιμήσεται) is a joke. The city is telling its citizens what it wants them to think it thinks, and it is impressed by its own argument. In the end the elevation of the flatterer to high repute is depicted as a discovery or sudden realization (ἄρα, C5) rather than the self-fulfilling prophecy that it is.

2095

αὖ (D1), suggesting re-evaluation from a different vantage point.

2096

ὑπὸ τῶν πολλῶν (D5-6): Adeimantus strikes the first note of supercilious impatience with the majority.

2097

ἀνδράσι (D7), again evoking fellow-feeling (n.2085). Socrates perhaps reminds the stern Adeimantus of the lenient position he took (at 366C3-D3) toward those who could know no better.

2098

ἑτέρων τοιούτων (D8-E1) masses them with a broad brush into a single category over against him. For derogatory ἑτέρων cf.379D7 and n.1224.

2099

αὖ (E3), with all mss., responding relentlessly to αὖ at D1.

2100

χαριέστατοι (E4): Socrates continues with the χάρις terminology.

2101

ἐπανορθοῦντες (E6) again begs the question how the principle of improvement is found once it has been lost: cf. 425E6 and A6.

2102

νόμων πέρι καὶ πολιτείας (427A2-3): For the collocution cf. 424E1.

2103

The prudential skepticism about perfectibility alongside a reliance on the effortless custody of habit puts Socrates in the same camp as Edmund Burke, a place Plato and his Socrates hardly belong as the political “idealists” they are made out to be. Cf. also 383C4-5, 493D5, 500D1, and 501C1.

2104

καὶ ἐγὼ εἶπον (B2): Emphatic, effecting transition (cf. n.1211).

2105

Hartman’s γε (B3) for the τε of all mss. is an unneeded improvement, as are his αἱ at B6 and his τήν at B9.

2106

θεραπεῖαι (B7): Not an uncommon metaphor for men’s treatment of god (443A9; Leg.716D7, 930E5), by dint of narrowing of its meaning from ἐπιμέλεια to ὑπηρεσία (Euthyph.13AD). It re-appears with the gods here so as to stress by contrast the fatuity of catering to the ignorance of the polis (of which it was used above, 426C3 and D1), as well as to underline the deferential attitude Socrates suggests toward the gods in contrast to the ἀνδρεία and εὐχέρεια with which that catering was delivered to the citizenry (D2-3).

2107

Reading τε (B7) from Ven.184 (om.AFDM). It conspires with αὖ to indicate that a second plurality is being added to the first, a very common use of αὖ that resembles our use of the semicolon as a stronger comma (cf. 373C3, 374E1, 410D1-2 [separating chiastic pairs], 437B7-8, 545C2-4 [separating an item done with a pair from subsequent items done with one word only, again like our semicolon], 585B13-C1, and cf. n.5132). The list (B6-8) is another congeries of items adduced only to be dismissed, for the sake of closure: cf. 423E6-424A2 and n.2056, 412B3-4 and n.1839.

2108

ἐὰν νοῦν ἔχωμεν (C1): He dismisses the ἀγύρται καὶ μάντεις that had scandalized Adeimantus by soliciting the rich to pay them to “fix” things with the gods (364B5-C5, 365E1-366A4).

2109

σοι (C6): Whether it is a dative of agent with ᾠκισμένη or an ethical dative of theoretical involvement (cf. σοι at 423A6 and n.2035) does not affect the meaning; but the fact that it is singular is striking: why say Adeimantus owns the result and not “we”? This should not go unnoticed: cf. 389A7-B1 and n.1369.

2110

The ἐάν construction (D3) echoes the modality of Glaucon’s initial request that Socrates help, in Book Two (358B1 and n.689).

2111

ἴδωμεν (D3): Socrates has postponed the first plural to this position (compare σοι C6), after suggesting Adeimantus get some help from his brother and Polemarchus and the others (D2-3). He imagines that he is receding from the center of the conversation, as he had at the beginning of Book Two (λόγου ἀπηλλάχθαι, 357A1).

2112

His statement of the primary question (D4-7) is very close to the challenge Adeimantus had put to him at 366E6-7, 367B2-6, and 367E1-5, with the exception of ποῦ (D4), which refers to the method they had agreed upon to answer that challenge, namely to build a city and look for justice “in” it (ἐν μείζονι, 368E7; cf. ποῦ, 371E12). On such accuracy of restatement cf. n.359.

2113

οὐδὲν λέγεις (D8): Last time, this conversational gesture was given to Glaucon’s brother (362E1), when he interrupted Socrates's answer to Glaucon's speech at the beginning of Book Two with a supplementary speech of his own. What moves Glaucon to interrupt is the pairing of the second person singular and the first plural, which leads him to infer that Socrates thinks he is done!

2114

ὑπέσχου ζητήσειν ὡς οὐχ ὅσιόν σοι ὄν … (D8-E2), quoting Socrates back to himself from 368B7-C2. Glaucon's interruption saves the logos.

2115

ἐλπίζω (E6). ἐλπίς, as a δόξα τῶν μελλόντων (Leg.644C10 and Stallb. ad loc.) and as a πάθημα τῆς ψυχῆς (Tim.69D1-6 and cf.Leg.864B3-7), is as much a cognitive weakness as a strength (cf. 383B6 and n.1321). In the present case Socrates’s hunch will at least serve as a vehicle to reaching the solution. The artifice of looking at larger letters that he proposed at a similar moment before (368C7-D7) was no more methodologically sound or sophisticated than the current proposal.

2116

δῆλον ὅτι σοφή τ’ ἐστὶ καὶ ἀνδρεία καὶ σώφρων καὶ δικαία (E10-11): Such a strong reliance on the traditional quadripartition of good (on which cf. 331A4 and n.101) is unwarranted (at least he says δῆλον rather than ἀνάγκη), but in the end it will lead to a tremendous heuristic success.

2117

ἐν (E13) Though he hypothesizes that the one has been found “in” the thing (427E13, cf. 428A3), Socrates says not that the others will be in the remaining area but that the others will be the remainder (427E14, cf. 428A6). He courts an ambiguity that is (1) fatal to the logic of the method (since it is only by assuming that the different aspects of the polis occupy different areas that he can expect the find the unfound in the remainder), but (2) crucial to the solution (since it turns out to be the nature of justice that it is everywhere in the city).

2118

The running through of cases (428B10-C10) is orderly but not slavishly so, according to the usual dialectical manner. Cf. nn.154 and 155.

2119

ἐν τῇ ἄρτι ὑφ’ ἡμῶν οἰκισθείσῃ πόλει παρά τισι τῶν πολιτῶν (C11-12) The knowledge is “in” the city (in the sense required by the argument, 427E13) by virtue of being at the disposal of (παρά) some of her citizens.

2120

ἔν τισι (D5) now replaces παρά τισι: the knowledge is in the city by being in some portion of her citizens.

2121

With τῷ ὄντι (D7) Glaucon echoes the phrasing Socrates used at the beginning of the argument (B3), and by reversing the order (εὔβουλος / σοφή) he acknowledges its completion with a chiasm. To call a city σοφή strains diction but to call it εὔβουλος does not. τῷ ὄντι is added to σοφή because the phrase is accurate despite its awkwardness.

2122

ἔθνει (E7): cf. 420B7 for the term.

2123

προιστάναι (E8) is a new term.

2124

μέν (429A5).

2125

οὐδ’ ἂν εἷς (B4): The tmesis is not emphatic, but yields to the tendency of ἄν to come second.

2126

τὴν περὶ τῶν δεινῶν δόξαν (B8-C1): The “sense” in question will need, and will be given, further support later (E7-430B5). δόξα (C1) cannot be purely approbative in Plato. It is exactly the “knowledge of sorts” (τοιαῦτα) for which it cannot be relied upon, and it is characteristic of it that it knows what it knows only by hearsay (παρήγγελεν, C2).

2127

ταῦτα .. καὶ τοιαῦτα (C1), answered by ἅ τε καὶ οἷα. The doublet adds, to the specific items (ταῦτα) the law enjoins it to guard against, a general sense of what sort of things (τοιαῦτα) these are. Cf. ταῦτά τε λεκτέον καὶ οἷα, 386A6-7.

2128

αὐτά (C1): Its antecedent is τῶν δεινῶν. The expression is proleptic and front-loaded, causing Glaucon to ask for a restatement (cf. n.1285).

2129

In his restatement (C5-8) Socrates recasts what he had said above into the logical order of dihaeresis or definition: σωτηρία (C5-6), τῆς δόξης (C7-8), διὰ πάντος (C8-D1).

2130

Reading αὐτήν (C9), with all mss. and Stob.

2131

καὶ ἔκπλυτα καὶ γελοῖα (E6): Socrates only needs the positive but Glaucon supplies the contrapositive as corroboration. It is characteristic of Socrates’s dialectic as of all conversation to stress opposition and “exclude the middle” in this way.

2132

ἐργάζεσθαι (E7), present representing the imperfect.

2133

Referring to the selection κατὰ φύσιν, 374E6-6C6 (n.b., ἐκλέξασθαι, 374E7). Calling them στρατιῶται takes us back to the discovery of a need for an army (373E2-4E3).

2134

ὅτε ἐξελεγόμεθα (E8): referring to 376E2-412B7 with the usual imperfect of citation.

2135

γίγνοιτο (430A3), present.

2136

ἐκπλύναι (A5) an aorist optative (not infinitive, as the accent indicates) parallel to γίγνοιτο. The present represents the process and the aorist the event.

2137

ἐκπλύναι / ἐκκλύζειν (A5-6): An almost-rhyme (cf. 375A2-3 and n.1114). The aorist ἐκπλύναι stands in contrast to the present γίγνοιτο, while the present ἐκκλύζειν denotes tendency or capacity. The construction (A6-B2) is binary of the distributive kind (n.774), and the first limbs are specific while the second generalize: a ~ b : : A ~ B. The metaphorical ῥύμματα are presented as ἡδονή and then as λύπη τε καὶ φόβος καὶ ἐπιθυμία; the actual ῥύμματα (the term is generic) are presented as the Chalestrian and the κονία and then πᾶν ἄλλο ῥύμμα.

2138

δοκεῖς γάρ (B6): Glaucon infers Socrates's attitude from his remarks at 429C1-2, spelled out at 429C7-8 and continued just above (B3).

2139

ἐκείνου (C6) refers to justice as opposed to bravery (τοῦτο, C5, also neuter).

2140

πραγματεύεσθαι (D4) shows some impatience, even intemperance. Moreover, πολυπραγμονεῖν will be integral to the definition of justice (433A8). So we have “self-instantiation” (335E7 and n.253).

2141

With πρότερον (D7) he refers back to the alternative envisioned at 428A3-4, ὁπότε πρῶτον ἐκεῖνο ἔγνωμεν, ἱκανῶς ἂν εἶχεν ἡμῖν.

2142

εἰ μὴ ἀδικῶ (E1): Though idiomatic (“urbana locutio quae pro fortiore ponitur affirmatione,” Ast Lex.s.v. ἀδικέω: cf. 608D7; Charm.156A6; Menex.236B7; and cf. δικαίως at 353D6), the expression continues the self-instantiation (cf. 612D2, E1). We can and should expect to see why.

2143

ὥς γε ἐντεῦθεν ἰδεῖν (E4): Socrates confesses it is his own idea (for other formulas for introducing his own guess cf. 368C7, 427E6, 428A11).

2144

ἡδονῶν τινων καὶ ἐπιθυμιῶν ἐγκράτεια (E6-7): i.e., ἐγκράτειά τις (ἡδονῶν καὶ ἐπιθυμιῶν, making ἐγκράτεια parallel with κόσμος τις. The tendency for the enclitic to be placed early is strong enough to spoil the syntactical parallelism. Cf. 380D8 and n.1238.

2145

ἐγκράτεια ὥς φασι, κρείττω δή (E7), placing comma after ὥς φασι rather than before, and reading (epexegetical) λέγοντες (E8) with mss.FM and Shorey and Chambry rather than Richards’s ἀποφαίνοντες with Burnet (cf. Slings). Socrates then interrupts himself even further, to allude to other such expressions, and leads himself into anacoluthon.

2146

ἴχνη (E9), with Shorey, suggests the hunt.

2147

αὐτῷ τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ (431A4).

2148

ὑπὸ τροφῆς κακῆς ἤ τινος ὁμιλίας (A7): Placing τινος after ἤ creates a non-distributive binary construction (n.2410): τινος and κακῆς both go with both τροφῆς and ὁμιλίας.

2149

Reverse καί (B7): cf. 343C6 and n.440: Just above it was ἥττω ἑαυτοῦ καὶ ἀκόλαστον (B1-2), but this time the warrant for the attribute is placed second instead of first.

2150

καὶ μὴν καί … γε (B9), introducing a minor premise. The empirical fact that the wide spectrum of pleasures is visible in the large majority or persons and the controlled ones in only a few, will be seen to correspond to the larger inferior part of our city and smaller superior part.

2151

ἐπιθυμίας καὶ ἡδονάς τε καὶ λύπας (B9-C1), a triad of the form A/B/~B (cf. nn.2585 and 2544), with τε corroborating the closer relation between the last two items. Contrast the use of τε at 528A4-5 (n.3496).

2152

ἐν παισὶ μάλιστα … καὶ γυναιξὶ καὶ οἰκέταις καὶ τῶν ἐλευθέρων λεγομένων ἐν τοῖς πολλοῖς τε καὶ φαύλοις (C1-3). The list starts with the obvious case and moves toward less obvious ones until it reaches objects that should not be on the list except for the fact that they are not what they are cracked up to be (λεγομένων). The criterion of the list is revealed, as usual, in the closing item, and by the very common device of a quantitative adjective (πάντες or πολλοί) with a specifying adjective (πάντα τὰ X), or relative clause (πάντα ὅσα X) or a defining partitive genitive (πολλοί τῶν X). What is noteworthy here is that the criterion, slavishness, is given per contrarium. It is the contrary of autonomy (ἐλευθερία), the failure of displaying which requires the inclusion after all of those who have it only by reputation.

For a sample of lists in which as here the generic (or aggregative or climactic) criterion is introduced through a periphrasis including quantitative noun plus a defining adjective or noun cf. 437B7-8 (ὅλως), 444B7-8, 493D4 (ἄλλην), 500D7-8, 536D5-6, 549C4-5 (satirical genus), 585B13-C1; Gorg.469E4-6, 477C3-4 (συλλήβδην), 508D7-E4 (συλλήβδην); Leg.678C9-D1, 694E6-7(πολλά), 716D6-7, 743D2-4 (πολύν), 777E2-4, 810E7-8, 817C4-5 (aggregate, not genus), 818C4-5 (aggregate), 832C5-7 (climactic), 859B7-8 (συμπάντων), 881E2-3 (aggregate), 948A2, 957E2-3 (συλλήβδην), 967C4-5 (πολλά); Phdo.70D7-9 (συλλήβδην); Phlb.14D1-3 (μυρία), 39E10-11 (πάντως), E13 (παντάπασι), 67B1-2; Polit.258D8-9, 272A3-4 (πολλῆς), 288D8, 289B4-5 (and Stallb.ad loc.), 294E5-6; Prot.324E3-5A2 (συλλήβδην); Symp.207D8-E3 (aggregate); Thg.124B5-7 (single ἁπάντων having generalizing force with δημιουργῶν and exhaustive force with ἰδιωτῶν); Tht.155E5-6, Tim. 82A8-B2; plus relative clause cf. Leg.897A1-4, 949A2-5; Polit.280C1-2, 284E6-7, 288D7-8; plus partitive genitive, as here, cf. Rep.552D3-6.

πάντα (vel sim.) with a co-ordinate terminal item has the force of exhausting the supply of the last item and so effects closure, as at 553B3-5, 596C7-8, 606D1-2; Gorg.484D2-7 (συλλήβδην); H.Maj.292D1-3; Leg.779D2-5, 792B6, 830C9-D1 (ὅλος), 899B3-4 (πασῶν); Lys.215D4-7; Phlb.21D9-10; Polit.283C11-D1 (cf.C3), 290B1-3 (πάνδεινοι),293A3-4, 299D3-E4 (seven times!); Soph.222C5-7. πάντα (vel sim., esp. μυρία) with a transparent generalizing term like τὰ τοιαῦτα, τὰ ἄλλα, τὰ συγγενῆ, etc., effects an essentially dismissive closure, as at 353A1-2 (πολλά); Leg.630E7 (μυρία), 885D5-7 (μυριάκις μυρίοι); Meno 81C6-7 (cf. Stallb.ad loc.); Phdo.70E1-4 (μυρία), 98D7-E1 (μυρία); Phdrs.246D8-E1; Phlb.11B7-8, 19D4-5, 26B5-7, 40E2-3.

Elaborations of the norm include Leg.897A1-4 (πάσαις ὅσαι τούτων συγγενεῖς ἢ πρωτουργοὶ κινήσεις) and Leg.889D3-4; Polit.285D4-5, 260D11-E2, which all have πάντα with both transparent term and generic term. Notable also is the use of exhaustive πάντα with the penultimate term and generalizing πάντα with the last one as at Charm.173B7-8, Phlb.54C1-4; Polit.307A8-B1). Rep.510A5-6 does the converse.

As to the content of the list, the way the people are split up (reading H.Wolf’s brilliant conjecture παισί against all mss. and Stob.: cf.494B5), compare Gorg.511E1-3 (on χρήματα cf. Dodds ad loc.); Leg.665D2-3, 817C4-5, 838D7-8; Meno 71E1-2A1; and the redo of this list at Rep.433D2-4.

2153

ἁπλάς τε καὶ μετρίας (C5) is in weak chiasm with πολλὰς καὶ παντοδαπάς (B9).

2154

μετὰ νοῦ τε καὶ ὀρθῆς δόξης (C5-6). These guideposts one follows along the way (n.b. μετά: cf. 537D6-7), though important, serve as foil for λογισμός, which here represents σωφροσύνη, the new item after σοφία (~ νοῦς) and ἀνδρεία (~ ὀρθὴ δόξα), nicely rendered “consideration” by Shorey.

2155

ὀλίγοις τε … καὶ τοῖς βέλτιστα ... (C6-7), repeats the pairing (τε καί) of quality and quality from πολλοῖς τε καὶ φαύλοις (C3), again in chiasm.

2156

ὑπό τε τῶν ἐπιθυμιῶν καὶ τῆς φρονήσεως (D1): The ἐπιθυμία is close to θυμός in the soldiers, while φρόνησις is in our rulers.

2157

ἄρα (D4): The inference is not fully prepared but receives support from three considerations. (1) The myth of the metals includes, in its being accepted, both that the rulers will acquiesce in ruling and that the workers will acquiesce in pursuing their trade. (2) The notion of ἐγκράτεια lately adduced (A6) according to which the lower part is contained, not tyrannized, by the higher, implies that the man who is stronger than himself is at peace within. (3) The statement is only comparative: in other states it is not the better that rule and therefore it is less reasonable that the inferior should acquiesce; with ours, withal, there is reason to acquiesce.

2158

ὡμοίωται (E8), the perfect used of what is fundamentally true (cf.597D8 and n.4782).

2159

ἀνδρεία / σοφία … σοφήν / ἀνδρείαν (431E10-432A1): Chiasm of cause and effect (cf. n.1693).

2160

τέταται (A3) suggesting a tension linking parts that might glide apart. The middle voice of the verb expresses a paradox: the subject stretches and is stretched, hence “spanning” like the German Spannung.

2161

διὰ πασῶν … τούς τε ἀσθενεστάτους … καὶ τοὺς ἰσχυροτάτους καὶ τοὺς μέσους (A3-4), the list (with the musical sense of διὰ πασῶν) imitating the major triad (do=1, so=5, mi=3).

2162

εἰ μὲν βούλει φρονήσει, εἰ δὲ βούλει ἰσχύι, εἰ δέ, καὶ πλήθει ἢ χρήμασιν ἢ ἄλλῳ ὁτῳοῦν τῶν τοιούτων (A4-6) The division by μέν, δέ, δέ emphasizes the categorical tripartition of goods into psychic (φρονήσει), bodily (ἰσχύι) and external (πλήθει ἢ χρήμασιν). By a characteristic form the first two types are represented by single examples while the last is more elaborately instantiated and then the elaboration is closed with dismissive ἢ ἄλλῳ ὁτῳοῦν τῶν τοιούτων. For πλῆθος as an external good playing the role elsewhere played by “friends” or “family,” cf.434B1.

2163

δεῖ (A8) of moral action in contrast with the inferiority and superiority that is fixed by nature.

2164

τὰ μὲν τρία (B2): In each case a conventional notion of the virtue has guided our searching for a version of itself in the city, and in each case the city has revealed something related to the conventional notion but also radically different. That is, the new ideas stand in dialectical tension with the old. σοφία, in order to be an attribute of the city as a whole, has to be redefined as wisdom about the ends of all the specialist means; bravery has to be distinguished from the soldier’s animal toughness or insensitivity to fear, which is only a small part of it (pleasure being the greater threat, as the Athenian explains to the old Cretan and Lacedaimonian at the beginning of the Laws); and temperance is found not to be the triumphant eradication of lesser by greater urges but a balance between them.

2165

ἐάν πως (C2), the wishful construction with ἐάν we saw at 358B1 and 427D3-4 (cf. n.689).

2166

εὐξάμενος (C5), the hopeful attitude following up the ἐάν πως construction. Even if Glaucon cannot do it he can ask the gods for help at the outset, as we all must.

2167

γοῦν (C8), interpreting his own metaphor.

2168

κυλινδεῖσθαι (D8), of words and therefore ideas, as at Phdrs.275E1; Ar.V.492, explained below with καὶ λέγοντες αὐτὸ καὶ ἀκούοντες (E5).

2169

λέγοντες αὐτὸ καὶ ἀκούοντες (E5-6), characterizing the process of dialogue, the one speaking and the other listening: cf. n.708. αὐτό means the thing itself (though we did not recognize it as such: so also D8 and E7).

2170

ἄκουε εἴ τι ἄρα λέγω (433A1) in accordance with the expression λέγοντες αὐτὸ καὶ ἀκούοντες above, Socrates announces the beginning of a dialectical search. On such preparatory byplay cf. n.3418.

2171

τὸ τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν καὶ μὴ πολυπραγμονεῖν (A8-9): The sense that justice is not being meddlesome is the initial doxic definition that guides the search (cf. n.2164 ad 432B2), a method that is, strictly, circular. The two perfects (ἀκηκόαμεν καὶ αὐτοὶ πολλάκις εἰρήκαμεν, B1), suggest that all that talk is “on record” and took place before the today’s dialogue, and also, in restating the pair ἀκούειν / λέγειν, credential these ideas as having been established in conversation. The explanation and association of the idea of minding one’s business with a denial of the converse, of being a busy-body (πολυπραγμονεῖν), recalls the moment at the beginning of the city’s construction where a different concept of τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν was aired (369E2-370A4, n.b. ἀμελήσαντα, 369E6) although a similar expression was used in connection with it: καὶ μὴ ἀλλήλοις κοινωνοῦντα πράγματα ἔχειν ἀλλ’ αὐτὸν δι’ αὑτὸν τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν, 370A3-4).

Somehow πράγματα ἔχειν is unattractive while πολυπραγμονεῖν is desirable. The paradox is analogous to the paradox Adeimantus brought up at the beginning of Book Four, that the rulers deserved more. The underlying issue of autonomy and its paltry substitute and pis aller, power over others, returns.

2172

ἐγγενέσθαι (B9), something of a correction or refinement of the ἐνεῖναι (being present) of the original conception (427E13; 428A11; 429A8; 431B5, C9, E2; 432A1,B2). The presence of the other three items that we discovered in the city, is now seen as a result of their being engendered by the prior presence of the fourth.

2173

καίτοι ἔφαμεν (C1): Corresponding to the development of ἐνεῖναι into ἐγγενέσθαι, there is a change or development in the meaning of ὑπολείπειν, from the complement of the other virtues into their ὑπόλοιπον (B7), the thing they lack—their sine qua non. καίτοι ἔφαμεν brings back the complementary sense (ὑπολειφθέν, C1), and by dint of identifying the ὑπόλοιπον with the ὑπολειφθέν, justice appears to be the virtue whose essence it is to make all the others possible. The logical form is: A is C and B is C therefore A is B, invalid as a syllogism. Rather than draw the invalid inference Socrates goes on to the next argument (C4-E2).

2174

ἀνάγκη (C3), of logical truth as usual, referring to the quadripartition of virtue posited above. Glaucon says yes to the whole by saying yes to the last, as often (cf. n.199 ad 333D9).

2175

The engendered virtues are rehearsed (C6-D1) in the order opposite to their discovery according to the chiasm of before and after (cf.327B1 and n.14). ὁμοδοξία (C6) is decorative variatio for ὁμόνοια, the essence of σωφροσύνη (432A7). The restatement of bravery (as σωτηρία) is linked to it by a chiasmus (τῶν ἀρχόντων τε καὶ ἀρχομένων and περὶ δεινῶν τε καὶ μὴ … ἐννόμου being the middle terms, the second functioning as an extensive prolepsis); and chiasm is employed again to introduce wisdom (ἐν τοῖς στρατώταις and ἐν τοῖς ἄρχουσι being the middle terms) with the restatement of wisdom being done with a bold hendiadys (φρόνησίς τε καὶ φυλακή). After this regal vanguard arrives the fourth, the virtue underlying them all, prepared for by a proleptic demonstrative followed by an introduction restating the leading construction (μάλιστα ἀγαθήν … ποιεῖ ~ μάλιστα ἀγαθὴν ἀπεργάζεσθαι) and then a broad and open-textured list that assembles willy-nilly all the ingredient members of the citizenry that had been brought up in connection with the other virtues. The high rhetoric celebrates the progress they have made in their understanding, but in particular praises justice as the sine qua non.

2176

καὶ ἐν παιδὶ καὶ ἐν γυναικὶ καὶ δούλῳ καὶ ἐλευθέρῳ καὶ δημιουργῷ καὶ ἄρχοντι καὶ ἀρχομένῳ (D2-3), a list of “everybody.” Repetition of καί is triumphant but tedious repetition of ἐν is avoided. The use of the singular (we may style them “representative”) is striking and rare. Geddes noted how Plato can shift to the singular “as the reasoning becomes more vivid” (ad Phdo.62D3-5) but the singular here is thematic rather than logical or rhetorical, stressing the presence of justice in the individual (n.b. εἷς, D4) rather than the type.

As to its contents, the first four elements, including their configuration into pairs, recall the list of persons prone to intemperate behavior (431C1-3), and its last two recall the pair of parties whose agreement as to who should rule was the embodiment of temperance in the city (431E5). Wisdom and bravery each belonged to a special group. The point of the present sentence is to show that the fourth, justice, belongs to each person in the city as maintaining his own identity. Of this behavior the δημιουργός had up until now been our paradigm, and this is why he has a place in the list. Richards’s addition of γεωργῷ καὶ before δημιουρῷ makes a pair to go with the other pairs but thereby dilutes the meaning.

2177

τό γε τούτοις ἐνάμιλλον (D11), with γε drawing a second application out of ἐνάμίλλον (cf. D7): As in the ὑπόλοιπον / ὑπολειφθέν argument above (B7-C2), A (ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν) is C (ἐνάμιλλον) and B (δικαιοσύνη) is C (ἐνάμιλλον), suggesting that A is B; and again Socrates omits to draw the invalid conclusion, but instead moves on to give a third argument or approach (E3ff, καὶ τῇδε).

2178

τὰς δίκας δικάζειν (E4). The figura etymologica stresses δίκη.

2179

ταύτῃ ἄρα πῃ (E12): The “second person” demonstrative replaces the first person (τῇδε, E3), once Glaucon has accepted the idea from Socrates.

2180

ὁμολογοῖτο (434A1) a claim for a consistency that is less than apodictic.

2181

The two hendiadyses οἰκείου τε καὶ ἑαυτοῦ and the rhyming ἕξις τε καὶ πρᾶξις (E12-434A1) constitute a distributive binary construction (the first going with the first and the second the second: cf. n.774) that feigns to ignore and tries to obfuscate an equivocation on τὰ ἑαυτοῦ (one’s possessions and one’s assigned task), an equivocation that in all strictness renders the argument invalid.

2182

τιμάς (A5), perhaps including a reference to their “pay-scale.”

2183

χρηματιστής (A9), a new way of characterizing the “rest of the city,” suggesting their interests rather than their contributions, and setting up ἐπαιρόμενος and the list at B1-2.

2184

ἐπαιρόμενος (B1) a term we met at the end of Bk.3 (416D1) describing the ominous arousal to reach beyond one’s station, from which we sought to exempt the guards. Cf. also its ominous role at 608B6.

2185

ἢ πλούτῳ ἢ πλήθει ἢ ἰσχύι ἢ ἄλλῳ τῳ τοιούτῳ (B1-2): The list of material or external goods is brought forward from 432A5-6 (cf. n.2162).

2186

ὄλεθρον (B7): The greater harm to the state brought about by the craftsmen becoming guards rather than merely switching crafts (434A3-B2), already noted in Socrates’s response to Adeimantus’s objection that the guards should receive something special for their trouble (421A3-B3), is now brought forward and expanded (B3-B6) to provide an argument for justice.

2187

πολυπραγμοσύνη (B7) in any field is deleterious to the field but such shifting among the roles that constitute the city is particularly damaging to the city (ὄλεθρον, B7). In the city therefore (ἄρα, B9) it is particularly true to say that πολυπραγμοσύνη (which tentatively and doxically = ἀδικία as the opposite of ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν) is κακουργία (κακουργία = κακὰ ἐργάζεσθαι) but κακουργία is also a synonym for ἀδικία (C4-5). That is, A (πολυπραγμοσύνη) is B (κακουργία), and B (κακουργία) is C (ἀδικία) so that A is C, laying the grounds for the (again invalid) inference that ~A is ~C.

2188

οἰκειοπραγία (C8) a coinage by, and hapax in, Plato, made up out of οἰκεῖος as used at 433E12, and invented for the immediate dialectical context to fill in as the contrary of “busy-bodiness” (πολυπραγμονεῖν and πολυπραγμοσύνη), i.e., the ~A of the note above.

2189

εἰς ἕνα ἕκαστον τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἰὸν τὸ εἶδος τοῦτο (D3): The conception of the εἶδος moving into each and any individual man is striking, and it is quite unrelated to the notion of a man going into an εἶδος that we saw just above (εἰς τὸ τοῦ πολεμικοῦ εἶδος ἐπιχείρῃ ἰέναι, B2). ἰόν proposes that we will “move,” in thought, the political image of justice into the individual man.

2190

καὶ ἐκεῖ δικαιοσύνην εἶναι (D4): The circularity of the method proposed finally becomes explicit. Even in the original formulation (368D1-369A3) we had to know what were looking for in order to tell whether the letters spelled it, regardless how large they were; but now for the first time Socrates asserts that the application to the small case will need to pass muster there as well. It never was justice in itself, after all, that we had sought, but justice in man.

2191

τότε (D5): Just as νῦν can refer to the present as the “real” that disproves the irreal conditional (νῦν δέ = “but the fact is”), so τότε here refers to a remote time as the time in which an entailment of irreal condition might be realized (“in that case”).

2192

ἐκεῖ (D7). There is no need to supply ἤ, with Burnet. The reference of ἐκεῖ needs not be the same as it was just above (D4): the two places are interchangeably “there” and “here” to each other.

2193

ῥᾷον ἂν … κατιδεῖν (D8): The optical conceit, that virtue will be easier to see in a large thing (368C7-D7), always presumed that we would be near enough this large thing that it would not be too small to see, yet this larger object of contemplation is here said to be ἐκεῖ, “there.” Socrates now says that the investigation has produced what it could, for better or worse. As witnesses to the process (in fact it did not happen but was conceived only for our contemplation) we ourselves can say that what has determined its course more than anything else is the interventions of Glaucon and Adeimantus, and moreover that they have intervened to point out a mote (κάρφος) they saw in that polis over there because of the log (δοκός) in their own eyes.

Jesus’s parable (Matt.7.3, Luke 6.41) is miraculously succinct. He calls the mote in my eye a “log” because it is close to my eye—indeed “in” it, no more nor less than my brother’s mote is “in” his. His parable leaves it to me to realize that I can see that tiny mote far off in my brother’s eye, if it is truly there in the first place, only because I know the mote in mine so well. He leaves it to me to confess that his mote was always too small for me really to see, let alone how much my own ability to see it should be entirely disabled by the mote in my eye that is so large. That is, he leaves me to confess what is almost unbearable to confess, that I project the mote I never saw, to be there in my brother’s eye rather than my own. Mutatis mutandis, Socrates’s over-there polis has been a neutral medium in which the theorization of virtue could be carried out safely, one step removed from my anxieties, that fragile comic mechanism in me that somehow reconciles my pride with my self-doubt. Have I been prepared to receive the result, now that we are on the verge of bringing the point home to the individual soul, i.e. me? Are Adeimantus and Glaucon ready for it?

2194

ἐπαναφέρωμεν (E3), replacing the impersonal concept of ἰέναι (ἰόν, D3). ὁμολογῆται (E4), repeated from there, may be spelled out by supplying ταὐτὸν εἶναι or δικαιοσύνην εἶναι.

2195

ἐμφαίνηται (E8): dialectical φαίνεσθαι again.

2196

The method (E3-435A3) is revisable and the revision is slapdash. Curiously, the technique of adjusting both embodiments of justice to save the analogy—to apply personal aspects of the virtues to the city and vice-versa—is just what he has already been doing throughout the search for the virtues in the city that he has just completed. Socrates comes very close to admitting the method does not matter after all. Moreover, it is not yet clear what he means by confirming a result among ourselves once it has become obvious (A2-3).

2197

καθ’ ὅδον τε λέγεις (A4) thanks Socrates for making their place in the program clear step-by-step; he is not asserting that the program is methodologically sound.

2198

μεῖζόν τε καὶ ἔλαττον (A5-6): Smallness and largeness were the crucial differences between city and man in the original guess that justice was the same in each (368E).

2199

φύσεων (B5) stretches the more abstract term, εἶδος (B2) toward the realm of the natural and alive, which will then be further stretched (or specified) below (B7: cf. n.2202).

2200

εἴδη (C1) proffered as analogous to γένη as used at B5.

2201

ἐν τῇ ἑαυτοῦ ψυχῇ (C1). ψυχή is new: this is the first time that the justice that is being sought in the individual is asserted, more particularly, to be in his soul. The point is not controversial—virtue was always going to be an attribute of soul just as strength belongs to body (e.g., 353D11, accepted without argument)—but since the justice we have found in the city, like σωφροσύνη, has a sort of second-order character, present not in a part the way a sock is somewhere in the drawer but in the relation among the parts, any just thing will need to be a plurality so that there can analogously be a relation among parts, and therefore the soul will need to be so. This prerequisite to the heuristic analogy, that πόλις (which is obviously a plurality of πολῖται) and soul (whose inner plurality is far from obvious) must both be pluralities, had not of course been foreseen.

2202

πάθη τε καὶ ἕξεις (B7) now stretches φύσεων (B5) into the personality and experience of the natural and alive man.

2203

αὖ (C4) points back to βλακικόν γε ἡμῶν τὸ πάθος (432D5).

2204

εἰς φαῦλόν γε … σκέμμα (C4). The neuter σκέμμα (in place of σκέψις) is derogatory (cf. Crito 48C4). Although φαῦλον can be used of a topic the speaker finds undignified to consider (e.g., Parm.130C6-7), Glaucon’s reply indicates that the sense here is the opposite of χαλεπόν (as at 368C8) and is being used ironically (as at 423C5 and C6). In following the general plan or μέθοδος of using the justice in the large entity as a guide to finding it in the small entity we happened to discover along the way that the large entity has three parts. This fact along with the fact that justice itself was found to be a relation among these parts, entails that continuing with the method will require us, as an unforeseen preliminary (ἐμπεπτώκαμεν), to find an analogous partition in the soul (the small entity) and then search for justice in the relation of these parts. Cf. ἀπαμβλύνεται, 442D7 and n. ad loc. In the event, this side-study will prove to be central!

2205

Ironic φαῦλον elicited a similar statement of overarching purpose at 423D8-E2.

2206

τοιούτων μεθόδων (D1) referring to the path of inquiry he just restated so as to show which step in the inquiry comes next, a method he declared in passing to be tentative (434D2-5A3), in contrast to a path longer in number of steps (πλείων) and in the time that would elapse in taking them (μακροτέρα). Glaucon had replied with approval of Socrates’s orderliness (καθ’ ὅδον, A4). The plural μεθόδων, as well as anarthrous use of the demonstrative τοιούτων, are derogatory. To take Socrates’s reference to a longer road as an indication from Plato to his readers that goes over Glaucon’s head vitiates the dramatic project of the dialogue merely to provide the commentator an opportunity to grandstand among his peers. He will still need to account for Socrates’s φαῦλον (C4) and for his καὶ πάνυ ἐξαρκέσει (D8).

2207

ἱκανῶς ἂν ἔχοι (D7) denotes dialectical sufficiency in the present circumstances (cf. n.482), which includes meeting both the polite exigencies of a live conversation at Cephalus’s house as the night approaches and the existential exigencies of reaching an account sufficient to answer the pressing questions about justice and the life-aspirations of Glaucon and Adeimantus. Plato’s decision in his invention of the dialogue form to invent conversations that create their own horizons and to limit speculation to the needs arising from likely occasions, just like Socrates’s discipline of showing up daily at the agora that was its inspiration and model, evinces a fidelity to life as lived; but neither of them will drag truth into the mud. Socrates does not parade scandalously in public view like a Cynic and Plato does not write dialogues about fools who happen to be passing by. The fate of Glaucon and Adeimantus, for which Socrates has taken some responsibility in the conversation, is not the most important thing in the world, but surely it is a topic easier to deal with than the soul. Hence his rejoinder that he is even more happy than Glaucon, who after all will not let him leave until he finishes (so much he indicates with μὴ ἀποκάμῃς, D9).

2208

With εἴδη τε καὶ ἤθη (E2) Socrates resumes slanting the aspects of the soul (εἴδη, the abstract and logical term for qualitative identity as opposed to quantitative in the argument above, 435B2) into the direction of dispositions as he had already done with φύσεων and πάθη τε καὶ ἕξεις, above (435B5-7).

2209

γελοῖον (E3). The assertion bluffs certainty and then attempts to corroborate it with the threat of ridicule, a corroboration comparable to the one offered in Book Eight (544D7-8 and n.3721) despite its worthlessness as such. As in the case of his method with the large letters, Socrates suggests the hypothesis for the illumination it casts, in the Viconian manner: nothing is added by turning it into an ontological claim.

2210

αἰτίαν (E6). The society owes it to the men, who in turn owe it to the environment (αἰτιάσαιτο, 436A1).

2211

The list of places and dispositions (435E6-436A3) illustrates by examples a commonplace belief in the climatic localization of human temperaments or characters (cf.Leg.747CD, Arist.Pol.1327B24-33, and the expression πολλὴ ἀνάγκη ἡμῖν), but in the course of presenting three examples of such, two of which we encountered in the education (τὸ φιλομαθές or φιλόσοφον paired with τὸ θυμοειδές without any coordinate involvement of τὸ φιλοχρήματον) the list also broaches the tripartition of the soul as well as a coordinate tripartition of goods (φιλοχρήματον standing in for ἐπιθυμητικόν: cf. 553C5 and the explanations given at 442A5-7 and 580E2-81A1). θυμοειδές already is being slanted toward the body since the other two dispositions (φιλομαθές and φιλοχρήματον) clearly correspond to the psychic and external goods.

2212

χαλεπόν (A5,8) echoes Glaucon’s χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά (435C8) and therefore recalls the questions about ψυχή that Socrates felt unable to treat adequately “by the present methods.” Rather than giving up treating the difficult problems he continues to note where they lie. Cf. ἀξίως (B2 vs. 435D5) and ἀκριβέστερον (C8 vs. 435D1).

2213

ἕκαστα (A8) makes them distinct from one another and stands in contrast with αὐτῷ.

2214

ἑτέρῳ (A9), of the first aspect, as if there were only two (“this one instead of that one”), soon replaced by ἄλλῳ for the second aspect and then τρίτῳ for the third. The three aspects are being mustered before our eyes as if in response to the things that are to be done. For the close logical use of ἕτερον in distinction with mere ἄλλον cf. 337D1; Charm.166A9; Euthyphr.10A10ff.

2215

τῶν περὶ τὴν τροφήν τε καὶ γέννησιν ἡδονῶν καὶ ὅσα τούτων ἀδελφά (A11-B1): Elaboration or subdivision of the last item of the list is a technique of closure (cf. 432A4-6 and n.2162, 431C1-3 and n.2152, 342E10-11 and n.426). This list of bodily pleasures (the typical triad, food and drink and sex [329A6 and n.51], being done with the pair, τροφή and γέννησις) is unusual in the way that it describes the objects of desire as means for ends beyond themselves (nutrition and procreation), which desire characteristically ignores.

2216

ὁρμήσωμεν (B2), replacing the more external πράττομεν (A8) as the generic term he now chooses for all three types of action seated in and initiated in the soul.

2217

ἀξίως λόγου (B2-3) on the surface means “worth mentioning,” “worth talking about,” but in the context of Socrates’s expressions of doubt about the adequacy of their “method” (ἀξίως, 435D5) there is place for it also to mean “worthy measured against the demands of reason,” which is certainly what it will turn out to be introducing.

2218

τοίνυν (B5).

2219

ὁρίζεσθαι (B5) is a repetition of διορίσασθαι above, with the usual dropping of prefix (n.1567), but also begins to suggest they will demarcate (determine the ὅρος between) the areas of the three elements or aspects of soul as “parts outside of parts.”

2220

The logical adjectives αὐτά, ἀλλήλοις, and ἕτερα (B5-6), and the shift of construction from datives of agent with concrete verb to loose datives of possession with ἐστί, continue to give the expression logical precision at the expense of leaving it so abstract that its meaning would be uncertain unless we already know what had to be said.

2221

εἶεν (C2) used differently from the ways so far.

2222

μή πῃ προϊόντες ἀμφισβητήσωμεν (C8-9): In the event, it is not only to fend off future disagreement that Socrates adds the following refinements but to elevate Glaucon’s thought to a higher level in advance, to a level more adequate to the very elevated topic of soul, a level Socrates had warned us we might not tolerate (435D1-3). ἀμφισβήτησις suggests captious squabbling in contrast with ὁμολογεῖν, which is to be thinking on the same plane as each other. Cf. 437A5, 442E1 with n.2317, 476D9, 501D1, 505D2 with n.3150.

2223

τὸ μέν τι / τὸ δέ (D1): If we supply a noun it might be μέρος; but in the coming case of the spinning top, μέρος wouldn’t work. Again the vagueness of the expression is necessary in advance and it is a matter of dialectical pacing (cf.n.197 ad 333C11).

2224

With ἔτι μᾶλλον χαριεντίζοιτο and κομψευόμενος (D4-5), his motives become questionable. Socrates often prepares his interlocutor for an abstract argument by reviewing the abuses of reason and language, intentional or unintentional, that lead to its failure, lest his own talking and thinking might seem indistinguishable from them. Cf. 453A7-454A2ff; Phdo.89C11 (on μισολογία).

2225

ὅλοι (D5) embodies the clever man’s attempt to gainsay the τὸ μέν / τὸ δέ solution.

2226

κατὰ ταὐτά (D8). The principle is to deny that ταὐτὸν τἀναντία ποιεῖ ἢ πάσχει κατὰ ταὐτὸν καὶ πρὸς ταὐτὸν ἅμα (B8-8 above), which requires that the same thing be oppositely qualified in the same respect and in the same relation at the same time. In the instance of the man it was not ταὐτόν that was suffering opposites but two different parts of him, and in the present case while it is ταὐτόν that is suffering opposites it is not so κατὰ ταὐτά. On its vertical axis (a mathematical entity without diameter) the top is stationary, though on its periphery, horizontal and perpendicular to this, the top is in motion. Once the top begins to wobble it ceases to be at rest in any respect (οὐδαμῇ, E6). Socrates (Plato) characteristically varies the expression for κατὰ ταὐτόν (the plural κατὰ ταὐτά); this dative of respect [οὐδαμῇ, with ὅδος understood]; the accusative of respect εὐθυωρίαν [E4]) so that the mind might not become diffused into the words and become unable to think about what they mean.

The stipulation πρὸς ταὐτόν (B9) is not illustrated here. A good instance would be the middle sized finger being at the same time long in comparison to (πρός) the shorter and short in comparison to the longer, a paradox Socrates will use in order to focus thought below (523C4ff).

2227

τὸ εὐθύ (E3): The neuter is used, avoiding an abstraction like “aspect,” “part” or “dimension.” The reality of this dimension or aspect of the top is purely logical, as the parts or aspects may be, according to this argument.

2228

τὴν εὐθυωρίαν (E4), accusative of respect.

2229

ὥς ποτέ τι ἂν τὸ αὐτὸ ὄν ἅμα κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ πρὸς τὸ αὐτὸ τἀναντία πάθοι ἢ καὶ εἴη ἢ καὶ ποιήσειεν (E9-437A2): In this less conversational and more pedantic expression of the principle all the stipulations are placed before the verb instead of being interfiliated (as they were at B8-9), and εἶναι is sandwiched in between πάσχειν and ποιεῖν. For the triad πάθοι ἢ καὶ εἶναι ἢ καὶ ποιήσειεν cf. Shorey ad loc. (Loeb 1.384 note c) and Phdo.97C8-D1. Perhaps it is added to pre-empt one more eristic attack.

2230

ἐμέ (A3), like any accented pronoun, is emphatic. Socrates’s illustration has had the preparatory effect it was intended to have on the only person who matters, his interlocutor (cf. n.2222).

2231

ἀμφισβητήσις (A5) again pejorative (cf. 436C9), as often (cf. n.2222).

2232

ὑποθέμενοι (A6) is hardly technical and so it is explained, even defined, in the sequel. It is an intransitive middle, as at 346B3; Aeschines 1.37, 2.102; Arist.Meteor.340A23, Rhet.Alex.1432B5; Isoc.4.51; Thphr.Char. proem (which all point backward to a proposal made at the start), and at Parm.137B4, where as here it sets out a program in prospect. The middle means to make a beginning in an argument (as the hypothesis of a play is the beginning point for a filling in of the details: cf.W.Trimpi, Muses of One Mind (Princeton 1983), 50ff), and therefore it can take a prepositional phrase (make a beginning with the topic X: Parm.137B4; Isoc.4.51; Arist.Meteor.340A23) or a question (begin with the question X: Parm.135E9, 136A5,B1; Arist.deCaelo 269B20). For indirect discourse the verb uses the infinitive (Phdo.100B5, Prot.339D2, Soph.237A3-4) but since it can take a bare noun (as to propose a subject for discussion: Rep.510C; Tim.53D5) it can appear to take a participial construction if its object is made subject of a circumstantial participle (e.g., Parm.136B7, C4). Here, we have neither of these constructions (neither τοῦτον οὕτως ἔχοντα nor τοῦτον οὕτως ἔχειν), but ὡς τούτου οὕτως ἔχοντος. The genitive and ὡς are used to distinguish (with the genitive absolute) our belief (ὡς) in the proposition from the beginning we proposed to make by hypothesizing that belief. It is our ground for making a beginning, and only in this sense something we “hypothesize”—a term that in itself has no meaning except this.

2233

φανῇ (A8) dialectical.

2234

ἡμῖν (A8) by its position it is an ethical dative of the theoretician, rather than a dative of agency with λελυμένα.

2235

In Greek, τὸ ἐπινεύειν τῷ ἀνανεύειν (B1), nodding the head and raising it. Where we shake the head for “No,” the Greeks raised it, and still do.

2236

τὸ ἐπινεύειν τῷ ἀνανεύειν καὶ τὸ ἐφίεσθαί τινος λαβεῖν τῷ ἀπαρνεῖσθαι καὶ τὸ προσάγεσθαι τῷ ἀπωθεῖσθαι (B1-3). The list is paced (cf. n.197): first a pair of verbs distinguished only by their opposing prefixes (ἐπι- and ἀνα-); then a pair that is parallel in meaning with alternative opposite prefixes, one the same and one different (ἐπι- and ἀπο-), and opposing roots too; and finally a third pair with a third pair of prefixes (one the same and one different) and a pair of opposing roots that redoes the second pair more transitively. The selection of verbs in the middle voice corroborates the mootness of active and passive. For the overlapping substitution illustrated in the prefixes cf. n.155. The deployment of syntax and diction that enforce the meaning without going so far as slavish parallelism is as characteristic of Plato’s conversational diction and dialogical manner as his willingness to vary them when the meaning is patently the same. As the argument proceeds the variation can, and will, become radical.

2237

τῶν ἐναντίων (B3): Genitive of the genus: cf. 439A1 and 376E9 with n.1155.

2238

ἐπορεγόμενον (C5) The elaboration with a new verb (ὀρέγεσθαι) affords an extra opportunity to use the “positive” prefix (ἐπι-).

2239

ἤτοι ἐφίεσθαι … ἢ προσάγεσθαι … ἢ αὖ … ἐπινεύειν (C2-4). The three items (1,2,3) in the new list are being associated with the three pairs (A,B,C) in the previous list without repeating the order of either list: ἐπιθυμία (1) with ἐφίεσθαι (B), βούλεσθαι (3) with προσάγεσθαι (C), and ἐθέλειν (2) with ἐπινεύειν (A).

2240

μηδ’ (C8), means merely “and not,” parallel with καὶ μή, as at Leg.743D2-4. For the article governing all items of a list (as if their common role as opposites were more important than any distinction one might draw between them) cf. 353D4-5; and Crito 47C9-10; Gorg.450D6-7, 508E1-4; Leg.634A3-4, 645D7, E1-2, 733E1-2, 863E6-8; Phdo.75C9-D2ff; Polit.258E8-9, 274A2, 284E4-5; Prot.312B1-2, 329C4-5 (in context of whether the virtues are one or many), 357A7-B1; Symp.207D8-E1, E2-3.

2241

ἀπωθεῖν καὶ ἀπελαύνειν (C9) redoing only the third item from the list above, ἀπωθεῖσθαι (B3), now in the active rather than the middle. ἀπελαύνειν is mere exegesis on ἀπωθεῖν, being itself a closer antonym to προσάγεσθαι (B2), but affording a second opportunity to use the “negative” prefix (ἀπο-). The other two items in the original list are then incorporated dismissively with καὶ εἰς ἅπαντα τἀναντία.

2242

αὐτῶν (D3) “reframing:” cf. n.1794.

2243

The preposition from προσῇ (E1) is followed up by προσπαρέχοιτο (E1). The variation of the first declension feminine noun δίψα (D3,D9) with the third declension neuter δίψος (τῷ δίψει, D11-12), is purely gratuitous.

2244

At the same time that the exemplary material is repeated (D11-E2), the re-expression of the cases undergoes radical compression: the case is 13 words long (D11-E1) and the counter-case 6 (E2).

2245

The compression (E2-4) is again radical. Moreover the work done by πρός above (E1) is now done by παρά instead (παρουσίαν / παρέξεται, a verbal noun replacing the subjunctive προσῇ and a future indicative παρέξεται replacing potential optative προσπαρέχοιτ’ ἄν); and, worst of all, the two cases (πολλή / ὀλίγη) are subsumed under a vague general term πλῆθος (in a vague prepositional phrase, to boot) that might have meant a large amount but ends up meaning quantity in general, and in fact a small quantity in the first case (making the thirst large, just as the presence of heat had made for a thirst for cold and of cold for a hot one). The assertion that a hot thirst would desire a cold drink appear to have troubled the formalistic Hermann and he emended, needlessly. The passage avoids formalism at every possible opportunity, requiring thinking instead. The pains that Adam takes to make explicit the subtle and implicit logic of this passage (ad 437A[2], 437E[29], 438A(3), 438B[8], 438D[20], 438E[29]), illustrate exactly the sort of adjustment and edification that Glaucon is meant to be undergoing and carrying out within himself!

2246

τὸ διψῆν (E4): Now the verb varies the neuter noun δίψος.

2247

οὐ μή (E4) plus subjunctive, the strongest of denials, in defense of the virtual theory of forms.

2248

πῶμα rhyming with βρῶμα (E5-6), as if the rhyme confirmed the point, though all that came before presupposes that diction, grammar, syntax, and semantics are mere externals, relative to the meaning. At the very moment he insists that the objects of thirst and of hunger are one and only one, he varies the word for them (from ποτόν and ἐδωδή). Accurate thought can always exploit, but never needs to rely on, careful wording. Indeed, to the extent it does, it isn’t.

2249

τοῦ δὲ τοίου ἢ τοίου τὰ προσγιγνόμενα (E8): Glaucon’s response (E7-8) imitates the compression.

2250

τοι (438A1).

2251

γὰρ ἄρα (A3) a striking collocation, as if he surprises himself by having an explanation. The point is that desire was already for something good so that the goodness of a given object of desire is not consequent upon the specific nature of the given desire but upon the fact that it was a desire in the first place. The collocation appears four other places in the corpus. Near the beginning of the Protagoras (315D1) Socrates explains what he means when, in his narration of the figures he comes upon at Callias’s house, he says, “And there also Tantalus did I see:” ἐπεδήμει γὰρ ἄρα καὶ Πρόδικος ὁ Κεῖος. Here γὰρ indicates that he is telling us whom he meant by Tantalus, and ἄρα expresses his surprise at seeing the man himself about whose presence in Athens he had only heard rumors (whence the imperfect). At Gorg.469D3 (γάρ BTW : γε F [Dodds]) γάρ tells what the new thing is (ἄρτι) and ἄρα expresses the speaker’s still-dawning sense of his new-found power. Similarly, at Leg.698D4 Datis’s claim that he had captured every Eretrian is explained (γάρ) by a still-stunning claim (ἄρα) that he had gathered them together as in a net. Finally, at Symp.205B4, Diotima tells Socrates why (γάρ) he should not be surprised, since she has a new point (ἄρα) for him to consider. This last use is closest to the present one, and conversely supplies a justification for reading it there, where the mss. are not unanimous (ἄρα T Oxy : om. BW [Burnet]).

2252

Glaucon’s γάρ (A6) prevents us, whether he means to do so or not, from knowing whether he himself finds the argument challenging.

2253

οὐκ ἔμαθον (B2) the aorist referring to the moment Socrates said what he said (cf. ἔμαθον, E9). His very perspicuous answer in the case of ἐπιθυμία (437E7-8), reveals that all Glaucon does not understand at this moment is Socrates’s generalizing language. Socrates “explains” by giving more examples.

2254

τινός (B5): Greek uses the bare genitive for a spectrum of relations, as witness the objective genitive (“of”), genitive of comparison (“than”) and genitive of lack (“for” as with ἐπιθυμεῖν). Socrates’s expression sustains a high level of generalization by employing a series of bare genitives rather than introducing a term for such relations. An English paraphrase, compelled to supply different prepositions nevertheless, requires the same mental work to be understood as was required by Socrates’s formulation. For similar uses of the genitival relation cf. Charm.168B-169A, Symp.199C-200B, and Tht.160A. The semantic equivocation of the grammatical form weakens the argument not at all.

It is noteworthy that these further examples (B4-C4)—in particular their being opposites—suggest the commutativity of the relation Socrates is describing, i.e., that qualifying the thirst qualifies the drink, but qualifying the drink also qualifies the thirst. His next example after them, ἐπιστήμη, will draw this out more clearly since it is the μάθημα that gives οἰκοδομική its name (C6-D3).

2255

τίς καὶ ποιά τις (C8). καί is epexegetical (cf. bare ποιά τις below, D5). τίς means what ὅστις means at Gorg.447D1, where Socrates suggests we ask Gorgias ὅστις ἐστίν, i.e., what is his occupation (cf. Dodds ad loc.): it asks for a “one word answer.” The knowledges have names (that is, they are τινες) which they derive, as we are about to learn, from the ποιόν of their field of knowledge.

2256

My paraphrase uses chiasm as the Greek does (D12-13) but in a different place.

2257

οὔ τι λέγω (E1).

2258

νοσώδης (E3): There is more than the absurdity of a knowledge being sick. Knowledge tends to be knowledge of opposites (e.g., what is healthy and what is not), so that if in general the qualification did map back onto the knowledge, the knowledge would oppose itself and become a self-contradiction.

2259

ἰατρικήν (E8): This second example of a ποιότης conferred back on the thing (i.e., ἰατρική) by its correlate (i.e. τὸ ὑγιεινὸν καὶ νοσῶδες), is paced in the sense that it dispenses with the crutch of an etymological relation that made the first example easier to understand (ἐργασία οἰκίας / οἰκοδομική, D1-3).

2260

τοῦτο ὅπερ ἐστίν (439A2), restates what had been stated above by οὗπερ πέφυκεν (437E5, E8, and cf. A7, infra), with πέφυκεν standing in contrast to the qualifications that “come into existence” (ἐγένετο, 438D2, D8, E4, E6, all going back to γένηται at 437A5).

2261

οὔτε ἀγαθοῦ οὔτε κακοῦ (A5-6): This pair of candidate qualifications is repeated from 438E3. It does not contradict the stipulation that persons always desire the good (χρηστόν is used, 438A1-5): though all thirsts are thirsts for good drink it is only qua desire that thirst is a desire for a good drink, not qua thirst.

2262

ἀνθέλκει (B3): The mood indicates it is less an hypothesis than an observation, and “when” might be a better translation for εἴ ποτε than “if ever.” The condition is mixed (with an optative apodosis), already intimating familiarity with times the soul somehow resists its desire to drink (C2-4, καὶ μάλα ...).

2263

αὐτοῦ and ἕτερον (B3-4): This terminology now applies the hyperlogical language established at 436A8ff (cf. nn.2213, 2214, 2220, 2223, 2229), preparing for the reintroduction (B5-6) of the principle there reached (436E9-7A2).

2264

Reading θηρίου (B4) with all best mss. Castellani’s collation of Ven.B and Stobaeus have θηρίον which in turn is read by most modern editors without comment (see now Slings, Criticial Notes, 191, who chooses θηρίου, and who incidentally reports that at Plac.Hipp.Pl. 5.7.36-40, Galen reads the genitive not the accusative as Burnet and Chambry reported), even though in the passages they cite as parallels for the metaphor (e.g. Rep.589, Polit.309E) the θηρίον is an aspect or tendency or state of the soul, not the soul itself. That the beast should be led rather than leading (ἄγοντος) and the soul leading rather than led, of course begs the question. Cf. ἄγοντα below (D1).

2265

Reading ἅμ’ ἂν (B6), with Burnet. “Carrying over” of ἄν can take place by dint of close parallelism in expression (as 382D7-11 and 352E6-353A2: cf. n.1306), but such parallelism is absent here.

2266

ἀπωθοῦνταί τε καὶ προσέλκονται (B9): The middle plurals along with τε καί combine the two actions into one confused complex; then μέν / δε and the singular participles (ἀπωθοῦσα / προσαγομένη, B10-11) pull it apart and attribute its components to the arms separately.

2267

ἄλλη μέν … ἑτέρα δέ (B10): again the language of ἄλλος and ἕτερος is closely tailored to the immediate logical context (cf.436A9 and n.2214), ἄλλος with μέν proleptically announcing that another is coming and ἕτερος insisting that the other is the alternative to or complement of the one.

2268

οὐκ with ἐθέλειν (C2), here adhaerescent. Circumstances under which a person is just plain thirsty but unwilling to drink do not so readily come to mind. The vehemence of Glaucon’s reply (C4) therefore suggests that it is the desire to drink wine that they have in mind, and moreover that he knows it’s true because he has felt it. The aposiopesis suggests an acute sense of shame about dipsomania (cf. a similar aposiopesis at Phdrs.238B2-3). Cf. also the unquestioned tee-totalism of 403E4-6.

2269

τὸ κελεῦον / τὸ κωλῦον (C5-7): the congenial rhyme of the opposites is emphasized by anaphora of ἐνεῖναι with μέν and δέ.

2270

κρατοῦν τοῦ κελεύοντος (C7): The participial formulation is borrowed from the example of the archer.

2271

The elaboration and specification in this description of an event within the soul (C9-D2), is striking. It is effected by a careful and contrasting choice of prepositions: ἐγγίγνεται, of the κωλῦον, is contrasted with παραγίγνεται of the ἄγοντα, and these come respectively ἐξ the λογισμός but διά the παθήματα. The elaboration of παθήματα (an aspect of soul already mentioned at 437B4) with derogatory νοσήματα is likewise striking.

2272

οὐ δὴ ἀλόγως (D4): The litotes again (cf. 436B2-3 and n.2217) reminds us that reason is the element by which the several elements in the soul are being, and can be, definitively divided, including the rational element (ᾧ λογιζεται, D5).

2273

ἐρᾷ τε καὶ πεινῇ καὶ διψῇ (D6-7). The list employs the characteristic triad of desires (cf. 329A6 and n.51) and then moves to generalization with a periphrastic expression that provides place for the term ἐπιθυμία, so as to give a basis for the term ἐπιθυμητικόν parallel to the grounding of λογιστικόν with ᾧ λογίζεται, above (D5). The term needs such a justification because it is virtual coinage (though cf. ἐπιθυμητικῶς, Phdo.108A7). For a list functioning to create place for a needed new term cf. 431C1-3 and n.2152. The generalization here includes a derogatory spin (ἐπτόηται), just as νοσήματα had been added to παθήματα above.

2274

ἀλόγιστόν τε και ἐπιθυμητικόν (D7-8): ἀλόγιστον both introduces ἐπιθυμητικόν as the antithesis of the rational element and also echoes ἀλόγως (D4) so as to stress that the very analysis is being done not by the desiring part of the soul but the rational part.

2275

ἴσως τῷ ἐπιθυμητικῷ (E5). He is influenced by the etymological root that ἐπιθυμητικόν and τὸ τοῦ θυμοῦ share, a linguistic feature hard to bring over into English.

2276

The present optatives (E9-440A1) in secondary sequence represent imperfect indicatives. ἅμα with μέν and δέ explicitly states that he was doing the two things at the same time, but αὖ with the second acknowledges the one follows the other in some way.

2277

κρατούμενος / διελκύσας / προσδραμών (A1-2): The three participial phrases in asyndeton describe the operation of the ἐπιθυμητικόν in a syntactically sub-rational way, at the same time that they hold in abeyance the syntactically ordinate echelon of the indicative for the irruption, eruption, and interruption of the θυμός.

2278

ἰδοὺ ὑμῖν (A2): The fact he uses the second person on himself reminds us we are seeing the division in the soul in action.

2279

ἐμπλήσθητε (A3): Again pleasure is characterized as a πλήρωσις: cf. 439D8 and 442A7 (bis). Cf. much later πληρώσει τε καὶ ἡδονῇ, 585A3 et seq.; 606A4-7.

2280

τοῦ καλοῦ θεάματος (A3): Sarcasm and derision are vehicles of the θυμός.

2281

We may fill in this description (C1-5) with the case of a man rightly found guilty and imprisoned, and his feelings toward the juror that sent him there.

2282

διὰ τὸ πεινῆν καὶ διὰ τὸ ῥιγοῦν (C8-9). The pains of hunger and cold are the same but the circumstances are different: now he is on the battlefield.

2283

καίτοι γε (D4).

2284

The γένη (441A1), which according to the myth of metals breed true, may be thought of as “species.”

2285

χρηματιστικόν, ἐπικουρητικόν, βουλευτικόν (A1): This preliminary and enthymemic guess about how the soul might have three parts as the city does, corresponds exactly to Glaucon’s guess about the previous question (439E5), except that this time the guess happens to be right instead of wrong. The naming of three types is a perfect instance of the substitution of synonyms to make the point easier to accept. The way was prepared when the ἐπίκουροι and φύλακες had been pushed in the direction of being στρατιῶται and ἄρχοντες (414D3, 433C6-D1) and then categorized as πολεμικόν and βουλετικόν (434B2-3). Calling the ruling species τὸ βουλευτικόν has slanted them in the direction of the λογιστικόν; calling the helpers στρατιῶται and then τὸ πολεμικόν has slanted them in the direction of the θυμοειδές. The δημιουργοί had been pushed into the identity of χρηματισταί (cf.434A9, C7-8), though in all strictness a connection between money and appetite has yet to be made.

2286

ἄν γε (A5). Glaucon’s “necessity” (A4) is an overstatement, as Socrates immediately notes. There is only the neat parallelism between the helping role of the third class in the city and the presently revealed helping function of the spirited element within the soul, and between the (deliberating) rulers in the city and the (deliberative) rational element in the soul that they respectively help, and even these parallelisms partly depend on the slanting terminology described in the previous note.

2287

φανῇ (A5): This “becoming plain” is φαίνεσθαι in the dialectical sense (n.205), an event of clarification encountered within the argument. Last time the event was the story of Leontius (439E6-40A7) elaborated by the hypothetical cases of the man acting unjustly and the man being treated unjustly (440CD). These cases are being viewed as virtual empirical evidence.

2288

καὶ γάρ (A7), adducing a fact or single case as a reason and warrant.

2289

With καλῶς γε εἶπες (B2) Socrates praises the underlying logic of Glaucon’s remarks, despite the fact that he overdraws things in order to establish the essential independence of θυμός and λόγος. Not only do children possess θυμός from the beginning, but the other may never arrive (this is the overdrawing of the case, which makes the logical point), though usually it does (conceding the empirical facts once the logical point is made).

2290

ἐν τοῖς θηρίοις (B2-3): In the case of animals the rational element never arises, suggesting it can hardly be the creature of the will.

2291

στῆθος δὲ πλήξας κραδίην ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ (B6), = Od. 20.17: Odysseus is angrily contemplating the behavior of the suitors (κακὰ φρονέων κατὰ θυμόν, v. 5). Homer very pertinently says πολλὰ δέ μερμήριζε κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν (10), contrasting thought with anger, but Socrates quotes the later line to stress the opposition or fight – the “contradiction” – between the parts.

2292

διανενεύκαμεν (C4): If the verb is a form of νεύω, its use again confirms that the soul that is deciding (nodding head for yes and shaking head for no) through the very process of the argument, is the same as the soul that the argument is about (cf. ἐπινεύειν / ἀνανεύειν with which the disquisition on soul began, 437B1). The verb may be νέω: Plato does use the rare verb διανέω of making one’s way through an argument (Parm.137A6, Phdrs.264A5), though in those cases the metaphor has a distinct application drawn out with adjacent words, whereas here it stands alone. It may refer to the shifting or bobbing possibilities (one preliminary guess [439E1] proving wrong and the next [440E10ff] proving right), through which they have plied their path.

2293

γένη (C6) now logical rather than biological in meaning (contrast A1).

2294

τὰ αὐτὰ μέν / τὰ αὐτὰ δέ (C5-6): Sameness is reciprocal or reversible. It is not that the soul is like the city nor that city is like soul, but that the virtues are the same in both (435A5-7).

2295

ἀλλ’ οὔ πῃ μὴν τοῦτό γε ἐπιλελήσμεθα (D8): the collocation of particles combines urgency with carefulness. The logical relation of the sentence—that it is a minor premise—is announced methodically by ἀλλὰ μήν γε; the urgency comes from this collocation being interrupted by οὔ πῃ and τοῦτο (reading all these, with Burnet). We are after all on the brink of the answer for which we have been waiting for some time.

2296

ἐκείνη (D8) carefully distinguishes the conclusion, reached before and on its own grounds (432B7-433C2), from its application in the present context. There is a hint of inescapability in the verbal adjectives (μνημονευτέον) that is new. Up until now we have been hoping to reach a definition of justice at all. As we approach success it becomes incumbent upon us to remember (cf. ἐπιλελήσμεθα / ἐπιλελῆσθαι D8,11) and be mindful (μνημονευτέον) of the conclusion we have reached, and indeed to act in accordance with it. Cf.472C8-D1.

2297

μνημονευτέον ἄρα ἡμῖν ὅτι καὶ ἡμῶν ἕκαστος (D12): For the first time, the “we” of theoretical engagement (the ethical dative ἡμῖν) stands alongside the “we” (ἡμῶν) upon whom as individual men ethical truth impinges (though παρ’ ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς at 435A3 and ἡμῶν at 435E2 did broach the matter).

2298

μουσικῆς καὶ γυμναστικῆς κρᾶσις σύμφωνα αὐτὰ ποιήσει (E8-9): Socrates opportunistically incorporates material from the speculation on education (410B10-412A7) to strengthen the analogy from state to soul. The relation of the ἐπίκουροι (the civic θυμοειδές) to the φύλακες (the civic λογιστικόν) has so far been described only in terms of the willingness of the former to hearken loyally to the latter (ὑπηκόῳ … καὶ συμμάχῳ, E6) and the latter’s oversight and concern (προμήθεια, E5) for the former; and it is only these relations that he needs to derive from the reference to the education, namely, the attentiveness that the philosophical element derives from gymnastics (as well as the nourishment it receives from music), and the moderation the spirited element derives from its exposure to music. For the balancing and harmonizing language ἐπιτείνουσι and ἀνιεῖσα compare ἐπιτεινομένω καὶ ἀνιεμένω (412A1) and τραφέν … ἐπιταθέν / ἀνεθέντος … τραφέντος (410D7-E2); and for τρέφουσα cf. τρεφόμενον (411D5). For παραμυθομένη cf. πειθοῖ (411D8); for λόγοις τε καλοῖς καὶ μαθήμασιν cf. τῷ καλῷ λόγῳ (401D2). Moreover the discovery at the end of the treatment of education, that music and gymnastics serve not soul and body but the two parts of soul, fits perfectly with the sequel here (442A4-B3), in which the third element of the soul, the ἐπιθυμητικόν, plays the role of the “body” (or the mass of citizens) over which the educated elements (or guards) may stand as ἐπιστάτης (412A10).

2299

For this beauty compare 401D2 τῷ καλῷ λόγῳ.

2300

The simultaneous participles (441E9-442A2) express feelings of success and conviction inspired by the fortuitous alignments the interlocutors are discovering within and among the fields of education and state and soul, resembling in this the mood produced at 399A5-C4 and 372AB. παραμυθομένη includes a reference to λόγος which, along with the subsequent datives ἁρμονίᾳ and ῥυθμῷ, brings out the triad of elements studied in the musical education.

2301

ὡς ἀληθῶς (442A4), used of something true in a new way. The corrective effects of the duplex paideia to which he has just alluded (E3-6) enable the reason to do its work without softening and the will to do its work without turning to iron (cf. 410B10-12A7). The paideia can therefore be said to help each of them to act justly according to the definition newly reached.

2302

προστήσετον (A5), a future active dual (the reading of AFD and Stobaeus) is not impossible. The redivision of the dual subject yoked together above (μουσικῆς καὶ γυμναστικῆς κρᾶσις, 441E8-9) is tolerable, and a subsequent shift in subject from this affecting pair to the affected pair in τηρήσετον (A7) is a natural progression in exegesis. However, Bekker’s suggestion προστατήσετον (with τούτω as subject) is not only “better than the ms.” (as Shorey puts it) but also echoes ἐπιστάτου in the precedent passage (412A10).

2303

πλεῖστον (A6), denoting a great amount while still remaining singular, straddles between the concept of the individual soul and the plurality of the polis (i.e., οἱ πολλοί) to which the soul is being likened.

2304

χρημάτων (A6) stands in for ἐπιθυμιῶν according to the present project of welding three triads together: the tripartition of goods (virtue, strength, possessions), the three classes of the polis (rulers, enforcers, moneymakers: 441A1), and the three parts of the soul (mind, will, appetite).

2305

καταδουλώσασθαι (B1): ingressive aorist, depicting a result achieved by main force (ἰσχυρὸν γενόμενον). In contrast, the durative aspect of the present ἄρχειν (ibid.) denotes holding the office of rule and exercising its duties, something the ἐπιθυμητικόν is by nature unable to do. The point is expanded at 444B3-5 (cf. n.2342).

2306

σύμπαντα τὸν βίον πάντων ἀνατρέψῃ (B2-3) would be hyperbolic if it applied only to the soul (there being only three parts and therefore only two others), but it also alludes to the “everybody” in the polis with its large lower class. It corresponds to πολιτεία at 412A10 just as ἀνατρέψῃ represents the opposite of what σῴζεσθαι meant there.

Semantic strains, slantings, straddlings and slips—in one word, metonymy—are the very substance of analogies, as for instance between state and soul (here); or between body and soul (e.g., σαθρός used of the soul, Gorg.479B8; πλάνη of the soul, Phdo.81A6 after being used objectively at 80B4-5 [cf.79C6ff and cf.444B7 below]); or between judge and doctor (ἁμαρτήματα in reference to body, Gorg.479A7-8); or between dialectician and doctor (ἀπορεῖν of the doctor, Gorg.522A1, πικροί of the dialectician’s λόγοι, B8 [cf.A1]). Cf. n.1585.

2307

καὶ ἀνδρεῖον δή ... (B11) effects a transition to bravery in the individual by resuming the expression used for the individual’s justice above (καὶ δίκαιον δή, 441D5-6). It will be continued, with variation, for individual wisdom and temperance below (C5, C10).

2308

ἦρχεν (C5); παρήγγελλεν (C6): The imperfects succeed the aorist (παραγγελθέν, C2) to depict τὸ λογιστικόν as occupying the position of ruler, or being ruler according to its nature—not just issuing willful commands: cf. ἄρχειν (B1) with n.2305.

2309

αὖ (C6) indicating the respective work or ability in the λογιστικόν whose presence warrants the man being called wise. The ἐπιστήμη described corresponds to προμήθεια at 441E5, which itself hearkens back to the εὐβουλία of the rulers (428C11-D3).

2310

ἑκάστῳ τε καὶ ὅλῳ τῷ κοινῷ σφῶν αὐτῶν τριῶν ὄντων (C7), depicting a knowledge of what each part must be and do, and therefore what is good for the whole soul, just as the man whose parts each stuck to their respective jobs could therefore be called a man who himself sticks to his job (καὶ τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττων, 441E2).

2311

πόλεώς τε καὶ ἰδιώτου (D3): The quick elaboration of the answer indicates the end of the section (cf. n.1379).

2312

τούτῳ καὶ οὕτως (D4-5): The combination of the dative and the adverb refers back to the expression of the analogy between state and individual above: ὡς … καὶ ᾧ (441C9-10, for σοφία), ᾧ … καὶ ὡς (441D1, for ἀνδρεία), the dative referring to the place or part in which each virtue inheres. With the mention of justice (and temperance) the virtue does not exist only in one group but in the groups’ interrelation (σωφροσύνη) or their parallel unmeddlesomenesses (δικαιοσύνη). Thus the bare dative used with justice (τῷ αὐτῷ τρόπῳ, 441D6) appears parallel to the dative used before but deftly avoids the dative of the part and incorporates the adverbial idea which alone is appropriate to justice (as it would have been with σωφροσύνη, the mention of which was however avoided by the generalization at 441D2-3), by adding τρόπος (D5-6). That dative was then continued with a dative articular infinitive (τῷ … πράττειν, 441D9). Similarly, at 442C10 the dative τῇ φιλίᾳ καὶ συμφωνίᾳ employed in the description of temperance is morphologically parallel but no longer the “dative of the part” we had just had in the cases of bravery (τούτῳ τῷ μέρει, 442B11) and wisdom (ἐκείνῳ τῷ σμικρῷ μέρει, C5); it is the purpose of αὐτῶν there (C10) to bring the parts back into the formulation.

2313

ἀπαμβλύνεται (D7) refers among other things to the discovery of tripartition in soul, and the correspondence of its parts to the parts of the city and of the relations among them that constitutes justice.

2314

ἐφάνη (D8) dialectical: cf. ἐμφαίνηται, 434E5.

2315

ἄλλο τι δοκεῖν εἶναι (D7-8): The infinitive is epexegetical to ἀπαμβλύνεται: (“dulled into seeming something different from what it was”). The phrase refers back to the alternative envisioned with ἐὰν δέ τι ἄλλο ἐν τῷ ἑνὶ ἐμφαίνηται, 434E4-5.

2316

γάρ (D10) explains the confident tone of his previous assertion (D7-8), in light of Glaucon limiting his agreement to himself, personally (ἔμοιγε). The extra remarks will help secure the conclusion from all points of view (παντάπασι). βεβαιωσαίμεθα refers back to 435A2-3: καὶ φανερὰν γενομένην βεβαιωσόμεθα αὐτὴν παρ’ ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς. There, ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς countenanced an adjustment within ourselves that would be necessary once the truth became clear; this adjustment is now described as φορτικὰ προσφέρειν, where the verb suggests medicament: see next n.

2317

εἴ τι ἡμῶν ἔτι ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ ἀμφισβητεῖ (E1) continues the references to the identity between investigator (Socrates, Glaucon, and us) and the subject under investigation (soul): cf. 441D12 and n.2297. It does not refer to ‘a trace of doubt lingering in our minds’ (J.-C.), or ‘un brin de perplexité’ (Leroux), but a part or aspect of the soul that still quarrels with and resists the conclusion. It is to this part (αὐτῷ, E1) that the φορτικά in question will be applied. They are not tests, but arguments with a broad and vulgar appeal administered as remedies (as at 403A10, 563D6, 604D4: cf., LSJ, s.v. προσφέρω, I.3.b) to the φορτικώτερον τῆς ψυχῆς. For the method cf. 501D1-502C8 and 589C7-590C7, and n.3080 on γάρ at 501D1.

The part of the soul in question is the one that relies inordinately on gross external indices of behavior to corroborate what reason already knows, a reliance characteristic among persons who fear their shadow (cf. Phdo.101D) and are comfortable only when they are sure they are imitating themselves. Arguments κατὰ τὸ εἰκός assuage but only perpetuate this weakness, since they will never provide the dispositive proof it craves. Socrates will use the occasion to rebound and bring Glaucon to a higher plane of argument; but the others present will have a different reaction (Book Five, init.).

2318

παρακαταθήκην χρυσίου ἢ ἀργυρίου (E6), recalls the image of the just man reached momentarily in the conversation with Polemarchus (333C7, n.b. παρακαταθέσθαι): our result saves that image.

2319

ἱεροσυλιῶν καὶ κλοπῶν καὶ προδοσιῶν (443A3), the first two items recall Thrasymachus’s list of the common criminal acts (citing the first and last: ἱερόσυλοι καὶ ἀνδραποδισταὶ καὶ τοιχωρύχοι καὶ ἀποστερηταὶ καὶ κλέπται, 344B3-4), but προδοσιῶν and the expansion of ἰδίᾳ ἑταίρων with δημοσίᾳ πόλεων go on to include his great act of unjust betrayal, as well (πρὸς τοῖς τῶν πολιτῶν χρήμασιν καὶ αὐτούς, 344B5-6). Thrasymachus was after all contemplating a kind of injustice that would change the πολιτεία.

2320

Reading καὶ μὴν οὐδ’ ὁπωστιοῦν ἄπιστος (A6) with ADM rather than ὅπως τί γε οὖν (F) or ὁπωστισγεοῦν (Stobaeus) or the conjectures of Hartman (ὁπωστιοῦν ἂν) or Burnet (ὁπωστιοῦν γ’ ἂν). There is no need to emend; ἄν is “carried forward” as often in parallel questions. (cf.382D11 and n.1306).

2321

κατὰ ὅρκους ἢ κατὰ τὰς ἄλλας ὁμολογίας (A6-7): If ὅρκοι refers to divinely sanctioned civic pacts, ὁμολογίαι may refer to private agreements, in which case ἄλλας is adverbial. The pairing recalls Cephalus’s uses for money: ὀφείλοντα ἢ θεῷ θυσίας τινὰς ἢ ἀνθρώπῳ χρήματα, 331B2-3.

2322

μοιχεῖαί γε μὴν καὶ γονέων ἀμέλειαι καὶ θεῶν ἀθεραπευσίαι (A9-10): To the list of injustices is added a list of impieties. For the contents cf. 386A2-3 and n.; and for the complementarity of justice and piety cf. 331A4 and n. The list’s homoioteleuton in -αι and its parallel genitives show rising indignation, echoed by Glaucon’s definitive answers in agreement: τίνα; οὐδέν(α) (442E7-3A2) // ἐκτός; ἐκτός. (A4-5) // ὁπωστιοῦν ἄν; πῶς γὰρ ἄν; (A6-8) // παντί; παντί. (A10-11).

2323

ἔτι τι οὖν ἕτερον ζητεῖς (B4): Socrates’s question will close the review of φορτικά, echoing as it does the question with which it opened (ἄλλο τι δικαιοσύνη δοκεῖν εἶναι, D7-8). But it was Glaucon’s answer to his last question (καὶ οὐδὲν ἄλλο, B3) that gave him the warrant to ask it.

2324

He refers not directly to 369E-70C, where the principle of ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν is first adopted, with proof, but to 432D-433A, where the deeper importance of the principle that had been adopted suddenly came into view. Thought is not knowledge but can be the medium in which knowledge or truth appear. As to the tenses of the infinitives, since they had had the inkling before they said they had it, we have the punctual aorist ὑποπτεῦσαι; since they were contemplating the possibility that the inkling was true at the time they voiced it, we have κινδυνεύειν, present as at 433B3.

2325

τὸ δέ (C4) adverbial adversative akin to νῦν δέ.

2326

δι’ ὃ καὶ ὠφελεῖ (C4): The image or likeness (εἴδωλόν τι) can either limit and expand understanding. It may be experienced as pointing beyond itself (in the way we know that a dream [ἐνύπνιον, B7] is more deeply true than we are able to understand), or it may occlude understanding by allowing it to stop at what is only a partial adumbration (in the role of a likeness [εἴδωλον, C4] mistaken for and then even chosen over, the original); over time it can do both. The determinant lies outside it, just as measuring the man by his external behavior requires something more than rote observation. In this case we got beyond it to its own principle. Ast’s emendation (ὠφέλει, imperfect), read by Chambry, is therefore attractive.

2327

Reading τοιούτου μέν τι (C9) with all mss. and Chambry against Stobaeus’s τοιοῦτόν τι, read by Burnet. The μέν concedes the similarity (τοιοῦτο, used as at Tim.50B4 et passim, and as ὁμοίους at 475E2, again with μέν) in order to stress the all-important difference (done with ἀλλ’ οὐ).

2328

ὡς ἀληθῶς (D1).

2329

ἐάσαντα (D1): The accusative draws the individual man out of αὑτοῦ and makes him an actor in what we have to assume (from its case) will be an infinitival noun clause parallel to τὸ … ἔχειν (C5-7) that will define ἡ δικαιοσύνη, either as an appositive or as a predicate with ἐστι understood. The infinitive (πράττειν, E2) comes after several subject accusative participles have made it virtually otiose. See note below.

2330

γένη (D3) grafts an aspect of the civic version onto, or into, the individual.

2331

τὰ οἰκεῖα (D3) made pregnant by τῷ ὄντι.

2332

νεάτης τε καὶ ὑπάτης καὶ μέσης (D6-7): The analogy from musical harmony is repeated from 432A2-4.

2333

ἤδη (E2). The motive for postponing the infinitive (cf. n.2329) finally comes to light. His external behavior is once again to be seen as a mere image of his inner state.

2334

ἢ περὶ χρημάτων κτῆσιν ἢ περὶ σώματος θεραπεύειν ἢ καὶ πολιτικόν τι ἢ περὶ τὰ ἴδια συμβόλαια (E3-4): The first two items concern the third (external) and second (somatic) categories of personal goods: the psychic good has been taken care of before action in the vulgar sense (ἐάν τι πράττῃ) begins. Following his personal interests his involvement with the people around him comes into view (ἢ καὶ πολιτικόν τι … .). By entertaining the φορτικά Socrates has ricocheted back to the inner wellsprings of virtue of which the φορτικά are only an aftermath and outer show.

2335

καλήν (E5) highlights the externality of πρᾶξιν—its outer look—and thereby slants it toward and associates it with the world of external goods just listed.

2336

ἀεί (444A1) suggests continual evaluation and prudence rather than reliance on a formula.

2337

παντάπασιν (A3): Glaucon celebrates the perspicuous (cf. n.3567) and elevated tone of this sentence, the longest sentence in the Republic so far.

2338

τὸν μὲν δίκαιον ἄνδρα καὶ πόλιν καὶ δικαιοσύνην (A4-5): The list enacts the separation of the form (expressed adjectivally with δίκαιον) from its two instances (man and city). The fact that it can be separated means it has been discovered in itself. Compare the semantics of εὖ in the articulation of τὸ καλόν (cf. n.1591 ad 400E2-3), another height Socrates reached with Glaucon’s help, at 400C7-401D3.

2339

μετὰ γὰρ τοῦτο σκεπτέον οἶμαι ἀδικίαν (A10-11): The programmatic remark is meant to remind us of the set of questions Glaucon and Adeimantus had burdened Socrates to answer, to wit, Glaucon, at 358B4-6: τί τ’ ἔστιν ἑκάτερον καὶ τίνα ἔχει δύναμιν αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτὸ ἐνὸν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ; and Adeimantus, at 367B4-5 (cf. D3-4): τί ποιοῦσα ἑκατέρα τὸν ἔχοντα αὐτὴ δι’ ἑαυτήν.

2340

ἄρχῃ (B3) again present (cf. 442B1).

2341

δουλεύειν (B5): This time present (contrast ingressive καταδουλώσασθαι, 442B1), now denoting the role he will always play given his nature.

2342

Reading τῷ τοῦ ἀρχικοῦ γένους ὄντι (B5), with Vat.226 (and Chambry’s W [= Vindob.54]). The reading τοῦ δ’ αὖ δουλεύειν ἀρχικοῦ γένους ὄντι of AFDM and Stobaeus, and Burnet’s economical emendation τῷ δ’ οὐ δουλεύειν ἀρχικοῦ γένους ὄντι, introduce a double negative, while the point is cleanly made by τῷ τοῦ ἀρχικοῦ γένους ὄντι, by presenting the one type, τῷ τοῦ ἀρχικοῦ γένους ὄντι, in clear contrast with the other type, ὄντος φύσει οἵου πρέπειν αὐτῷ δουλεύειν. The main point here (B4-5) as well in the precedent passage (442A7-B3), is that conquest does not make a ruling type out of a slavish type (note prominent and emphatic γένει, 442B2).

2343

τὴν τούτων ταραχὴν καὶ πλάνην (B6-7) elaborates on the precedent σύμπαντα τὸν βίον πάντων ἀνατρέψει (442B2-3) with ταραχή and πλάνη, anxiety and disoriented wandering, which turn ἀνατρέπειν inward and make a segue to the metaphor of mental health.

2344

ταραχή (B6) represents the soul’s parts losing their proper orientations, by which the θυμός makes the soul brave and the λογιστικόν makes it wise. πλάνη (B7) represents the loss of their proper relation to each other, including the harmony between them that constitutes the soul’s temperance and the parts’ mutual respect for each other’s roles and dedication to their own, which constitute its justice. The metaphor of the πλάνη is a favorite of Plato’s. It tends to come up unprepared, and often at the climax of important arguments (479D9, 505C7, 586A3, 596D1, 602C12; Prot.356D4-7ff). These facts suggest it has a phenomenological meaning to him more than a theoretical one.

2345

τὰ ἄδικα πράττειν … καὶ αὖ τὰ δίκαια ποιεῖν (C1-2): Socrates now moves to the second part of Glaucon’s (and Adeimantus’s) question: τίνα ἔχει δύναμιν (358B5), or μὴ μόνον … ὅτι δικαισύνη ἀδικίας κρεῖττον, ἀλλὰ καὶ τί ποιοῦσα ἑκατέρα … ἡ μὲν ἀγαθὸν ἡ δὲ κακόν (367B2-5, E2-5); but now that δικαιοσύνη has been discovered to be an inner state rather than a behavior (443C9-444A2) it is not δικαιοσύνη that affects the soul but τὸ δίκαια πράττειν, which is what the brothers meant by δικαιοσύνη there, since that is what they thought justice was at that point.

2346

κατάδηλα ἤδη σαφῶς (C2-3). The two terms combine clarity with distinctness. Since τυγχάνει (C2) is repeated from A4, we are meant to compare them with ηὑρηκέναι there. That what makes behavior (πρᾶξις) just is simply and only that the behavior preserves the just order of the soul is not only already clear but has just been stated, though not quite in the present terms and not for its own sake. There (443C9-444A2), behavior had been demoted to the external world (τὴν ἔξω πρᾶξιν, C10), in comparison with the inner state of soul. Here that new thesis is brought to bear on the conventional outlook, according to which τὸ ἄδικα πράττειν means ἀδικεῖν (C1) or ἀδικία, just as δικαιοσύνη conventionally refers to acting justly (τὸ δίκαια πράττειν).

2347

ἐμποιεῖ (C10) thus answers Adeimantus’s original question, τί ποιοῦσα (367E3).

2348

ποιεῖν (D3) = ἐμποιεῖν by the familiar rule of dropping the prefix (cf. n.1567).

2349

κρατεῖν (D4) connotes physical power and ἄρχειν (D5) the political or moral authority. In his analogy between body and soul he uses both with both, as here.

2350

κρατεῖν / ἄρχειν (D3-6)// κρατεῖν / ἄρχειν (D8-11): The analogy is scrupulously spelled out with parallelism rather than chiasm, as noticed by Glaucon in his response, κομιδῇ (D12). The parallelism is repeated below (D13-E2). The purpose is to optimize the warrant for asserting that virtue and vice really are health and sickness of the soul rather than merely being like the health and sickness of the body.

2351

ἀρετὴ μὲν ἄρα (D13): The term is brought in from the corresponding generalization about vice, above (πᾶσαν κακίαν, B8).

2352

ὑγίειά τέ τις … καὶ κάλλος καὶ εὐεξία ψυχῆς (D13-E1): Above δικαία πρᾶξις had been elaborated with καλή by way of stressing its externality (443E5 and n.), over against the inner ἕξις of soul (443B5-6), but by force of the present analogy from bodily health, an inner “health, beauty, and well-being” (εὐεξια) come into view. The goods of beauty, health, and strength, traditionally associated with body, here ricochet into soul.

2353

τὰ μὲν καλὰ ἐπιτηδεύματα (E4): The term echoes Glaucon’s use of it during his first framing of the question, 358A6 (cf. n.685, and cf. 360E6): Socrates now redeems it.

2354

πότερον αὖ λυσιτελεῖ (445A1),“Which” of two.

2355

τοιοῦτος ὤν (A2-3). With this new explication Socrates takes on the worst case scenario that was truly the heart of Glaucon and Adeimantus’s confusion, their resentment of people getting away with it who are truly bad, and the prospect of being persecuted for being good. Socrates’s great “paradox,” that punishment is ameliorative (μηδὲ βελτίων γένηται κολαζόμενος), goes by without notice, as it did at 380B1-2. We may think of the remark as a “preview.”

2356

σκέμμα (A6) as before is derogatory (cf. n.2204 ad 435C4). In response to Socrates’s most challenging articulation of the problem, Glaucon now asserts that his original formulation of the problem of justice pales in the face of the climactic and radical formulation he and Socrates have reached, that virtue is only the inward state, and he asserts it with his thumos (γελοῖον: cf. n.2280). Another great step has been taken: have we taken it along with them?

2357

οὐδὲ μετὰ πάντων σιτίων τε καὶ ποτῶν καὶ παντὸς πλούτου καὶ πάσης ἄρχης (A7-8): To the body with which he starts (τοῦ μὲν σώματος) Glaucon adds the third locus of goods (the externals), before contrasting them both with the first locus (soul, here done in periphrasis with τῆς δὲ αὐτοῦ τούτου ᾧ ζῶμεν φύσεως). Food and drink are never listed as bodily goods: they here provide an improvised metabasis from body to the usual externals (wealth and power). The improvised metabasis, the periphrasis, and the anaphora of πᾶς are all triumphant and serve as an index of how fully Glaucon has grasped the argument.

2358

ἄρα ἔσται (B1): ἄρα with the future indicates this is an argument a fortiori or ex contrariis, on which cf. n.1104 ad 374B6-D6.

2359

ἐφάνη (B4) dialectical (n.205). The argument Glaucon volunteers in elaboration of his assent (A5-B3) is the same argument a fortiori that Socrates makes at the climactic moment in the Crito, the moment at which Crito’s ability to continue with the dialectic becomes so severely strained (47C8-48A2, referred back to at 49E9-50A3, where Crito does not understand), that Socrates feeds him instead the paraenetic speech of the Laws. What makes the present passage a distinct echo of that passage and therefore an indirect reference to the fatal choice Socrates himself will have made about his own life and death, is not only the words the two arguments share (including σκέμμα: cf. 48C4) but also the way both arguments avoid mentioning the soul by name (cf. αὐτοῦ τούτου ᾧ ζῶμεν, 445A9 with μετ’ ἐκείνου … ὃ τὸ ἄδικον μὲν λωβᾶται, κτλ, Crito 47E7-8, and κακῶς τινας ποιοῦμεν καὶ ταῦτα οἷς ἥκιστα δεῖ, 50A1-2). That Glaucon should be quoting to Socrates his own favorite argument can be compared to the beginning of Book Two where he uses Socratic commonplaces (δοκεῖν πεπεικέναι ἢ ὡς ἀληθῶς, 357A5; οὐ ποιεῖς ὃ βούλει, B4-5) to compel Socrates to participate. There he quotes his teacher to cajole him; here he quotes him to pay him homage for having taken him somewhere.

2360

περ in ἐάνπερ (B1) tells against J.-C.’s interpretation that ἄλλο πλήν means “unless.” Instead, it produces a stipulation to mirror the stipulation the unjust man makes, that injustice profits as long as one avoids the penalty (ἐάνπερ μὴ διδῷ δίκην, A3). Socrates had added to that stipulation the paradoxical exegesis, μηδὲ βελτίων γένηται κολαζόμενος (A4), and it is this that Glaucon here elaborates. His argument a fortiori raises the unjust alternative to a freakish extreme. The unjust life will be livable as long as the soul keeps itself in the hell it has chosen and forgoes benefitting itself with just behavior: this after all is the effect the two actions would have, as we now have learned.

2361

γελοῖον γάρ (B5): Socrates acknowledges the triumphant sentiment that Glaucon has cloaked in irony.

2362

ὅσον οἷόν τε (B6). The polar doublet of quantity and quality, in tandem with the superlative, calls for a complete understanding.

2363

ὅσα καὶ εἴδη (C1), καί pointing interest; but the phrase continues the theme of complete understanding from B6.

2364

ἅ γε δὴ καὶ ἄξια θέας (C2), καί again pointing emphasis. To behold injustice in all its kinds and details, Socrates here asserts, is a worthwhile pastime. We are left to presume it will help us achieve the firmest grasp possible that our theory of justice and virtue is true (B6-7), but he does not here say why this should be so. Commentators treat ἅ as if it were ὅσα which implies the clause limits how many types he will review, contrary to his advocating something exhaustive. The limitation is only introduced below (τέτταρα δ’ ἐν αὐτοῖς, C6-7), as if the prominence of four types of vice were a thing seen from the height, and it is immediately justified by being correlated with types of constitution, placing us on the familiar ground of studying human morality in the external medium of the city.

2365

ὥσπερ ἀπὸ σκοπιᾶς μοι φαίνεται (C4): The triumphant and elevated tone is reminiscent of the last paragraph of Book Three. How surprised shall we be, then, by a deflating interruption by someone who is not sharing in the logos with Socrates, like the one that Adeimantus made at the beginning of Book Four?

2366

κινήσειεν ἂν τῶν ἀξίων λόγου τῆς πόλεως (E1): τῶν ἀξίων a genitive of the sphere or topic: cf. n.2802.

2367

τοίνυν (449A1).

2368

πόλιν τε καὶ πολιτείαν (A1). The latter term had been used a few times so far (412A10, 424A4, 424E1), but its use just above in the plural (445D1ff) governs the meaning here. πόλεις would be geographically separate: for comparative study we need a more abstract term.

2369

ὀρθήν (A2) is new and receives emphasis from its position. We may guess at the start that it is used to distinguish the one correct constitution from the several incorrect ones.

2370

ἡμαρτημένας (A3) is here the opposite of ὀρθήν.

2371

ψυχῆς τρόπου κατασκευήν (A4), a pleonasm for ψυχῆς κατασκευήν, continues the idea that there are kinds or types of cities and souls from 445CD (C5 [εἶδος], C9 [τρόποι], D4 [τρόπος], D8 [εἶδος]).

2372

ἐξ ἀλλήλων μεταβάλλειν (B1): That cities or governmental modes should change into “each other” (n.b., ἀλλήλων does not mean, nor does it have to mean, back and forth: cf. n.2529) is a new topic, neither requested before nor implied by the previous program, though in the search for justice in the city a genetic approach was likewise adopted and, likewise, suddenly and without methodological justification (369A5-10).

2373

ἀφήσομεν (B6): Socrates did not hear the object of the verb, and now gives it a default neuter (τί, B8). The picture of the two of them talking together privately after Glaucon and Socrates had been talking together in public and in their very view, must be handled properly in the visual dramatization of the dialogue. The very inspired conversation Socrates and Glaucon have just carried out together would inspire a good deal of envy.

2374

Reading ἔτι (C1) with mss.AFD against the ὅτι of the recentiores. Socrates repeats his question since it has not been answered. For the repeated question cf. 343A10 (culminating A3-9).

2375

φαῦλος (C4) is the climactic remark, placed at the end of the series of accusations, and means “But we caught you!” ἄρα (C4) adds “As if you didn’t notice.”

2376

τὸ ὀρθῶς τοῦτο (C7): Adeimantus is turning Socrates’s own term against him: ὀρθήν (A2 and A3, and now C6) was to serve as the criterion for the narration he was attempting to move on to, concerning the incorrect constitutions and characters. Similarly Glaucon re-uses τρόπος (C8) from A4.

2377

With σύ (D1) Adeimantus acts as if there were an onus on Socrates to come up with an answer, although the argument was reached not by him alone but by him and Glaucon together. Moreover, his remark that there are many possible answers is as much a reason not to raise the issue as it is to pass it over!

2378

πάλαι (D1) means they started to wait before he moved on to these next two topics, namely, the search for vices in the city and then finding them in the soul.

2379

παιδοποιΐας τε πέρι (D2), narrower of course than περὶ γυναικῶν τε καὶ παίδων (C4-5).

2380

ὅλην (D3) rather than πάντα or τὰ ἄλλα requests something of an overview.

2381

ὀρθῶς (D5,6), again.

2382

μέγα … τι … καὶ ὅλον (D4-5). For the corrective καί cf. 461D3 (δεκάτῳ … καὶ ἑβδόμῳ δή); Apol.23A7 (ὀλίγου τινὸς καὶ οὐδενός), Gorg.501D1-2 (περὶ δύο καὶ πολλάς), Phlb.16D6 (ἓν καὶ πολλὰ καὶ ἄπειρα), Polit.293A3-4 (περὶ ἑνά τινα καὶ δύο καὶ παντάπασιν ὀλίγους), 297C1 (σμικρόν τι καὶ ὀλίγον καὶ τὸ ἕν), Tht.173E4 (σμικρὰ καὶ οὐδέν) and the proverb δὶς καὶ τρὶς εἰπεῖν. Compare also ἤ τι ἢ οὐδέν at Apol.17B7. In all these cases of the idiom, καί broaches the extreme possibility (Denniston’s climactic uses: 291, 293).

2383

πᾶσι ταῦτα δεδογμένα (450A5): Several in his audience (note first plural, 449B6) had been waiting (πάλαι περιμένομεν, 449D1) for him to revisit the sharing of wives. If it were put to a vote it would be a landslide (Thrasymachus’s perfect δεδογμένα suggests a resolution already voted upon, and thereby a forgone conclusion: cf. δέδοκται, Phdrs.228E2, for the idiom). But the image of the city had been a mere vehicle for discovering justice in the soul: that task now completed, the ladder might be thrown away. However, Socrates has proposed to continue with the political investigation as a vehicle for discovering the nature of injustice and so there remains an excuse for asking him to revert to his remarks about the just city. Did his audience listen at all to the intervening recondite discussion between Socrates and Glaucon, in which the soul was divided, and then the division was applied to the individual, and how the result came out so square and clear? Had they been affected by the corroborative “administration” of φορτικά so as to see the distinction between the inner and the outer? If so, why does this “outer” concern linger? These questions become moot the moment Glaucon, the party to that crucial discussion, casts his vote with the others; and it for this reason that Thrasymachus can now say the vote is unanimous (without having to consult the others). Moreover, in casting the final vote Glaucon re-assumes the role of Socrates's interlocutor.

2384

ἣν ὡς ἤδη διεληλυθὼς ἔγωγε ἔχαιρον (A9): Now we have a model for the break between Books Four and Five, namely the break between One and Two, where Socrates had thought the discussion was complete but what had been said turned out to be mere preamble. There, too, the discovery came at the beginning of the new book rather than at the end of the previous. Cf. also D8 and n.

2385

ὃν ὁρῶν ἐγὼ παρῆκα τότε (B1-2): It is not true that Socrates tried to suppress something: the details were irrelevant to his immediate purpose (cf. n.2056 ad 423E6-7). By this false “confession” he only strengthens the grounds for the objection, as usual: cf. 372E2-374A2, 420A2-7, 487E6-10.

2386

πολὺν ὄχλον (B2). Literally, a dense mob. Forces similar to those at work within Adeimantus at the beginning of Book Four have now been aroused in the whole company, forces for which Thrasymachus is eager to be the spokesman. Throughout the Republic, as the argument progresses the obstacles it meets become more difficult. Socrates expresses a worry he will be lynched, as in fact he was, in the end. His demurral is more than the characteristic “Socratic diffidence.”

2387

χρυσοχοήσοντας οἴει τούσδε νῦν ἐνθάδε ἀφῖχθαι (B3-4): Thrasymachus’s remark captures his public behavior in a nutshell. With τούσδε (first person demonstrative) he arrogates to himself the role of spokesman for all (337A3-7 and n.280), which raises the question of who saw whom first (336D8, cf. n.271). His suddenly concrete remark about smelting gold may be an allusion to a proverb, as the paroemiographers say (cf.Warren ad loc., and Paroem.Gr. 2.91,727; 1.464), but the traditional explanation of the proverb illuminates no details in the text, which is crucial for corroborating that a proverb is being cited in the first place, and the passage itself lends scant support to their claim. Moreover the Platonic scholiast is silent on the point. More likely, Thrasymachus is exploiting an opportunity to throw back at Socrates the remark that Socrates had made to him, that he and Polemarchus would no sooner coddle each other’s inadequacies in their search for truth than they would if they were searching for gold, a remark Socrates again recalls much later (589D6-590A2). To allude to Socrates’s vaguer χρυσίον ζητεῖν (336E5) with the unnecessarily concrete χρυσοχοήσοντας fits his penchant to disarm with crassness (cf. 336B8-D4 [n.b. ἐξεπλάγην, D5] and τίτθη σοι ἔστιν; 343A3-9, ἐνθῶ 345B5, and cf. n.2004 ad 421A3 on derogatory specificity).

2388

δέ γε (B6), common in retort. Once again Glaucon serves up to Socrates the sort of thing he has heard him say (cf. n.664). Little does he know that he will indeed be required in the next half-hour to adopt just the sort of higher set of standards to which he here casually alludes (472A-474B)! μέτρον governs both the objective genitive τοιούτων λόγων and the exegetical infinitive ἀκούειν in a zeugma analogous to the “lilies of the field” construction.

2389

ἡμῖν (C1): The first plural that had been used with the verbal adjectives early in the construction of the city has now become a recumbent ethical dative (cf. n.1004) by which the interlocutors remind each other of the fictional modality and experimental purpose of that construction.

2390

ὦ εὔδαιμον (C6) and ὦ φίλε ἑταῖρε (D2): his ὄκνος drives these repeated gestures toward a captatio benevolentiae, and the gestures elicit an elaborate protest in kind from Glaucon (D3-4). We may measure these against the slighter reluctance Socrates shows at 414B8-C10 and Adeimantus’s less ardent response there (414C11).

2391

ὦ φίλε ἑταῖρε (D2). Vocatives often reveal aspects of the speaker’s mood or meaning by projecting them onto his interlocutor(cf. n.550). Socrates often uses them to reassure his interlocutor that the conversation is going well without explicitly acknowledging the hegemony the interlocutor has given him.

2392

μὴ εὐχὴ δοκῇ εἶναι ὁ λόγος (D1-2). On the surface it is ridicule that he wishes to avert (cf. καταγελῴμεθα ὡς ἄλλως εὐχαῖς ὅμοια λέγοντες, 499C4-5), but in addition the modality will be taken seriously, and even defended, below (458AB1).

2393

οὔτε γὰρ ἀγνώμονες οὔτε ἄπιστοι οὔτε δύσνοι οἱ ἀκουσόμενοι (D3-4): The triad is delivered so swiftly that Glaucon must be relying on the previous remarks for its meaning to come across. ἀγνώμονες, here meaning the opposite of συγγνώμονες (cf.Andoc.2.6) has its precedent in his offering Socrates carte blanche to decide the path he will take (ῇ σοι δοκεῖ, B8-C1); ἄπιστοι comes of course from Socrates’s references to ἀπιστία (C2,3,4); and δύσνοι (given an inimical tone by its prefix δυσ- replacing the mere litotes produced by the alpha privatives before) must refer to what is derogatory and ad hominem in the charge that Socrates’s arrangement is mere wishful thinking (εὐχή) rather than valid argument (λόγος).

2394

πᾶν τοίνυν … τοὐναντίον ποιεῖς (D8): The observation he makes to Glaucon echoes the observation Glaucon had made to him at the beginning of Book Two (357B4).

2395

ἐμαυτῷ (D9) rather than ἐμοί.

2396

φρονίμοις τε καὶ φίλοις (D10) echoed by μεγίστων τε καὶ φίλων.

2397

ἀσφαλὲς καὶ θαρραλέον (E1) // φοβερόν τε καὶ σφαλερόν (451A1): a chiasm of the contrapositive (n.4910).

2398

παιδικὸν γὰρ τοῦτό γε (A2) cf: παίζοντας καὶ γελῶντες, Euthyphr.3E1.

2399

προσκυνῶ δὲ Ἀδράστειαν … χάριν οὗ μέλλω λέγειν (A4-5): A formula for diverting Nemesis, like “Knock on wood.” Unintentional wrongs, like unnoticed good deeds, do finally receive their proper deserts through the agency of the Fates who know all and forget nothing.

2400

ἐλπίζω (A5): for the sense cf. 383B6 and n.1321.

2401

καλῶν τε καὶ ἀγαθῶν καὶ δικαίων νομίμων πέρι (A7), read by all mss. (n.b. Ven.184 writes in καί after δικαίων) and all modern editors except Ast, Stallb., and now Slings who follows Wilamowitz (who wrongly read κἀγαθόν [Platon 2.380]). The triad καλόν, ἀγαθόν, δίκαιον is the usual terminology, usually in that order, by which to specify τὰ μέγιστα (D10; cf. 451A4): cf. 475E9-6A5, 484D2, 493B8-C1, 520C5-6; Crito 47C9-10; Euthyphr.7D1-2; Gorg.459C6-D3 (cf.451D7), 470E9-11, 515A5-6; Leg.731E6, 896D5-6, 957B7; Parm.130B7-9; Phdo.65D4-7; Phdrs.246D8-E1, 260A1-3, 276C3, 278A3-4; Polit.295E4-5ff, 309C5-6. Cf. also Dissoi Logoi §§1-3. Sometimes it is the pair καλόν / ἀγαθόν (Crat.439C8; Gorg.474D12; Phdo.76D8, 77A4,100B5-6; Phlb.15A4-6; Prot.315D8-E1); and sometimes the pair ἀγαθόν / δίκαιον (Phdrs.272D5-6, 277D10-E1). Phdo.75C10-D3 adds ὅσιον as a fourth and Tht.172A1-4 places ὅσιον for ἀγαθόν, to-wit: καλὰ καὶ αἰσχρὰ καὶ δίκαια καὶ ἄδικα καὶ ὅσια καὶ μή, adding, because of the Protagorean context, οἷα ἂν ἑκάστη πόλις οἰηθεῖσα θῆται νόμιμα αὑτῇ, ταῦτα καὶ εἶναι. Closest in content to our passage is Leg.801C8-D1, which refers to the realm of things too important to entrust to the poets, which things it then describes as follows: τὰ τῆς πόλεως νόμιμα καὶ δίκαια ἢ καλὰ ἢ ἀγαθά, but its variation of connectives adds a formal problem.

In almost all lists where καί is varied by ἤ or ἤ by καί, the variation indicates that two items linked by the alternate connective are almost one (whether καί varies ἤ [Crito 53B2-3; Lach.192A4-5; Leg.658D6-7; Phdrs.248D3-4, 4-5; Rep.553B4-5] or ἤ varies καί [Gorg.520E2-4; Phlb.56D11-E1; Rep.400B2-3, 462E1-2; Tht.175E4-5]). The only instances I know where this is not the case are Charm.161D6-7, where ἤ varies καί to introduce a further elaboration (cf. D3-4); Leg.889B6-8, where καί varies ἤ to introduce a closing generalization; and Parm.130C6-7, where ἤ varies καί for the same purpose. Adding ἤ to one of the connective καί ’s (e.g. Rep.423A4, 609D8-9) or καί to one of the connective ἤ ’s (Leg.716A5-6, 738D2) is a different matter, and is usually done to effect a climax or closure. Perhaps related is A τε … ἢ B (where τε creates an expectation for καί that is met with ἤ instead): Ion 535D3-5; Meno 95B2-3 (reading mss.BT: cf. Stallb. ad loc.); Tht.143C2. The variation in connectives in the passage from Leg.801C8-D1 is peculiar for its repetition of the variant (καί, ἤ, ἤ). Still, we must infer that as elsewhere the variation acknowledges the intimate relation we usually see between δίκαια, καλά, and ἀγαθά. Translate, therefore: “the conventional attitude, whether touching the just the beautiful or the good.”

In both Leg.801C and the present passage it is not the truth that is at stake but the preservation of conventions. At 801C it is a matter of preventing the poets from committing perhaps the greatest sin (C5): undermining the conventional wisdom on the most important topics (C3-4: cf. also Rep.604B9 and context). Here, Socrates is worried that his speculative investigation about the most important topics (D10) might lead him into sin perhaps greater than manslaughter (A5-6): unintentionally deceiving his friends καλῶν τε καὶ ἀγαθῶν καὶ δικαίων νομίμων πέρι. Cf.479D3-4 and n.2778, and 484D1-3. For the position and sense of νόμιμα compare τὰ καλὰ καὶ αἰσχρὰ νόμιμα, 589C7 and contrast 484D2. The unintentionality of manslaughter corresponds to the less-than-full understanding of values provided by νόμος. Socrates is suggesting that a deluded life might not be worth living.

2402

ἐν ἐχθροῖς κρεῖττον (A8), added to explain how it is that stating their friendliness to him (450D3-4) discourages rather than encourages him (πᾶν τοὐναντίον, 450D8).

2403

Reading the εὖ (B1) of the mss. (οὐκ εὖ scribitur in Monac. : οὔ coni. Hermann), ironic among friends.

2404

πλημμελές (B3): The term can denote something far worse than an esthetic imperfection (“out of tune”), as Socrates’s statement at Apol.22D8 illustrates.

2405

ἀπατεῶνα ἡμῶν (B4): Glaucon repeats Socrates’s somber term by way of a joke, but the charge of deceiving people about the most important matters is tantamount to the complaint Socrates will actually face in 399, a complaint severe enough to warrant capital punishment. With ἀφίεμέν σε (B3) Glaucon promises to let Socrates go if only he will speak, the opposite of the offer Socrates imagines his jurors making to him, to let him go if only he will shut up (Apol.29CD). These parallels are indices Plato supplies his reader, who knows Socrates’s fate, of the ominous significance of the fact that even his allies, Glaucon and Adeimantus, are prone to be scandalized by the present topic.

2406

ὡς ὁ νόμος λέγει (B6-7): Socrates's reluctance to criticize τὰ νόμιμα is offset by an opportunity he now discovers to rely on νόμος after all. After his unconventional remark that deceiving friends was worse than manslaughter, he now encourages himself by relying on the conventional attitude about the man against whom charges are dropped.

Glaucon like most of Socrates’s interlocutors does not share his scruples but is only impatient with them. His reply (λέγε τοίνυν τούτου γ’ ἕνεκα) is tantamount to saying, “Whatever floats your boat.” Socrates’s willingness to continue in his dignified way is an index to Plato’s reader, if not to Glaucon, of how serious and solicitous he is of the young men’s needs.

2407

ἀνδρεῖον / γυναικεῖον (C2), as opposed to ἄρρεν / θῆλυ, distinguishes people by more than gender, as does “manly/womanly” (as opposed to male/female). Thus the connotation of bravery and warfare is allowed to attach to the first, and gives a place for home-life, and in particular child-rearing, to attach to the second, in accordance with convention (τὰ νόμιμα), though in truth it is sexual mores that the others are worried about. If there is an allusion in these words to the division of Sophron’s Mimes into ἀνδρεῖοι μῖμοι and γυναικεῖοι μῖμοι (cf. Adam ad loc.), the allusion would only corroborate what is already afoot.

2408

ἀνθρώποις (C4): not ἀνδράσι, which would have continued the language of ἀνδρεῖον / γυναικεῖον from above. There was nothing in the provisions so far that required the guards to be male; and the term ἄνδρες has so far been used not to denote masculinity but, on occasion, to express sympathy for the persons we imagine fulfilling the roles our theory has conceived of (cf. 361B6 and n.753).

2409

ὀρθή (C5, continuing the theme of τὸ ὀρθῶς (449C7 and n.2376).

2410

παίδων τε καὶ γυναικῶν κτῆσίς τε καὶ χρεία (C5-6). At 423E κτῆσις had gone with γυναικῶν (and with γάμων, the consummation of the acquisition), as it will again at 502D4-6 (τήν τε τῶν γυναικῶν κτήσεως δυσχέρειαν καὶ παιδογονίαν). κτῆσις as well as χρεία go with both γυναικῶν and παίδων (cf.Polit.271E8 referring to a primitive state in which there were neither πολιτεῖαι nor κτήσεις γυναικῶν καὶ παίδων), and so the construction is binary non-distributive (both going with both): cf.n.50 ad 329A5, 414A4-7, 431A7, 451C5-6, 493D4-6, 615B2-5. Contrast the distributive construction (n.774). For the pairing κτῆσίς τε καὶ χρεία cf. Menex.238B, κτῆσίν τε καὶ χρῆσιν.

2411

ἰοῦσιν (C7) can and should agree with the prominent dative at the beginning of the sentence. By now it is they as well as we that are going down the path we set out upon. Socrates’s defense against the paradox brought on by Adeimantus at the beginning of Book Four similarly began with the resolution to stick to the path they were on (420B3ff).

2412

ἀγέλης φύλακας (C8): Cf. esp. 416A2-C3.

2413

τροφήν τε καὶ παιδείαν (E4) is an hendiadys (cf.376C7-8). Even if Halliwell is right to say Plato was interested in the Spartan ways (“the main implication [sc. of τροφή] is surely that girls of the Guardian class will be fed the same diet as boys ... Plato may have been influenced by Spartan ideas” [ad loc.]), Socrates, the speaker, is not interested in what the female guards or female dogs are to be fed.

2414

The lexical shift from θῆλυς / ἄρρην to γυνή / ἀνήρ (E6-7) embodies a logical inference from the genus animal to the species man.

2415

μήν … γε (452A2) introducing minor premise, both particles conjectured by Richards (in place of μέν and τε in the mss.). The mss. reading is perfectly tolerable however: “Music and its mate gymnastics we already of course had assigned to them (the males).” On the hyperbaton of τε cf. Leg. 800A4, 966A7.

2416

καὶ τὰ περὶ τὸν πόλεμον (A4-5): The education did not include military training per se, though the gymnastic was modelled on the presumption that the guards should be ready to fight (e.g., 403E8-4C4; cf. also 422B3-D7).

2417

χρηστέον (A5): sc.ταῖς γυναιξί, from above. The focus on application evokes images of the women in motion and gives Glaucon pause (εἰκός, A6).

2418

λέγεις (A6) is not otiose: Socrates picks it up with λεγόμενα (C8). That his arguments should be radically discrepant from convention is not “an incidental objection” in Socrates’s eyes (Halliwell ad 452A7), nor is their laughability “no Socratic concern” (Halliwell ad 451A1). The discrepancy and the risibility are exactly the topics of this Book (not just structural elements or motifs, per Halliwell ad 457B1), the burden of which is to subordinate first laughter and then opinion to logos. These hold their sway not by the support of arguments a rationalist (which Halliwell presumes Socrates to be, ad 449C2, 450B5, 450B7, 451D1) could easily refute, but by a personal confusion that only the great teacher that Socrates is can, and in this Book does, treat.

2419

εἰ πεπράξεται ᾗ λέγεται (A8), reading the scr. in the Monacensis (the future middle πράξεται fails to achieve the needed parallelism with the passive λέγεται). The conditional expresses not doubt about realizability but sensitivity to the fact that the realization would take place in a world already filled with conventions, so that any realization of the concept will butt up against accepted usage in ways unexpected and paradoxical but categorically unimportant nevertheless. The problem, though only now formulated explicitly (389D6 is not a parallel, pace J.-C.: cf. n.1379 ad loc.), has affected the course of the conversation throughout. Socrates’s quick thumbnail sketch of the theoretical results had elicited Glaucon’s fateful reaction at 372C, requiring the “purification” of the feverish city; his sketch of the military εὐναί at 416D3ff with which the purification culminated had elicited Adeimantus’s objection and the digression with which Book Four began. Presently it is the scandalized imagination running wild on a topic Socrates had tried to skirt rather than treat in detail (423E4-424A2)—something the conventional view would view as “sharing women”—that has interrupted Socrates’s narrative (though of course he is less interested in continuing a narrative than responding to the objection!). Thus the present Book and the two that follow it are no more and no less a digression from some plan of argument, than was the lengthy education of the guards brought on by Glaucon’s objection at 372.

2420

With ὁρᾷς (A10), as well as its construction with perceptual participle (γυμναζομένας), Socrates acknowledges the transition from thought to actualization.

2421

ἤδη (B1) is not temporal and proleptic (as if it meant τὰς ἤδη πρεσβυτέρας with J.-C.) but goes with καί and means “withal.” Cf. long note by Cope, Arist.Rhet.1.13.

2422

λέγειν (B6) is again not otiose, but continues the distinction between thought and action. So also at C4.

2423

καὶ περὶ τὰ γυμνάσια καὶ περὶ μουσικὴν καὶ οὐκ ἐλάχιστα περὶ τὴν τῶν ὅπλων σχέσιν καὶ ἵππων ὀχήσεις (B8-C2): The list reproduces the range of the curriculum described just above (A4-5). τὰ περὶ τὸν πόλεμον is redone with the pair, arms and horses (for the dyad cf. 552A9-10; and Leg. 880D6-7, 943A7-8, 947C6, 953B7-8), here specially formulated so as to conjure the image of the soldiers’ bodily parts and poses, which are described with sexual double-entendre (ὅπλον [LSJ s.v.,V], ὄχησις [cf. e.g., ὀχεύειν, 454E1]: note the jump to vivid plural).

2424

κωμῳδεῖν (D1) The question whether this alludes to or (conversely) provoked Aristophanes’s Ecclesiazusae is not nearly as important as the question whether Glaucon and Adeimantus would be distracted by such a play from staying on the path of the λόγος. If the reader feels the pressing need that the brothers feel to learn that being just makes a person happy, he will be less distracted by either of the possibilities and uninterested in deciding between them.

2425

τὸ ἐν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς δὴ γελοῖον ἐξερρύη ὑπὸ τοῦ ἐν λόγοις μηνυθέντος ἀρίστου (D4-5): The point is baldly drawn (perhaps a mawkish parody of Thucydidean style: Denniston GPS 21 and 35-36) and will be filled out with full theorization throughout this Book, especially at the end (475D-480A).

2426

σκοπόν (E2) completes the argument of the paragraph by carrying forth the nascent distinction between sight and thought, replacing the object seen (by the eyes: ὄψιν) with the object looked for (by the mind: σκοπόν).

2427

παντάπασι (E3), of agreement to a complex point: cf. n.2058.

2428

ἀνομολογητέον (E4). ὁμολογία as agreement between the parties to the discussion based on their use of reason and argument with each other, continues the theme of sight vs. mind and now moves to correct the “public mind” of the sort that the comedians, imagined above, tease into consciousness and then scandalize. The very act of working the question up into an eliminatio begins to attenuate its susceptibility to ridicule.

2429

δοτέον ἀμφισβήτησιν (E5). Besides the broad ridicule he has just criticized there is the ridicule that hides behind captious argumentation, which will be Socrates’s next opponent in the defense of the philosophical profundity reached at the end of Book Four.

2430

ἵνα μὴ ἔρημα τὰ τοῦ ἑτέρου λόγου πολιόρκηται (453A8-9): The search for ὁμολογία does not silence opposition, as shame or ridicule would, but converts it.

2431

οὐδὲν δεῖ ὑμῖν ἄλλους ἀμφισβητεῖν (B3): Socrates provided a place for the ἀντίδικος to make his case (δοτέον, 452E5); but the first thing the ἀντίδικος says is that he didn’t need to (B3-4)!

2432

πάμπολυ (B7), colloquial, emphatic, and conveniently vague.

2433

πλεῖστον κεχωρισμένην φύσιν ἔχοντες (C5) much more logically specific than the πάμπολυ it pretends to repeat. The expression is indeed close to one of the endoxic definitions of “the opposite” cited by Aristotle (Met.Δ,1018A27-8; Cat.6A17-18, n.b. πλεῖστον … διεστηκότα).

2434

ἕξεις τι (C6): By shifting from second plural to second singular Socrates stops the prosopopoeia and turns to Glaucon, speaking in his own voice.

2435

ὦ θαυμάσιε (C6). With the vocative Socrates feigns to marvel at the argument. The attack has been combative and ad hominem, and has challenged assent (οὐδὲν δεῖ ἄλλους … αὐτοὶ γὰρ, B3; ἔστιν οὖν ὅπως, B7; πῶς οὐχ ἁμαρτάνετε, C3; and the triumphant gesture we have to imagine accompanying deictic iota in νυνί, C3). Hence Socrates asks Glaucon if he has a defense (ἀπολογεῖσθαι), rather than an answer (ἀποκρίνεσθαι).

2436

δεήσομαί τε καὶ δέομαι (C7). I cannot cite a parallel for the diplosis, unless 457B4 serves as one. Glaucon’s future answers the future in Socrates’s question (What will you do?) pertaining to some imaginary conversation in the future: “What I will do is defer to you” (emphatic σοῦ). The ensuing present is Glaucon’s sincere and personal request, in the present of the conversation between himself and Socrates, that Socrates take on the question since he, Glaucon, cannot.

2437

τὸν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν λόγον (C8) continues the idea that they have been attacked personally.

2438

καί (C8) correlative.

2439

τοῦ περὶ τὴν τῶν γυναικῶν καὶ παίδων κτῆσιν καὶ τροφήν (D23), the complicated topic jammed into the attributive position after τοῦ, revealing a certain difficulty in naming it without buying in to the doxic scandal. Cf. the expressions at 451C5-6, 502D4-5 and 423E6-7.

2440

ταῦτ’ … καὶ ἄλλα πολλά (C10): But it may just as well be Glaucon’s demurral to answer the objection that Socrates refers to! The question as to whether the difficulties Socrates is facing have to do with the λόγος or with his interlocutor, becomes a constant issue during the next forty pages (e.g., n.2723, 450C3-5; n.2850 [δυσαπόδεικτον], and n.2876), as also the distinction between things for which one fears being laughed at (τὸ γελοῖον) and things one laughs at himself (also τὸ γελοῖον).

2441

Even with γάρ (D4), pace Stallb., we can compare this proleptic blanket negative (οὐ μὰ τὸν Δία) followed by specific negation (οὐ γὰρ εὐκόλῳ) with 605E, 484E, 536C; Tht.142E; Xen.Symp.2.4, 4.3; and we can compare (with J.-C.) the very close parallel, Parm.131E6-7, οὐ μὰ τόν Δία … οὔ μοι δοκεῖ εὔκολον εἶναι τὸ τοιοῦτον οὐδαμῶς διορίσασθαι. The force of γάρ is to apologize for the prolepsis.

2442

οὐ γάρ, εἶπον (D5): The “fallacy” of the argument has already been made quite patent by the slip from πάμπολυ to πλεῖστον κεχωρισμένην φύσιν. Raising scandalous arguments does not elicit the best of logic but anger, such as an indignation at the blending of sexual roles that would easily see fit to misuse logic. Socrates feared not πολύ but ταῦτα καὶ ἄλλα πολλὰ τοιαῦτα (C10-D3).

2443

ἢ ἄλλην τινα ἄπορον σωτηρίαν (D10-11). The point is, there is no contradiction in hoping for the unhoped for at the same time that we are doing all we can within our meager powers. Again the modalities of hope and reason are combined (450D1-2), in a way that is tantamount to recognizing that “The evil of the day is sufficient unto the day” while also hoping that “The rest shall be added unto you.”

2444

The language of διαφέρειν (B7) is now replaced with the language of ἄλλος and αὐτός (E3-4).

2445

With κατηγορεῖται (E5) Socrates continues to acknowledge they have been attacked, but his summary of the challenge is now stated in purely rational terms without the personal edge.

2446

ἀντιλογικῆς τέχνης (454A1-2). First reason fought ridicule; now it fights “antireason.” Are these opponents one or two? Surely reason can appear captious to the conventional state of mind, so that it becomes crucial that Socrates distinguish his reason from that of his captious scandalizers.

2447

γενναία (A1): “Humdinger” rather than “noble,” as at 414B9.

2448

λεχθέντος (A7) aorist of the act of assertion, as opposed to the present λεγόμενον one line above, designating what the assertion meant and still means.

2449

διαλέκτῳ (A8) a rare noun (fem.) used to make a pair with the noun ἔρις, just as the two ideas were paired as verbs above (ἐρίζειν, διαλέγεσθαι).

2450

καὶ πρὸς ἡμᾶς (A11): Plainly Glaucon falls among the ἄκοντες of A4.

2451

τὸ τὴν αὐτὴν φύσιν (B4): There is no need, with Burnet, to read the μή of Ven.184 against the older mss. and Galen. Disputation hinges on double negatives; contrast the non-antilogical restatement of their underlying position at 453E3-4, where the casual use of the ἄλλο / ἄλλην construction refers to the same and the different at one and the same time. Fighting that the same don’t need the same is tantamount to fighting that the different don’t need the different.

2452

τοιγάρτοι (C1) intimates that we could act just as irresponsibly as the ἀντιλογικός.

2453

ἀνερωτᾶν (C1). The prefix ἀνα- makes “ask” mean “question:” Unless asking for points of information is the issue (Charm.153D1, Lach.180E7, Tht.143D2, Tim.22A1), the prefix adds a confrontational edge, as when the answer is personal or when it requires or presses the respondent to decide or commit himself to something he hasn’t (Apol.22E1, Gorg.455C8-D1, H.Min.364D1; Leg.793A1, 893A3; Phlb.63C, Thg.123B4). Hence it is used in dialectical conversation, where each question is a step the answerer is being asked to concede (ὁμολογεῖν), as at Gorg.497B7, Leg.629A2, Meno 84D2 (of the slave-boy), Phlb.20A1 and 63C3—and here, where the very framing of the question challenges assent, as it did at 453B7-8. The word presumes the person questioned owes an answer (Ar.Lys.484, Pl.499).

2454

καὶ οὐχ ἡ ἐναντία (C2-3): The antilogical tone returns, pushing for the entrapping answer, as at οὐ πάμπολυ διαφέρει above (453B7).

2455

ἄρα κατ’ ἄλλο τι … γελοῖον (C7): Irrationality can be as laughable as the paradoxical conclusions of reason.

2456

If ὄντα (D2) is to be kept, with all mss., against the excision of Burnet, it must be taken separately with each of ἰατρικόν and ἰατρικήν, understanding ἄνδρα as subject for the one predicate and γυναῖκα as subject for the other, according to the rule of the prevalence of the masculine in such cases (Smyth §1055). The two pairs of examples—female doctorly / male doctorly and male doctorly / male builderly—make the point as swiftly as it can be made.

2457

τέχνην τινὰ ἢ ἄλλο ἐπιτήδευμα (D8), a chiastic hendiadys: the former term brings forward the technical qualification implicit in the examples, which were typical τέχναι; the latter returns us to the term that has been occupying us all along (last used at B9). τινα and ἄλλο then mean almost the same thing.

2458

οὐδὲν μᾶλλον (E1): It is not that the argument from φύσις has become merely empirical (Halliwell ad 454D1) but that since φύσις trumps νόμος, the burden is shifted onto νόμος to give evidence that its provisions have any basis in truth. Such evidence would perforce be empirical. For οὐδὲν μᾶλλον as the formula for such burden shifting cf. n.353.

2459

κελεύομεν (E6). The interlocutor had up to now been a refuter only. By the burden shifting he has become an upholder (the technical term in dialectic is ὑπέχων), in the sense that the proposition he had foisted upon us as self-evident has become a thesis he now has to defend.

2460

διδάσκειν (455A1). The term, along with κελεύομεν, evinces the different tone, polite and calm and dialectical instead of eristic, with which Socrates now advances the contrary argument. If two disagree one might teach the other what he does not know, unless they disagree for disagreement’s sake. Conversely if they come to agree, one has learned. Thus the parties to a dispute can be admonished to “learn and teach” rather than haggle (Crat.427E1-4; Gorg.467B11-C2; Lach.195A4, 196C3-4; Leg.934E5; Phlb.16E; Tht.167D; cf. the fleeting allusion to it at 407A10-11, and the rhetorical use of the idea at the end of this Book, 476E4-6). In true dialectic the questioner becomes the learner and the answerer the teacher. Socrates, who desires above all to know, doesn’t care which role he takes. This is too much for a Thrasymachus to believe (cf.336DE and 338B).

2461

δίκαιον γοῦν (A4). For the “warranted” question cf. 599D1; Gorg.451A1-2, 454A7,B1, 461D2; Meno 85E3; Phdo.86D6.

2462

οὐδὲν χαλεπόν (A7). Glaucon had said a quick answer would be hard, but had not bragged that time would make it easy (453C7). The addition suggests the antilogical interlocutor is still trying to dodge (the plea for time becomes a dodge in the Hippias Major: cf. 295A, 297E1-2, 304D4-5). In the sequel Socrates gooses him along.

2463

ἐάν πως … (B1-2), the same polite and gentle construction Glaucon had used to request Socrates’s help at the beginning of Book Two (358B1: cf.427D3 and n.689). This is a further note in the conciliatory treatment broached above and referred back to, at 476E5-6.

2464

εὐφυῆ / ἀφυῆ (B5).

2465

μακρολογῶμεν (C6), in praeteritio. The term tends to be derogatory. A single extra word is enough to draw the charge (Euthyphr.14B1,B8; Gorg.449B4-9 replying to B2-3 and A7-8 above; and note the hyperbolic use of ἀπέραντον at Tht.147C4). The complaint has to do with pertinence rather than mere length. Sometimes speaking at length is justified (Gorg.465E1-6A2) but usually it is “speechifying” when one should be conversing, obstructing the flow of conversation with unneeded elaboration (cf. 343B-4C; and H.Min.373A2-5; Meno 71E-2A; Prot.335B8 [tendentious]; cf. Alc.I 106B1ff and Soph.217C1-D5, where it means lecturing rather than teaching), sometimes for the benefit of the audience rather than the immediate interlocutor (Gorg. ad init., 482E2-5, 494D1; Prot.328E5-9B5; Tht.162D3). Hence it becomes associated with the sophists (e.g., Prot.334C8-D5 and Philostr. Vit.Soph.1.494) in contrast with the Socratic “method” of question and answer: Gorg.447C1-8, H.Min.364B1-C2.

2466

τήν τε ὑφαντικὴν λέγοντες καὶ τὴν τῶν ποπάνων τε καὶ ἑψημάτων θεραπείαν (C6-7): What makes the list “macrological” is its gratuitous specificity.

2467

καταγελαστότατον (C8): It is a reversal that ridicule is now heaped on the person who believes what is only usually true.

2468

ἡττώμενον (D1), as well as the ensuing κρατεῖται (D2), by standing in contrast with βελτίους (D4), already intimate the stipulation that men as a class possess only physical superiority (cf. E1-2, infra).

2469

διεσπαρμέναι (D8), the empirical perfect (cf. n.1571).

2470

ἀσθενέστερον γυνὴ ἀνδρός (E1-2): Physical strength as a criterion for suitability was not only listed third but also as dependent upon the other two (whence the quaint expression, τὰ τοῦ σώματος ἱκανῶς ὑπηρετοίη τῇ διανοίᾳ, B9).

2471

καὶ γυμναστικὴ δ’ ἄρα οὔ (456A1), reading καί with D (om. AFM Galen Eusebius : del.Burnet,edd.): the statement adds γυμναστική before δ’ἄρα presumptively denies it, ἄρα expressing a feigned access of sudden realization as it does in argumenta ex contrariis (cf. 376B6-D2 and n.1104).

2472

Note (455E6-456A5) the playful substitution and elaboration of expressions for presence and absence of attributes: ἰατρική / οὔ (sc. ἰατρική); μουσική / ἄμουσος (privative ἀ- substituted for οὐ); γυμναστική + πολεμική (positives, though introduced by οὐ in a question anticipating positive response) / ἀπόλεμος + οὐ φιλογυμναστική (supplementary positive prefix φιλο- in connection with negative οὐ); φιλόσοφος / μισόσοφος (μισο- following φιλο- by easy logic at the expense of coining a term); and finally the reversion, in θυμοειδής / ἄθυμος, to the formula used with μουσικός. These embody the natural and casual manner of inductive pacing (on which cf. 333C11-12 and n.197) but also distract the interlocutor from the underlying strategy present in the choice of exemplary material at the same time that they slant the issue away from innate ability toward personal disposition or preference.

2473

After ἰατρική (E6) the items are chosen to collect the attributes that the theoretical investigation had come to require of our leaders (the two aspects of nurture [the παιδεία] and the two aspects of underlying nature [cf. 376C4]), affording therefore the conclusion that women also qualify to be “phylakic” (456A7). The first example, ἰατρική, as well as its pairing with μουσική which truly belongs with gymnastics, is something of a red herring that hides this strategy. It reappears from above, where it served as the first instance of an occupation that might require a peculiar inner nature (454D5). ἰατρική typically represents a maximally crucial skill in which physical strength is least required, in contrast with the skill of the pilot (332D10-E3ff, 341C4-D4, 346AC, 360E6ff; cf. Polit.297E11-12ff), and of the general (Charm.173B1-3; Leg.709B2-3, 961E-62A; and end of Euthyd.279D8-80A5), which need more. Cf. also Phlb.56B1-2; Prot.344D2-5.

2474

φυλακική (A7), recalling the coinage at 412E6 (cf. 412C10 and n.1843).

2475

The ἢ οὐ clause (A7-8) functions as a Q.E.D. The list of attributes we can expect to find among women as well as among men moves along by its own inner logic until it reaches the item (φυλακὴ πόλεως) that all along had been the goal.

2476

ἔστιν ἄρα καὶ φυλακικὴ γυνή (A7): After this fundamental conclusion, the corollaries are drawn with triumphant parallelism: καὶ γυναικὸς ἄρα (A10), καὶ γυναῖκες ἄρα (B1).

2477

συνοικεῖν τε καὶ συμφυλάττειν (B2): The expression looks back to 451D4-6 as well as to the description of the way living and guarding are combined in the description of the guards’ regime on the last page of Book Three.

2478

ὁμολογοῦμεν (B8), the goal of dialectical conversation.

2479

τῶν φυλάκων (B9): The women have now been added in and φυλάκων might be partitive genitive rather than possessive as it was just above (454E3-4: τούς τε φύλακας … καὶ τὰς γυναῖκας αὐτῶν).

2480

εὐχαῖς (B12), from εὐχή (450D1), here in the derogatory plural of a ridiculing critic.

2481

εἴπερ κατὰ φύσιν ἐτίθεμεν τὸν νόμον (C1): That φύσις and νόμος should be aligned gets the best of both worlds, but more, it explodes the indignant objection that Socrates’s flabbergasting policy is kookie.

2482

γε (C5): The “program” comes from 450C6-9 but broadly overstates that passage, which had only represented a sputtering indignant attack (“First of all it’s just impossible; but besides it’s a lousy idea!”) Socrates is taming down the emotional aspect of the objection, step by step.

2483

δυνατά γε καὶ βέλτιστα λέγοιμεν (C4-5): The expression omits a noun. Compare the restatement at the end of this argument (457A3-4 and n.2490).

2484

ὑπολαμβάνειν παρὰ σεαυτῷ (D5) is pleonastic, continuing the pleonasm of πῶς ἔχεις δόξης πέρι in the previous question. Pointedly, Socrates asks him not whether he believes it but whether he has a belief about it. δόξα tends to replace questions with presumptive answers, and therefore tends to have forgotten where those answers came from.

2485

οὐδαμῶς (D7): He has already expressed the belief that persons are not equally competent at 455D3-5.

2486

ἐξειργάσθαι (D9): The perfect emphasizes the result rather than the process, and refers to the guards as a class. They were already better men than the ones who learned trades. Contrast the aorist below (457A1) which emphasizes the increment of improvement attributable to the παιδεία.

2487

τῇ σκυτικῇ παιδευθέντες (D10): Notably, there was no specific provision to train them (beyond tutelage in the trade provided by their fathers: 421E1-2). The references to the rest of the city (τῶν ἄλλων πολίτων, D12; first called ἡ ἄλλη πόλις at the end of Book Three [414C2, D3, E5; cf.465B9, 467B4]; and then οἵ τε γεωργοὶ καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι δημιουργοί [415A6-7; cf.C2]) are few and unsystematic because the subject is unimportant (cf. οὐδὲν δεινόν, 421A5).

2488

γελοῖον (D11). The theoretical project is by now taken seriously enough to make a comparison to common life laughable, despite the fact that for conventional purposes only common life is real.

2489

On μανθάνω in response (D12) cf. 372E2 and n.1050.

2490

οὐ μόνον ἄρα δυνατὸν ἀλλὰ καὶ ἄριστον καὶ πόλει νόμιμον ἐτίθεμεν (457A3-4), imitating the omission of noun in the parallel construction at 456C4-5, the plurals changed to singular, ἐτίθεμεν replacing λέγοιμεν (itself representing an imperfect in secondary sequence), and ἄριστον replacing βέλτιστα. πόλει νόμιμον is a surprise predicate, insisting, contrary to the indignant objector, that the new provision is not only κατὰ φύσιν after all but could become νόμιμον for a city.

2491

ἀποδυτέον δή (A6). Agreement having been reached, Socrates now (with δή) places a picture before his interlocutor's eyes, as he did some forty pages ago (416D3ff) only to elicit the objection of the onlooker Adeimantus; and as he had some forty pages before that (372A5ff) only to elicit the objection of the onlooker Glaucon. It has been these pictures, these ecphrastic descriptions, that have especially provoked his interlocutors’ dissent or sealed their assent. The theoretical and the actual; the rational, the hoped for, and the ridiculous, are all forced to encounter each other. Which shall win out? The story of Leontius comes to mind.

2492

ἀτελῆ … σοφίας δρέπειν καρπόν (B2-3), a quotation later attributed to Pindar as his criticism of the φυσιολογοῦντες by the Vit.Pindari Ambrosiana (Schol.Pind.1.4,6 Drachmann) and by Stob.2.1.21 (2.7,18 Wachsmuth-Hense) = fr.209 Schroeder, fr.248 Turyn. The premature harvest makes small gains where a larger could have been had if one had waited. Pindar’s criticism might be analogous to Heraclitus’s criticism of Ionian φυσιολογία and Socrates’s criticism of the περὶ φύσεως ἱστορία in Phdo.96Aff, namely, the shallow use of reason.

I disagree with those who imagine Plato is here co-opting Pindar as a representative of poetry in its “quarrel” with philosophy, into the philosophical group. There is no “quarrel” (cf. n.5052 ad 607B5), but more to the point, the theme of Book Five is the power of ridicule and mass opinion and of the φθόνος that underlies them, which is not only one of Pindar’s greatest subjects but is also in Plato's oeuvre shown to be at the center of the feeling that brought on Socrates’s demise, to the shame of Athens.

2493

οὐδὲν οἶδεν (B3). What makes him laughable is that he does not understand; but this implies that only the knower will laugh at him – so, again, the tables are turned.

2494

καὶ λέγεται καὶ λελέξεται (B4), true now and always because not resting on fashion. Cf. δεήσομαί τε καὶ δέομαι, 453C7-8.

2495

λέγοντες (B8) stresses that reason has not only stayed laughter and embarrassment, but also has come to a reconciliation with the captious sophistry that turned reason against itself (cf. λόγος at 453A8, C8, D10, and the methodological digression on ἀντιλογική, 454A1-D1). Hence the striking expression τὸν λόγον αὐτὸν αὑτῷ ὁμολογεῖσθαι below (C1-2).

2496

καὶ τὰς φυλακίδας (C1): The coinage φυλακίς is Aristophanic. Humor, once put in its place, can be called back out to add a charm of self-satire.

2497

τὰς γυναῖκας ταύτας τῶν ἀνδρῶν τούτων πάντων πάσας (C10): The word order weaves from women to men and with πάντων πάσας back again.

2498

τὰς γυναῖκας (D7): γυνή has meant “woman” up until now; but now “wife,” its simultaneous other meaning, becomes operant.

2499

λέγεις … λόγων σύστασιν (E2).

2500

διδόναι λόγον (E6), identical to playing the role of answerer in dialectical conversation, and therefore synonymous with ὑπέχειν λόγον, which is half of what Socrates has in mind when he next says ὑφεκτέον δίκην, accepting his liability for giving a rational defense for law.

2501

ὅταν μόνοι πoρεύωνται (458A2): The archetype behind Rousseau’s promeneur solitaire comes inevitably to mind in the ensuing lines (A2-B1), but also the leisurely activity of spinning tales in general, and Aristotle’s distinction between ἃ ἐγένετο and οἷα ἂν γένοιτο (Po.1451B4-5). We are moving out of the light of the forum and into the shade of the trees. μαλθακίζομαι (B1) brings on board all of the coarser man’s derision of the more poetic types. All in all we have an embryonic definition of fiction.

2502

οἱ ἄρχοντες / οἵ τε τούτοις ἐπίκουροι (B9-C1). The distinction is drawn at the end of Book Three (412B8-414A7) and pace Halliwell has nothing to do with philosophical training and little to do with age. The criterion of age (412C2-3) was merely a starting point there (based on 409A7-C1), subsumed immediately into the main criterion, which was the purity and strength of their souls (already mentioned at 409A5-6), for which several tests were then described (412D9-414A4).

2503

Reading αὐτοῖς with the Parisinus 1642 apud Slings (cf. tr.Ficino, partim ipsis parentes legibus) rather than αὐτούς of the major mss., which introduces the spurious notions that the rulers “actually” believe in some laws and not others, and that they enforce the ones they do not believe in in order to imitate or emulate “us.”

2504

ὅσα ἂν ἐκείνοις ἐπιτρέψωμεν (C4), referring of course to their refusal to legislate details: 423D8-424A2, 425A3-27A7; including of course the dismissal that Polemarchus resuscitated in order to interrupt the flow of the argument, which interruption caused the present digression!

2505

παραδώσεις (C7), as of a father assigning his daughter to her betrothed.

2506

οὔ γεωμετρικαῖς γε ... (D5): On ἀνάγκη of logical necessity cf. n.199. Glaucon strengthens Socrates's notional neuter plural (ἀναγκαῖα, D3) with a truly nominal plural (ἀνάγκαις) in order to replace abstraction with something more concrete.

2507

τὸν πολὺν λεών (D7), perhaps comic diction (e.g.Ar.Ran.219, 676; cf. also Lucian Hermot.72[815 Jac.]; Harm.2[853 Jac.]), expressing a certain disdain, the opposite side of ridicule.

2508

οὔτε ὅσιον … οὐ γὰρ δίκαιον: (E1-2): again the pairing of ὅσιον and δίκαιον in compendious reference to virtue, like our “right and good.” Cf. n.101.

2509

ἄκρων (459B11): Here the term is used in a truly approbative way for the first time, as at E1 below: hitherto it had been a term of troubled praise for a canny astuteness in the service of lesser ideals, used first by the troubled brothers (360E7, cf. 366B5-6 and 405A8). Another term has now been re-appropriated to a higher purpose.

2510

ἀνδρεῖος (C6) notably functions as the opposite of φαῦλος, here (C4-6). It has exactly the same sense at it had at 357A3.

2511

ἔφαμεν δέ που (D1): Referring to 389B with the imperfect of citation.

2512

With τοίνυν (D4) and with the “second person” demonstrative, τοῦτο (D5), Socrates implicates his interlocutor as an abettor of his radical plan, as does his division between the herd of guards over against the rule who manage them (E2-3) with whom his interlocutor is meant to identify. Moreover he cathes up Glaucon's use of ὀρθῶς (Glauc. καὶ ὀρθῶς γε | Soc. τὸ ὀρθὸν τοῦτο: D3-5) just as Adeimantus had caught him up at the beginning of the Book (Soc. οὐκοῦν ὀρθῶς; | Adeimant. ἀλλὰ τὸ ὀρθῶς τοῦτο: 449C6-7), as embodying the gravamen of the matter concerning wives and childen. The incumbency to answer that Adeimantus had there forced upon Socrates is now being forced by Socrates upon Glaucon as an incumbency to rise to the occasion and agree.

2513

ἀκρότατον (E1): The superlative invokes the notion of gradual improvement toward a peak of perfection.

2514

τοῖς γιγνομένοις γάμοις (460A1-2): The participle invokes the particulars of the marriage occasion and insists that the poem be suited to them, just as Pindar’s praise blends perennial issues (his τεθμός) with the specifics supplied by his client (his χρέος).

2515

αἰτιᾶσθαι (A9): Presumably the complaint of the φαῦλος is that he is assigned very seldom.

2516

που (B2) adds a note of indifference. The grounds for the awards are merely a πρόφασις for arranging more matings for them.

2517

γέρα δοτέον καὶ ἆθλα ἄλλα τε καὶ ἀφθονέστερα ἡ ἐξουσία τῆς τῶν γυναικῶν συγκοιμήσεως (B2-3). γέρα/ ἆθλα is an exhaustive pair (honorific privileges and memorials: cf. 503A6-7, 414A2-4, and 516C8-9 where τιμαί replaces γέρα), 465D9-E2 (where ταφή replaces ἆθλα), and 608C1-2 (where ἐπίχειρα replaces γέρα). The usual rewards are mere foil meant to serve as distractions from the underlying strategy of maximizing the matings for the better guards. Thus they are dismissed with a rather unique ἄλλως τε καί construction, ἄλλα going with both γέρα and ἆθλα since it dismisses the whole concept of traditional awards they jointly embody. For the non-agreement of singular active verbal plural nominatives cf. 403B1.

2518

The language of αἰτία (A9) and πρόφασις (B4) acknowledges the process by which contention among the guards or their helpers, broached at 459E3, might arise. On the terms cf. the indispensable study by Lionel Pearson (TAPA 83[1952]205-223).

2519

ὀρθῶς (B6), the fourth time Glaucon uses this term to agree, echoing the challenge Adeimantus made at the beginning of the Book (τὸ ὀρθῶς τοῦτο, 449C7: cf.nn.2376, 2381, 2409). Cf. also 461B3, B8, and E4 below.

2520

οἰκούσας (C2) feminine because the feeders are female. τροφούς is either able to be both masculine and feminine (pace LSJ) or we have a constructio ad sensum, where, as Smyth says (§1013), “The real, not the grammatical, gender ... determines the agreement.”

2521

Reading μέλλοι (C6) with all mss. rather than the μέλλει of the recentiores (and Vindob.54 according to Chambry) accepted by modern editors. S.R. Slings (Critical Notes on Plato’s Politeia [= Mnemos.Suppl.267: Leiden 2005] 87-8) compares Phdrs.274A6-7, Tht.162B5-6. The optative continues the dominant theme of this Book, that the conceptual realm of reason is to be their guide.

2522

ταῖς τῶν φυλάκων γυναιξίν (D6-7): either “those of the guards that are female” (as at 456B9), or “the wives of the guards”—the “extension” of the two expressions is the same. The point is that the toils of motherhood will be greatly mitigated for the guards, which in Glaucon’s mind at least had been a primary obstacle to the credibility of the program: cf. 450C4: ἡ δὴ ἐπιπονωτάτη δοκεῖ εἶναι.

2523

ὃ προυθέμεθα (D8-9): at 459B1-3.

2524

τίκτειν and γεννᾶν (E5-6), are the only jobs the male and female guards do not share: cf. τίκτειν / ὀχεύειν at 454D10-E1.

2525

οὔτε ὅσιον οὔτε δίκαιον (461A4): The pair needs no analysis: cf. 458D9-E2 and n.101. The double litotes seems to be idiomatic (458D9-E2, 463D5, and perhaps 391A2-3).

2526

τῇ πόλει (A7), the dative used for the eugenically controlled contribution as at 460E6, E5 and below at 461B7.

2527

καί (A8) inferential. Their goodness (the nobility of their stock) entails their being beneficial to the city. Cf. 459A1.

2528

ἀνέγγυον καὶ ἀνίερον (B6) echoes οὔτε ὅσιον οὔτε δίκαιον (A4).

2529

πατέρας δὲ καὶ θυγατέρας (C8-D1): Abbreviation of all four cases by mentioning (chiastically) the last and the first. The meaning of ἀλλήλων is for once not reciprocal (cf. 449B1 and 616D7). They are not to decide who are each other’s daughters and fathers, but who are the women’s fathers and who the men’s daughters, respectively.

2530

δεκατῷ μηνὶ καὶ ἑβδόμῳ δή (D3), with καί moving from the easy assertion to the extreme case, as μέγα … καὶ ὅλον (449D4-5 and n.2382). On δή cf. Denniston 291.

2531

ἡ Πυθία (E3): Once again deferring to Delphi caps off an area of legislation: cf.427BC and 540BC.

2532

βεβαιώσασθαι παρὰ τοῦ λόγου (E8), again emphasizing reliance on reason. Cf. λέγοντες 457B8 and n.3121.

2533

ἥδε (462A2), first person.

2534

ὁμολογίας (A2): The current business of overcoming paradox with a deeper reliance on reason, is again emphasized (cf. 456B8, C7, C9, 457C1-2 and n.2495). Where we speak of paradoxes being “resolved” Socrates speaks of us “agreeing” them away.

2535

ἐκεῖνο (A9) refers back to the conversation with Adeimantus in Book Four (422E7-423B10), as the re-use of peculiar plural, πολλάς (sc. πόλεις) indicates. No particular cause of disunity is there named, though the problem that passage addressed was the divisive effect of the single individual’s desire for wealth and power (πλεονεξία) that had been embodied in Adeimantus’s remarks.

2536

τοῦ (B1), the article functioning as a demonstrative even in Attic prose, not uncommon before a relative (Smyth, §1116).

2537

γιγνομένων τε καὶ ἀπολλυμένων / χαίρωσι καὶ λυπῶνται (B5-6), binary in the distributive sense (i.e., A is a-ing and B is b-ing): cf. 362C2-3 and n.774. The participles are neuter and form an hendiadys referring to the transient and vicissitudinous character of human existence (whence the expression παθήμασι below). The importance of united feeling was first recognized during the treatment of σωφροσύνη (432A2-6) but here the words of the song that was there being sung are revealed. At the beginning of Book Four Adeimantus was seeing the very green grass on the other side of the fence. To object (with Halliwell) that they should say “ours” rather then “mine” confuses cause with result, the “ours” being nothing but a spontaneous chorus of “mine’s.”

2538

παθήμασι (C1) compendious for τὰ γιγνόμενά τε καὶ ἀπολλύμενα at B5-6.

2539

τῆς πόλεώς τε καὶ τῶν ἐν τῇ πόλει (C1) broaches proleptically the analysis into parts and whole that will come next.

2540

δάκτυλος (C11): The finger is chosen for the illustration because it is a small but distinct part of a man that by its shape almost appears to be attached to him, and therefore detachable.

2541

τεταμένη (C12), another borrowing from the previous treatment of σωφροσύνη (τέταται, 432A3 and n.2160), where the same voice and tense of the verb is used to describe the binding tension that unifies the parts of the city.

2542

ὁ αὐτὸς γάρ (D6): Glaucon agrees with the points in reverse order, i.e. last point first (cf. n.199).

2543

τὸ πάσχον (E1-2), a neuter replacing the hypothetical πολίτης (masc.) suggesting we understand μέρος with it (from D4), and thus tightening the analogy between the state with its citizens and the individual man with his “parts.”

2544

μάλιστά τε φήσει … καὶ ἢ συνησθήσεται ἢ συλλυπήσεται (E1-2). The position of μάλιστα is striking and creates (with τε) a sort of reverse ἄλλως τε καί construction. For the constellation of materials in the form A/B1/B2 cf. Euthyd.271B4-5; Gorg.457D6, 479B8-C1, 483B6-8, 508C6-7 (A~ἑαυτόν as here); H.Maj.304B2-3 (A~ἑαυτόν); Leg.744B6 (B1/B2 exegetical), 766E1-2 ( B1/B2 exegetical), 776D8-E1(A~ἑαυτόν), 782A6-7, 803E1-2, 933A2-3, 950E5-6; Meno 75C8-9 (B1/B2 exegetical); Phdo.85E3-4; Phlb.17E4-5, 22A3; Polit.262D3-4; Prot.325A6; Rep.395E1-2, 411D3-4, 431B9-C3, 476B4-5, 528A4-5, 588A9-10 ( B1/B2 exegetical); Soph.219D5-6, 260C8-9; Symp.219D4-5 ( B1/B2 exegetical). The form is essentially a doublet with sub-differentiated second, to be distinguished from the device of subdividing the last element of a list to effect closure (on which cf. 342E10-11 and n.426), of which it can be seen as the limit case. For the variation of connectives cf. n.2401.

2545

ὁμολογήματα (E5). Cf. n.2222.

2546

αὐτή (E6): “she as she is.” As accented the adjective is very close to what would be a pronominal use in the nominative. Perhaps we should read αὑτή (cf.463D6, 431D9-E2 [with 431D4-5]).

2547

ἄρχοντές τε καὶ δῆμος (463A2), τε / καί forming an hendiadys as the preceding singular verb ἔστι helps us anticipate.

2548

δεσπότας (A8).

2549

Reading τοὔνομα (A9) with the mss., which Burnet does print (pace Slings) despite his misgivings.

2550

Filling in the matrix in a meandering way and all other casual order is characteristic of dialectical conversation (cf. n.155).

2551

προειπεῖν (B11): It is because the “normal” meaning of family and family relations is being modified or extended by this paradoxical community of wives that a “nominalist” approach becomes necessary for purposes of conversation.

2552

καὶ πολλούς γε (B13), referring only to the number that address each other ὡς ἀλλότριον (B13), again answering the whole by answering only the last (cf.462D6 and n.199).

2553

παρά σοι (C3) again the ethical dative of the theoretician (cf. 371A8 and n.1004).

2554

τε (D1) can, as here, append an illustration as at 412B3, 430A6-B2, 465C1 and C2, 555A2; cf. Leg.809B4 (“explanatory,” Eng. ad loc.), 931B5-C1, 956E5. It can even append an inference, as at Leg.942C1 (ἑνί τε λόγῳ).

2555

μήτε … αὐτῷ ἄμεινον ἔσεσθαι (D3-4): For the idiom οὐκ ἄμεινον cf. 554D2.

2556

ὑμνήσουσιν (D7): Cf. 329B2 and n.54. The expression again shows that οὔτε ὅσια οὔτε δίκαια (D5) is an unanalytic formula (cf. 461A4).

2557

γελοῖον γάρ (E1): Glaucon uses these admonitory words as if their mere utterance will cause familial deed to follow familial word! Another step has been taken in the revolutionary realignment of word and deed, paradox and convention, honor and ridicule that is being reached by agreements, one after another, in this Book, even though at the same time by any normal way of looking at things more and more preposterous institutions are being promulgated!

2558

συμφωνήσουσιν (E3), drawing from the audibility of φῆμαι and ὑμνήσουσιν above, to take us back again, via the unanimity of 462C3-8, to the chorus singing in unison imagined during the original discussion of σωφροσύνη (430E3, 431E7-432A9).

2559

ἔφαμεν (464A1), points to the connection first made between ᾔσθετο and συνήλγησεν (462D1), and then repeated at E1-2.

2560

With μάλιστα (A10) Glaucon acknowledges the μάλιστα ’s in Socrates’s argument (463E3; 464A4, A6), which had made it an argument of degree and acknowledges thereby that he agrees with it as such.

2561

ὡμολογήσαμεν (B1): Socrates refers to 462A2-E3, with εὖ οἰκουμένην (B2) corresponding to οὗ δεῖ στοχαζόμενον τὸν νομοθέτην τιθέναι τοὺς νόμους at the beginning (462A4-5) and Glaucon’s stipulation τόν γε εὔνομον at the end (462E3).

2562

πέφανται (B5): Dialectical φαίνομαι in the perfect: cf. n.205.

2563

τοῦ μεγίστου ἄρα ἀγαθοῦ (B5). The superlative fulfills the desideratum that they show how the provision makes the city μακρῷ βελτίστη (461E7). Halliwell’s remark ad loc., that “Plato’s proposals are meant to be nothing if not challenging,” comes very close to the right way to be hearing the conversation. For me all that needs to be changed in it is that it is Socrates who is doing the challenging, and Glaucon (and we) who are being challenged for bringing it all back up on behalf of Adeimantus and the others (and us, perhaps). This will become clear when the question of “feasibility” is finally faced (472A1-473B3).

2564

ἡ κοινωνία τοῖς ἐπικούροις τῶν παίδων καὶ γυναικῶν (B6): The phrase is a reverse version of ἡ τῶν γυναικῶν τε καὶ παίδων κοινωνία τοῖς φύλαξιν (A8-9), forming an apodotic chiasm before and after the conclusion (for which cf.327B1 and n.14). The ἄρχοντες or φύλακες were called σωτῆράς τε καὶ ἐπικούρους (sc. τοῦ δήμου) at 463B1, and it is in this broader sense that ἐπίκουροι is used here, as opposed to its narrower sense of the φυλάκων ἐπίκουροι (first at 415C4-5 and most recently at 458C1).

2565

ὁμολογοῦμεν (B8), the first of the two desiderata (ἑπομένη τε τῇ ἄλλῃ πολιτείᾳ καὶ μακρῷ βελτίστη, 461E7), which are being satisfied in reverse order.

2566

ἰδίας(B9) hearkens back, through 462B8, 458C9, and 457D1, to the last page of Book Three (416D5 and 417A6); just as the brief list of possessions (οἰκία, γῆ, κτῆμά τι) echoes 417A6-7, which Adeimantus’s speech had taken up on the next page (419A5-7, the beginning of Book Four).

2567

κοινῇ πάντας ἀναλίσκειν (C2) refers to ταμιεῖον μηδενί (416D6) and ὅσον μήτε περιεῖναι (E2) as well as to the summary expression κοινῇ ζῆν (E4).

2568

ὄντως φύλακες (C3), in contrast to what they might otherwise become, as sketched at 417A6-B6. For the expression cf. 421A5-6, A8.

2569

διασπᾶν (C7) used at 462B1.

2570

εἰς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ (C8-9): Socrates is recalling the way Adeimantus’s imaginary house at the beginning of Book Four developed into a private compound or even a cosmos unto itself in the course of his speech (419A5-10 and n.1967). Again the idea is broached that greed (πλεονεξία) is not the desire to have more than you do but more than someone else does (cf. n.474), which is what compelled Adeimantus’s happy man to populate his house with foreigners.

2571

ἑτέραν (D1, cf. D2) stresses not difference but comparison and the odium it incites.

2572

τείνοντας (D4): The present expresses vividly and conatively what the perfect middle (432A3, 462C12) had expressed dynamically and systematically.

2573

ὁμοπαθεῖς (D4): cf. 409B1-2, where note the iota of difference.

2574

διὰ χρημάτων ἢ παίδων ἢ συγγενῶν κτῆσιν (E1-2): outside the context of the κοινωνία the list would be παῖδες καὶ χρήματα καὶ γυναῖκες (e.g., 423E6-7; cf. Gorg.511E1-3).

2575

πλὴν τὸ σῶμα (D9): Contention over possessions having been obviated by the very removal of possessions, their bodies remain to fight over—a slightly ridiculous and Aristophanic conception.

2576

δίκαι δικαίως (E4) almost a pun. The argument reached a climax at 464D3-5; next, as at 442E1-2ff, we have corroboration on the vulgar level (proceeding on the pedestrian level of eliminatio of like to like, older to younger, younger to older), but this time the transition is not announced.

2577

μέν (E5) indicates a division is coming up, whose structure is then implied by ἥλιξι / ἥλικας.

2578

ἄρχειν τε καὶ κολάζειν (465A5): Specifying ἄρχειν with κολάζειν makes a euphemism for τύπτειν (A10 below).

2579

οὔτε ἄλλο βιάζεσθαι … οὔτε τύπτειν (A9-10), a virtual ἄλλως τε καί construction, based on the distinction drawn above between βίαια in general and αἰκία in particular (464E4).

2580

πανταχῇ δή (B5): An inference from the eliminatio (464D6-B4). Contentions rely on possessions, including (1) money and family and (2) one’s own body, the latter consisting of contentions between (2A) contemporaries or (2B) older and younger or (2C) younger and older.

2581

ἄνδρες is used (B6) not to exclude γυναῖκες who have since been included among the guards (though ignored in the present context dealing with violent behavior), but to avoid the impersonal tone of ἄνθρωποι. Cf. 361B6 and n.753.

2582

ἡ ἄλλη πόλις (B9) all but the rulers and their helpers (cf. 434A9 and n.2183).

2583

πένητες (C2), nominative (seclusit Ast), in a constructio ad sensum requiring us to draw a verb out of κολακείας, the verbal quality of that noun already having been brought to the surface by the objective genitive, πλουσίων.

By its nature praeteritio broadens the description of what is to be passed over on the least pretext, by syntactical wedges of this sort. First, τε (C2) indicates that κολακείας will have something added to it, but before that happens it is elaborated by the objective genitive (πλουσίων); and while we wait for an accusative parallel to κολακείας we discover instead the nominative (we may call it a subjective nominative). Finally we get the accusative, ἀπορίας, tacked on by τε; and while we might suspect it will be modified by a genitive parallel to πλουσίων we get an elaboration of the accusative itself, ἀλγηδόνας, announced, rather than tacked on, by καί. Only then do we get the elaboration we expected, this time with a clause rather than a “verbal genitive.”

The clause buys a new syntactical frame so that the nouns no longer need to be extenuated by verbal genitives and nominatives. Immediately ὅσας confesses that a quantity of items will be passed over, and buys the opportunity to double the nouns, παιδοτροφίᾳ and χρηματισμοῖς. These verbal nouns in turn, like κολακείας above, again import through the back door a subject for the verb ἴσχουσι. Having then purchased place for the mention of home economics (τροφὴν οἰκετῶν ἀναγκαίαν) he may then divide the economic strategies with two straightforward participles (τὰ μέν, τὰ δέ) capped by a very elaborate third (note doubled circumstantial participles θέμενοι and παραδόντες).

Finally he summarizes what he will pass over with a generalizing relative clause, unstintingly adding οἷα to the expected ὅσα (C6, parallel to C2); and forgets that the original construction and peg from which the whole elaboration was hung—the accusative dependent upon λέγειν (C1) standing in apposition to τά γε μὴν σμικρότατα (B12)—and adds the assertion that what he has left out are obvious, ignoble, and not worth mentioning. The severe limitation on the guards amassing treasure (416D6) has now been countered by a list of exemptions from needing one.

2584

δῆλά τε δὴ καὶ ἀγεννῆ καὶ οὐκ ἄξια λέγειν (C7): The first two items present the warrant for the third (as at Crito 47B1-2 and Polit.301D2-3), a special case of the constellation A1/A2/B (for which cf. also 556C1-2 and Leg.633C8-D2 [πόθους / ἡδονάς corresponding to φόβους / λύπας above, making τινας δεινὰς θωπείας into B], 669E6-7, 897B7-8 [πάσης τῆς περιόδου being a generalization]). This triadic constellation is to be distinguished from the localized device of splitting the first item to start a list (e.g.602D8; Leg.709B2-3, 927E6-7; Menex.249B5-6; Phdrs.247C6-7; Tim.37E1), of which it is the limit case (compare and contrast A/B1/B2, n.2544).

2585

τε (D2): The parallel construction suggests comparison by understatement.

2586

μακαριστοῦ and μακαριώτερον (D3) climactically answer Adeimantus’s remark at 419A9.

2587

εὐδαιμονίζονται (D5). εὐδαιμονία is the general term that the μακαρ- language always trumps: cf. nn.254,1975.

2588

τῶνδε (D6): The first person demonstrative replaces the second person τούτοις which had already been contrasted with third person ἐκεῖνοι (D5), so as to add a note of triumph and pride for their construction.

2589

The τε … τε ... construction (D6-7) is strikingly repeated from just above (D2-3) and repeated again just below (D7-8) where it is then extended (καὶ γέρα ...). The three instances cumulatively elevate the tone (the nearby uses of double τε above [C1-2] and below [466C7-8] are fortuitous).

2590

τροφῇ τε καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις πᾶσιν (D8): I.e., the σίτησις ἐν πρυτανείῳ Socrates mentions as a fitting “penalty” in the Apology (37A1).

2591

The comparanda, νίκη and τροφή (D7-9) are supplemented by the conventional doublet γέρα / ἆθλα (on which cf. 460B1-2 and n.2517), ornately composed into a parallelism (γέρα δέχονται / ταφῆς μετέχουσιν) and linked with a chiasm made by subordinate participles in τε καί (ζῶντές τε καὶ τελευτήσαντες).

2592

Socrates says οὐκ οἶδα ὅτου (E4-5) not to commemorate that Adeimantus’s objector remained unnamed so much as to exonerate Adeimantus from any further embarrassment for having brought the objection, which clearly was his own (cf. n.1986). Socrates has a quiet ability to avoid confrontation in order to keep the logos going: cf. 373A1 (with nn.1057, 1055), 420B3-421C6 (with nn.1996, 2005), 471B7, 489A8, 489B8 (with n.2883), 489C9, 504C3, and 588B1-8.

2593

With οἷς ἐξόν (466A1) Socrates refers to Adeimantus’s vague genitive, ὧν ἔστι (419A3: cf. n.1966) which even there he clarified as ἐξέσται αὐτοῖς (420A4); and, with τὰ τῶν πολίτων, uses the genitive as Adeimantus had there meant it. The word underlying it all is ἐξουσία.

2594

μέμνημαι (A7). Glaucon answers Socrates's μέμνησαι (E4), agreeing to the intervening question, and with this single word joins Socrates in demurring to mention Adeimantus.

2595

ἐπίκουροι (A8). The term was derogatory in Adeimantus’s peroration (419A10) but has since been redeemed by passages like 463B1.

2596

πολύ τε καλλίων καὶ ἀμείνων (A9): Simply the comparative of καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός.

2597

For κατά (B1) cf. οὐ κατὰ τούτους, Apol.17B6.

2598

ὅ γε καὶ ἐκεῖ ἔλεγον (B4) refers to 421A2-C6, where the welfare of the whole city is said to rest on the guards remaining guards. For the proverb cf. Hesiod WD 40-1 (quoted again at Leg.690E2-3: cf. Greg.Cyp.(cod.leid.)289 [=PG 2.83] and D.L.1.75[Pittacus]). As the sequel in Hesiod reveals (οὐδ’ ὅσον ἐν μαλάχῃ τε καὶ ἀσφοδελῷ μέγ’ ὄνειαρ), the proverb does not advocate an astute calculation to cut one’s losses, but praises the gift of simplicity (cf. also ὀλίγον ἀποτεμόμενος apud D.L., loc.cit.). It is akin to the proverb, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too” (which, incidentally, advocates eating the cake while it is still fresh). The guard’s life is the best in the city (let him eat) but if he reaches for “more” he will lose even what he has (there will be nothing to eat). The meaning of Hesiod’s assertion ἐν μαλάχῃ τε καὶ ἀσφοδελῷ μέγ' ὄνειαρ was lost on Glaucon, also, when he objected to the humble fare of the original city (372C2).

A question lurks, almost unbearable to answer: What is the value of the cake possessed if it is not eaten? The answer is that it allows you to continue believing you truly desire it, while at the same time it causes others to envy you for having it. The impossibility (“can’t”) only means that your desire that they desire your cake requires you to perform the logically impossible task of thinking the cake desirable at the same time that you desire not to eat it yourself. By analogy, in the case of Adeimantus’s concupiscent vision at 419A it is foreigners he imagines regaling (ξενοδοκοῦντες, 419A7)—so that he can be seen to be regaling by his fellow citizens, whom at the same time he excludes.

2599

οἰκειοῦσθαι (C1) tellingly identifies the psychological fantasy Adeimantus exhibited when he imagined the ruler turning his own home (οἰκία) into a private cosmos (419A5-10 and n.1967). Contrast Socrates’s more concrete expression at 464C8-9, on which he here relies (including διὰ δύναμιν for ὅτι ἂν δύνηται).

2600

τῷ ὄντι (C2) is seldom gratuitous or otiose in Plato.

2601

παιδείας τε πέρι καὶ παίδων καὶ φυλακῆς τῶν ἄλλων πολίτων (C7-8). While φυλακή refers to their duties as guards, the former two terms refer to the question of childrearing as Glaucon had articulated it at 450C1-4 (τίς ἡ κοινωνία παίδων τε πέρι καὶ γυναικῶν … καὶ τροφῆς νέων ἔτι ὄντων τῆς ἐν τῷ μεταξὺ χρόνῳ γιγνομένης γενέσεώς τε καὶ παιδείας ...), with τροφή now done with παιδεία. Note the chiastic order of before and after (παιδεία / παῖδες // παῖδες / τροφή).

2602

συμφυλάττειν … καὶ συνθηρεύειν ὥσπερ κύνας (C9-D1) expands upon φυλακῆς above, referring back to the beginning of the argument when their sex was shown, by analogy with dogs, not to disqualify them for the military work (451D4-E2: τὰ θηλείας τῶν φυλάκων κυνῶν … συμφυλάττειν), enabling Socrates to introduce the distinction between peacetime duties and wartime, which he will next elaborate (E1ff).

2603

ἐκεῖνο (D6), referring to the question of “feasibility” that Socrates had begged to defer at 457E1-458B7. Imagining the communism in existence has meanwhile been pleasurable, as Socrates had there suggested it would be (χαίρουσιν διεξίοντες οἷα δράσουσι γενομένου, 458A6-7).

2604

ἔφθης … εἰπὼν ᾗ ἔμελλον ὑπολήψεσθαι (D9): the first indication that Glaucon has become eager for Socrates to address the question of “possibility.” For the expression cf. Phdo.100C1-2.

2605

περὶ μὲν γὰρ τῶν ἐν τῷ πολέμῳ (E1) refers immediately to εἰς πόλεμόν τε ἰούσας (C9). μέν and γὰρ suggest the point is so obvious that it can be passed over and they can move on to the question just raised, but what happens is quite the opposite. J.-C. and Adam ad loc. are quick to praise the “dexterity” (Plato’s, that is) of the transition, on the grounds that postponing the arrival of the third wave makes it more impressive. But what we have here is a conversation between Glaucon and Socrates: what happens to Glaucon’s eagerness? What can it mean to say that it is dexterously ignored? What is closer to the truth is that Socrates would prefer, or feigns to prefer, to continue with his feast of διατάττειν (458A6).

2606

ὥσπερ οἱ τῶν ἄλλων δημιουργῶν (E5-6): again it is assumed in passing that the education of the craftsmen will be left up to their parents: cf. 421E1-2 with n.2022, and n.2487.

2607

καταγέλαστον (467A9): Again the γελοῖον serves as a preliminary criterion. Because of the analogy with 456D8-11 the very unconventional idea of bringing the young onto the battlefield is less laughable than the potter doting over who will be allowed to use his wheel. Rational calculation will be used to justify the unconventional measure just below.

2608

ἱκανούς (D7), positive grade (in contrast to the superlative φαυλοτάτους) again, itself, a virtual superlative (cf.344C6, 372B1, 423E2 and nn.454 and 2053).

2609

πτεροῦν χρὴ παιδία ὄντα εὐθὺς ἵν’ ἄν τι δέῃ πετόμενοι ἀποφεύγωσιν (D12-13) affords him an opportunity to elaborate, in a passage that is already an elaboration. Compare his use of the indecipherable question (n.1114 ad 375A4).

2610

οὕτω γὰρ κάλλιστά τε … καὶ ἀσφαλέστατα ... (E5-7): With this summary statement and Glaucon’s formally worded acceptance (ὀρθῶς μοι δοκεῖς λέγειν, E8), the digression on bringing their children to the battle is given formal closure, so that now, once again, they can move on to the anticipated (cf. ἔφθης, 466D9) question, εἰ ἐν ἀνθρώποις δυνατὸν … καὶ ὅπῃ δυνατόν (466D6-8).

2611

Reading αὖ (468A3), Burnet’s brilliant emendation, sparing us from Riddell’s subtle workaround for the ἄν of the mss. (Digest §255). With αὖ Glaucon indicates to Socrates that he is beginning to notice how many digressions he is subjecting him to (cf. ἔφθης, 466D9). Cf. αὖ at 393D2 and 416A1 (with n.1918), and Euthyd.296A1, 8. Socrates now turns from the presence of the children in the battlefield to the question how the soldiers will treat each other. The former fell just within the provisions of the community of wives and children but now he has gone outside that sphere to a treatment of military behavior per se in which the presence of women and children is strictly irrelevant.

2612

διὰ κάκην (A6): note accent.

2613

δεῖ καθιστάναι (A7) might mean he deserves to be a craftsman or farmer and therefore would never have been appointed guard in the first place.

2614

Again (A6) one of the denotations of δημιουργός is the craftsman as the complement of the farmer (cf.466B1-2), while just a moment ago all public occupations were called δημιουργεῖν, including being a guard (466E5-6).

2615

εἴρηται ἤδη (C8), referring to 460B1-5, where as here the superior ones are referred to by the positive grade of the adjective (ἀγαθῷ ὄντι, C5: cf. τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς, 460B1).

2616

γε (D7) is not limitative but emphatic. There is no need to think back over the whole topic of poetic censorship here, as there was not in the references to Hesiod above (466C2-3) and below (468E8-9A3).

2617

ἀσκεῖν (E1) is analogous to αὐξήσει (D5), as ἀγαθοὺς ἄνδρας τε καὶ γυναῖκας (E2) is analogous to ἡβῶντί τε καὶ ἀνδρείῳ (D3-4): the byproduct of growth in the Homeric case (αὔξειν) is no longer appropriate to our guards, since they are fully grown, but hearty eating will keep their juices flowing.

2618

κάλλιστα λέγεις (E3), answering and topping Socrates’s approval of Glaucon’s answer above (καλῶς, B5).

2619

ἄρ’ οὐ (E5): He reverts to the use of postponed ἄρα from above (468A5, A9, and virtually at B2), which reminds us that this is the fourth section in his answer to the question τί δὲ δὴ τὰ περὶ τὸν πόλεμον (A1), and fills out the list of possible outcomes (desertion, capture, victory and death).

2620

WD 121ff.

2621

διαπυθόμενοι ἄρα τοῦ θεοῦ (469A4). The genitive is used since the god (Apollo: cf.427B2-C4) is the source of a command that will be reported by an exegete (ἐξηγῆται, A6) who serves as his mediary (cf. n.46 ad 328E2).

2622

ὅσοι ἂν διαφερόντως … ἀγαθοὶ κριθῶσιν (B3). This extension of the treatment beyond the burial of soldiers to the burial of all virtuous men effects closure exactly because it steps or points beyond the current subject proper, namely, τὰ περὶ πόλεμον and in particular how they will treat each others as well as their enemies (468A1-3), which had extended the treatment of war that already began at 466E1 (περί … τῶν ἐν τῷ πολέμω). For closure by generalization or reaching beyond, compare the description of mothers' behavior at 381E1-6, and n.2152 ad 431C1-3).

2623

πρὸς τοὺς πολεμίους (B5): The question how they treat each other in war was only tangentially relevant to the question of community (cf. n.2611). But the question how they should treat their enemies, though introduced by a very easy step in logic from friend to enemy, has no relevance to that question whatsoever, eliciting the slight pique in Glaucon's reply (τὸ ποῖον δή;). The question of relevance has by now been quite forgotten. They are off on a tangent, though it must be noted that the provision about kissing that came up along the way paid the dividend of corroborating their ideas on the community of women and man (468C5-8) and dove-tailing with it neatly (468D7-10). It is important to notice that Glaucon allows Socrates to stay off on this tangent though he had initially expressed eagerness (ἔφθης εἰπών, 466D9) to move on to the question of feasibility. Glaucon’s wavering has left commentators to imagine that our author has forgotten the tensions within his own drama and has abandoned it to give us a piece of his own mind about current politics in Athens. Glaucon’s wavering is however of paramount importance to the meaning of this entire Book, as we shall soon see.

2624

πολεμίους φύσει (470C6): “War-enemies,” i.e. enemies. The English term lacks the etymological connection to war that gives the Greek (πόλεμος / πολέμιος) much of its clarity.

2625

διαστῇ (D4), relying on the root of στάσις for its meaning (as with πόλεμος above).

2626

ἡμερωτέρων (E3), used properly of tame as opposed to wild animals, corresponding to English “civilized” in its colloquially approbative sense.

2627

σύ (E3): The emphasis given by the pronoun echoes that of ἐγώ in Glaucon’s response above (D2).

2628

πολέμιοι (471A7): Again the adjective πολέμιοι makes an allusion to war that the English “enemy” does not and “belligerent” only awkwardly does.

2629

Ἑλλάδα Ἕλληνες rather than Ἕλληνας Ἕλληνες (A9) bringing forward (with κεροῦσιν: cf. κείρειν, 470D8) the personification or metaphor of the Greek lands as mother, from 470D7-8 above.

2630

ὁμολογήσουσιν (A10).

2631

ἐγὼ μέν (B6) suggests a personal pronoun will be coming with δέ (e.g., τοῖς δὲ ἄλλοις or σὺ δέ); but the δέ clause draws a contrast with πρὸς τοὺς ἐναντίους instead. Glaucon wavers between making the personal point he started to make, and elaborating the position Socrates had just suggested. The wavering widens below.

2632

καὶ ἔχειν γε (C2) adding a second construction to θῶμεν not quite parallel to the first (accusative object, τὸν νόμον τούτον, understood). The slip in construction, as well as the shift from the present τιθῶμεν, reveals a little impatience, for which Glaucon next apologizes (hence γάρ). The paragraph break that editors place between Glaucon’s two remarks downplays and therefore obscures the relation between them (leading Denniston for instance to classify this ἀλλὰ γάρ under his heading 6 rather than 1.ii), only for the sake of indicating that a new section in the conversation is about to begin, while it is exactly the pairing of the remarks that brings this about. It is after all in the nature of transitional remarks to straddle two sections: cf. our remarks at the end of Book Two and beginning of Book Three (n.1324).

2633

παρωσάμενος (C6), stronger and less ceremonious than “postponed” (cf. ὤσουσιν 415C2). What Socrates said at 466E1, περὶ μὲν γὰρ τῶν ἐν πολέμῳ, sounded like a praeteritio (because of μέν and γάρ). But the μέν ended up being “solitarium” as we say, and the γάρ which sounded as if it were going to explain why the promised transition to the question of possibility was ripe ended up explaining nothing. Instead Socrates began discoursing on a series of questions touching military behavior, with increasing specificity and increasing prolixity, until he was stopped.

2634

τὸ ὡς δυνατή (C6-7): This question was placed second (ἀναβαλέσθαι, 458B1-7) in the combination of questions as to the goodness and possibility of the community of wives and children (the so-called σύστασις λόγων, cf. 457E2). The first proposal, that the finest women should share the jobs of the finest men, could rest upon a proof of their natural suitability to do these things and ignore conventionalist ridicule by focussing on their shared fineness (cf. the triumphant 457A6-B5). To tell men, on the other hand, and more importantly to accept for oneself, that wives are to be shared and family identity forgone is something on the order of the command Jesus gave to the rich young man to leave it all behind and follow him (Matt.19: 16-22). In a moment of enthusiasm, like the enthusiasm Socrates has created in Glaucon during the last few pages (466E1-471E5), such a choice might just seem possible. But sticking to it would soon become difficult, unless one had within him a very special love indeed, and this love will be the topic with which Book Five ends.

2635

αὑτὴ ἡ πολιτεία (C7): His wording leaves out the specifics. The question postponed (466D6-8) was whether (εἰ) and how (ὅπῃ) the κοινωνία γυναικῶν is possible among men as it is among other animals, a question originally paired with the question whether the κοινωνία was a beneficial policy, a “good idea in the first place” as we would say (457D4-5). There, too, Socrates behaved rather strangely, suggesting that the benefit of the policy would not be controversial though its feasibility would; Glaucon replied both would be controversial; Socrates admitted he was hoping to avoid the question of benefit and cut his workload in half. There was a hint of the slave trying to shirk his tasks and Glaucon would hear none of it (οὐκ ἔλαθες ἀποδιδράσκων, 457E5). To all of this Socrates made the extraordinary request that he be allowed to desiderate at will like a man taking a walk by himself free of any worry whether his ideas could be realized but thinking them as if they already were. It is this leisurely ramble that now must come to an end; if he were talking to an old Cretan and an old Lacedaemonian rather than helping these two young men, the ramble would surely continue all the way up to the top of Mount Ida and the Cave of Zeus.

2636

ἐπεί … γε (C8): cf. Smyth “where a speaker is strictly giving the reason for his statement of a fact (or for something in that statement) and not for the fact itself. Here there is a thought in the speaker’s mind which is suppressed” (§2380). Glaucon’s suppressed thought is that he, too, could go on at length how wonderful the city would be, but all this would add up to nothing if the city could never come into existence. For theoretical purposes he is of course wrong, and to his credit he fails to suppress the theoretical urge and does go on for a few lines. Socrates has provoked another crisis.

2637

εἴτε καί … γένοιτο (D4-6) Glaucon’s elaboration of the roles suited to female warriors expresses not a lingering uncertainty (Halliwell ad 471D3-5) but a brief divagation into the very sort of epideictic elaboration he has just accused Socrates of taking too far, in which he helps Socrates’s argument by showing how their relative weakness can be accommodated on the battlefield.

2638

οἶδα (D6) in praeteritio: cf. ἐπιστάμεθα (420E1) and ὁρῶ below.

2639

πάντῃ (D6) ends up being a generalization for the sake of closure (a feature of the epideictic style) so that he could make a transition from wartime to peacetime (καὶ οἴκοι γε) activities, where (D7) continues the confident tone it introduced with ἐπεί above, now to carry him through the next category.

2640

παραλείπεται (D7): His change of the voice (cf. παραλείπεις [C9]) shifts away from blaming Socrates toward setting the record straight for its own sake. Glaucon again shows his desire to “buy in” (cf. 468B12-C4, and contrast his tone at 468A3 [n.2611]).

2641

ὁρῶ (D7): the list ends with bathetic deflation. Glaucon wavers: Was his enthusiastic elaboration on Socrates’s remarks just a praeteritio after all?

2642

καὶ ἄλλα γε μυρία (E1-2): The gratuitous addition of μυρία (more epideictic rhetoric) with its confident γε again show his desire and enthusiasm vying with his skepticism.

2643

ἡμᾶς αὐτούς (E3-4) This is the first time in the conversation that either of the young men accorded to himself fully equal responsibility for the project rather than begging and cajoling Socrates to do all the work!

2644

Reading στρατευομένῳ (472A2) with all mss., Ast (Leipzig 1822) and Schmelzer (Berlin 1884), against the emendation into σταγγευομένῳ found in F and accepted by all other modern editors known to me. Socrates is turning back onto Glaucon what Glaucon has just said, how our worthy soldiers are least likely to ἀπολείπειν ἀλλήλους (D1). Cf. συστρατεύοιτο (471D3), and for the dropping of the prefix cf.399E8 and n.1567).

It is important to recognize how quickly Socrates is able to shift gears. When Glaucon asked for a little ὄψον he piled on all sorts of luxury (372E2-3A8); when Adeimantus objected to the unhappiness of his guards he added more woes to the heap (420A2-7); although he is suddenly despondent about their investigation of the soul (435C4-6) he is soon quite satisfied with something less than perfection (D8); when Polemarchus and Adeimantus accuse him of leaving something out he confesses it was intentional (450B1-2 and n.2385). Cf., in the “future,” 487E6-10. Here, at the very moment Glaucon wavers between support and skepticism and indeed pushes Socrates to go on (λέγε, E3) while at the same time declaring for the first time that the argument is the common work of both of them (πειρώμεθα ἡμᾶς αὐτούς, E3-4), Socrates only complains that his partnership is imperfect. The sharp reaction is part of his protreptic. The young brothers look to him for guidance, but he gives it only when they are able to recognize its merits and make it their own, a little like the way the magician finds the egg you lost right behind your ear.

2645

τρικυμία (A4), proverbial like our seventh and the Romans' tenth (Ovid, Trist.1.2.49): cf. Euthyd.293A3 and. Aesch.PV 1015. Sept.760; E.Hipp.1213.

2646

ἐπάγεις (A4), a military metaphor along with καταδρομή (A1).

2647

ἴδῃς τε καὶ ἀκούσῃς (A5), τε καί linking the metaphor and its meaning (n.92). Contrary to J.-C., what Glaucon will hear is the λόγος, not the roaring wave of indignation and laughter that it might arouse. We must realize that what will matter most will be Glaucon’s own reaction.

2648

διασκοπεῖν (A7), notably active rather than middle. Socrates does not fear being drowned by waves but fears his interlocutor will lose his courage to continue thinking and following the logos in case the people around him influence him with mob behavior such as ridicule (as at the beginning of this Book). For him to warn Glaucon that each wave is greater than Glaucon thinks it will be (here and at 457D4-5) is for him to mark their progress through this danger and to encourage him to persevere. The third and last threat will be his last chance to require Glaucon to handle a fear of ridicule on his own. We must imagine that his long and edifying digression on military matters is somehow meant to prepare him for this.

2649

ἀφεθήσῃ ὑφ’ ἡμῶν (A8-B1): Socrates’s strong reaction arouses Glaucon to rescind the collegial first plural he had just used (471E3) and replace it with another first plural that excludes Socrates but includes the others present, reminiscent of one that threatened him earlier that day (cf. ὁρᾷς ἡμᾶς … ὅσοι ἐσμέν; 327C7), as well as at the beginning of this Book (ἀφήσομεν, 449B6). It is as if we have slipped back to the beginning and the discussion of Book Five has been a failure!

2650

μέν (B3) is solitarium. Once again Socrates addresses a derailment in the conversation by reminding his interlocutor where they started (cf.420B3-ff, 372E2-3).

2651

δικαιοσύνην οἷόν ἐστι καὶ ἀδικίαν (B4): καὶ ἀδικίαν stresses that is not just the search for justice writ large in the city that Socrates is referring to but the original search foisted upon him by the brothers at the beginning of Book Two: cf. 358D5-6, 362E3, 367A6-7, and 367D3-4. Socrates referred back to these same passages in similar terms, before: 371E12, 420B9-C1, 427D4-7, and does so again, here. Cf. also C4-8, below.

2652

τοῦτο (B6): The second person demonstrative adds an edge (“Do you have a problem with that?”) Cf. Charm.164A8; Gorg.448B1, 497E8. Glaucon acts as if he suspects another digression is afoot.

2653

οὐδέν (B7), an answer, with asyndeton, used in belligerent contexts to dodge confrontation, as at Charm.164A9; Gorg.448B2, 498A1, 515E2. Socrates uses the first plural to include both himself and the brothers, even though the conversation is on the brothers' behalf. Likewise, Jesus doodled in the dust (κατέγραφεν, John 8.6) in order to avoid eye-to-eye confrontation with the Pharisees (cf. R.Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (New York 2001) 54-60.

2654

ὅτι ἐγγύτατα (C1): Given the context we should hardly translate “as close as we can,” the usual gloss for ὅτι-plus-superlative!

2655

καὶ πλεῖστα τῶν ἄλλων (C1-2): The expression comes very close to confusing the generic man described in Book Four and the men that we are, which are the men that our conversation is after all primarily concerned with, as Socrates next asserts (C7-D2).

2656

αὐτό (C4), again referring back to the mise au point presented by the brothers (e.g., 358B5, D2; 367B4, C7, D2).

2657

ἐζητοῦμεν (C4-D1) In this review Socrates not only reminds the brothers that the impetus for the discussion was theirs: he also twice omits to mention the search for justice in the larger letters of the city, the particular means they had adopted for finding a justice that would then be tried out on the individual man (472B7-8, C4-5; contrast τὸν μὲν δίκαιον καὶ ἄνδρα καὶ πόλιν καὶ δικαιοσύνην, in the peroration about the discovery of justice in the man at the end of Book Four: 444A4-5). He thus brings to the surface certain facts that have been overlooked since Book Five began. The city had only been a medium for theorizing justice; once justice was applied to the individual man and the inner meaning of justice was discovered, at the end of Book Four (443C9-444A2), the theoretical city became an irrelevant external, a ladder we could just as soon throw away. Somehow since the beginning of Book Five the whole conversation regressed to the perfectly irrelevant question whether that city could be brought into reality, and somehow the burden of answering this irrelevant question has devolved upon Socrates. These glissements have provided an occasion not for Plato idly to unload his opinions on Attic politics but, within the hypothesis of the drama, for Socrates to stretch his interlocutor’s mind toward a truth that is beyond opinion, to immunize him against the fear of ridicule, and to teach him how to react when people tug at his shirt from behind (λαβόμενος τοῦ ἱματίου, 327B4 and 449B3).

2658

ἄνδρα … εἰ γένοιτο (C5-6), a proleptic “lilies of the field” construction. The καί in the apodosis is emphatic, not apodotic (cf. Denniston, 309).

2659

τελέως δίκαιον (C5) is contrasted with ἀδικώτατον, a simple superlative. τελέως ἄδικον could easily seem a contradiction in terms.

2660

ἐκείνους (C7): The “third person” demonstrative expresses their remoteness from ourselves as objects of contemplation and therefore recommends them as standards: cf. ἐκεῖ, 434D7 and E3 and n.2190.

2661

ἀναγκαζώμεθα (C8) a notion very strong, and wholly new to the project (though cf. 441D8-E3 and nn.2297 and 2296), by which Socrates indicates to Glaucon that the search for justice is about his own life and fate, and that he must accept the truth about justice once it has been recognized. The student who requires too much proof requires reproof. To admit that the actual falls short of the ideal is to acknowledge you know more than you see. Hence the reference to μοῖρα below (D1).

2662

τοῦτο (D3), with moderating μέν, is now conciliatory.

2663

The imperfect ἐποιοῦμεν (D9) ruefully acknowledges that during the last few minutes the entire project has hung in the balance.

2664

With οὐ δῆτα (E5) Glaucon admits and asserts his stake in the conversation.

2665

προθυμηθῆναι δεῖ σὴν χάριν (E7): Socrates is careful to be accurate rather than vindictive. τὴν σὴν χάριν can mean either “for your sake” (σοῦ χάριν) or “per your request” (as in a phrase like εἰ ἔμοιγε βούλει χαρίζεσθαι [430D8]). With the ambiguity Socrates brings very near the surface the question whether Glaucon will be pleased to be benefitted, as well as the question whether he will be benefitted to be pleased, by continuing the conversation with Socrates.

2666

πῇ μάλιστα καὶ κατὰ τί δυνατώτατ’ ἂν εἴη (E7-8): Now the converse of the caveat in n.2635 applies.

2667

ποῖα (E10): Glaucon does not know what “same things” these are (τὰ αὐτά, E9) and has to ask, though J.-C. (ad loc.) do not: they think it is what he just agreed to about the artist: “in a different, it is true, and more universal form: that action can never come up to description.” Against their interpretation, πάλιν πρὸς τὴν τοιαύτην ἀπόδειξιν τὰ αὐτά (E8-9) contrasts a new investigation into how most easily to realize the ideal with another investigation, the one they had just completed (B3-D2). It was in respect to that investigation that Socrates required Glaucon to concede that the justice projected by their theorization into human form did not need to be represented perfectly in him (472C1-3), and it is this “same thing” he now wants Glaucon to grant as a precondition to his study of realizability, that the state, also, may only approximately realize the idea (473A6-7). In between asking him to be satisfied (ἀγαπήσεις, B2) he gives a warrant for being satisfied, that practice is by its very nature less able to embody truth than speech and reason are.

2668

κἂν μή τῳ δοκεῖ (473A2-3): Socrates warns Glaucon that rescinding the λόγος / ἔργον distinction is controversial. Glaucon gives his agreement fully warned, but the commentators seek refuge from following him by making Socrates’s remark a statement by Plato, who of course was always for them an idealist. J.-C. wax Coleridgean and quote Euler, who said about the arch: “All experience is against it but that is no reason for doubting the truth of it,” and follow up by interpreting this to mean “that the mathematical ideal of the arch is imperfectly realized in matter,” though Euler’s point is exactly the opposite (imperfect physical arches do a perfectly fine job). Adam: “Most men ... would not allow that λέξις has more truth than πρᾶξις ... . Not so Plato, according to whom the world of Mind is not only more perfect but truer than the world of Matter. ... The pointed ἀλλὰ σύ invites the assent of Glauco as a Platonist.” When did Glauco become a “Platonist”?

These enthusiastic inaccuracies reveal why for these authors only Plato could ever be a Platonist. They are stirred to distraction by Socrates’s argument and what it evokes in them and prefer to project these feelings onto the invisible author rather than accept the responsibility and honor of feeling them and owning them within themselves, as Glaucon has just done. Only Plato, they imagine in their admiration, could have the grounds for making these extravagant statements they then make themselves—statements which are in fact their own effusions and hardly Platonic at all. What is at issue in the dialogue at this point, which happens also to be the arithmetical center of the whole work, is what is happening within the soul of Glaucon and of any reader who finds himself sitting at his side, participating in the argument as seriously as he: it is the decision to follow the implications of the argument and own them rather than blame them on somebody else, whether it be Glaucon blaming Socrates or the commentators blaming Plato. As Glaucon wavered toward holding Socrates responsible for proving the feasibility, Socrates now holds him responsible to live up to what he already knows (ἀναγκαζώμεθα, 472C8 / ἀνάγκαζε, 473A5: see next note). The commentators on this conversation between Socrates and Glaucon about justice tend to take refuge by inventing a different conversation, a secondary conversation among themselves about an imaginary Plato. Socrates will not let Glaucon get away with this sort of thing, and Plato likewise has invented a literary form designed to make it as hard as possible for his readers to do this, and as little as possible to sink their teeth into, treating them in the same spirit as Socrates treated his interlocutors.

2669

μὴ ἀνάγκαζε (A5) referring to 472A8-B2. Compulsion is inappropriate, after all, in the context of the favor (σὴν χάριν) Socrates is offering him; and more importantly, Socrates is reminding Glaucon that μοῖρα will in any event impose upon him his true reward, quite apart from their conversation (472C8-D1).

2670

If γιγνόμενα (A6) is taken as a participle in indirect discourse with the virtual verb of perception ἀποφαίνειν (which its present tense indicates it should be), then Bywater’s ἄν (A6) becomes unnecessary.

2671

With οἷοί τε γενώμεθα (A7) Socrates now transfers the objective οἷα and γιγνόμενα (A5, 6) that had described the object of search onto the subjects performing the search. Will we eavesdroppers on the conversation now join in, or will we stay out and speculate on the opinions of Plato?

2672

φάναι (A8) might be a dependent infinitive parallel to ἀποφαίνειν, with the intervening ἀλλά requiring us to supply a verb opposite to ἀναγκάζειν, e.g., ἐάν. Or it is an imperatival infinitive dictating the position to be adopted, as at 508B12 and 509B6?

2673

This is the force of the perfect ἐξηυρηκέναι (B1).

2674

τί ποτε νῦν κακῶς … πράττεται (B5): If the concept is good enough, then it is the deficiencies in practice that become the issue.

2675

τὴν δύναμιν (B9), the remaining vestige of the worry about realizability (εἰ δυνατόν), carried forward below with δυνατοῦ δέ (C4).

2676

δεῖξαι (C3), repeating ἀποδεικνύναι (B5) with the usual dropping of the prefix (n.1567).

2677

ἀδοξία (C8). As long as δόξα is in charge ἀδοξία means disgrace; once ἐπιστήμη is the measure ἀδοξία will merely be paradox (e.g., A2-3 κἂν εἰ μή τῳ δοκεῖ). About its abetting partner, ridicule (γέλως), the analogous argument has already been made in this Book (452D3-E2). The dethroning of δόξα will occupy us now, through to the Book’s end.

2678

λεγόμενοι (D1) is added to distinguish the title or the office from the man (the nominalism was broached at 463AC; cf. also 445D5-6), since only a man can φιλοσοφεῖν. The two answers correspond to the alternatives envisioned at B4-7, viz., (1) adjusting the management of an existing provision (kings can be improved by becoming philosophical) or (2) adding a provision to the existing store (kings are to be selected from among philosophers), presented as usual in a chiasm of before and after (cf. n.14) or question and answer.

2679

πολλαί (D4) is derogatory (cf. n.2088). φύσις here has its naturalistic sense: “creatures,” “specimens” (cf. Phdrs.229E2).

2680

ταῖς πόλεσι, δοκῶ δὲ οὐδὲ τῷ ἀνθρωπίνῳ γένει, οὐδὲ αὕτη ἡ πολιτεία (D6-E1): Transition from the empirical (ταῖς πόλεσι, D6) to the theoretical realm (πολιτεία) is done by a detour through the universal (ἀνθρωπίνῳ γένει). For the move cf. 551C3-11; for enumerations with a similar logical structure cf. 466A8-B2, 475D1-E1, 529E1-3, 551C3-11, 610B1-3; HMaj.298AB; Leg.849C3-4, 956E1-7; Phlb.11B7-8; Symp.207D8-E3, 211A60B1.

2681

πολὺ παρὰ δόξαν ῥηθήσεται (E4).

2682

χαλεπόν (E4), bothersome rather than difficult (cf.476D8. 480A7, and n.3093 ad 502D7). Opinion (δόξαν, ibid.) chooses more comfortable beliefs. The entire sequence is therefore χαλεπόν, παρὰ δόξαν, γελοῖον. I keep the well attested ἀλλή with Burnet against the ἀλλῇ of the Monacensis lately adopted by Slings: only the πολιτεία they have constructed can promise happiness across the board.

2683

καὶ ὅς (E6): Socrates characteristically interrupts himself with phrases like these to arrest our attention.

2684

τοιοῦτον ἐκβέβληκας ῥῆμά τε καὶ λόγον (E6). The expression ἐκβάλλειν ἔπος is Homeric (cf. also Il.1.552, 2.350) and is imitated by Aeschylus (Eum.830, Ag.1663).. ῥῆμα replaces ἔπος by dint of ῥηθήσεται above; τε καί then links the specialized term with the more natural expression.

2685

πολλούς τε καὶ οὐ φαύλους νῦν οὕτως (474A1): The reference to a world beyond the discussants at Cephalus’s house (νῦν οὕτως) carries extraordinary emphasis.

2686

Glaucon’s response (473E6-474A4) takes the form of a series of statements breathlessly linked together as relative clauses filled with participles, as if he were too excited to achieve a syntactically deliberate and finished expression. Opening with the vocative shows excitement; the hendiadys ῥῆμά τε καὶ λόγον distinguishes the fact Socrates said it from what he said, as if Glaucon can’t decide which is the more scandalous; at the end he shifts from physical assault to the lawcourts (ἐκφεύξῃ and δώσεις δίκην) and with τῷ ὄντι tries to add an extra sting to the unbridled calumny, helping Plato’s readers to remember the mob and the baseless but emotional λοιδορία that brought him to “justice” in the Apology.

2687

ἀμυνῶ (A7, cf. A3) picks up the topic of μὴ ἀπολείπειν ἀλλήλους from 472A2 and 471D1 (cf. n.2644) with προδώσω (A6) picking up ἐπάγεις (472A4). Glaucon has switched sides.

2688

The double ἀλλά (A6, A7) shows more resoluteness than logic and the epanalepsis of δύναμαι shows humility. With ἐμμελέστερον (A8) he is apologizing for having confronted and “abandoned” Socrates at 471C-472B (cf. nn.2644 and 2649, and the related term πλημμελές used by Glaucon himself at 451B3). The most important reversal in his attitude comes with his opening remark, καλῶς ἐγὼ ποιῶν, by which for all his apologizing he courageously asserts he was right to get them into this fight.

2689

τοῖς ἀπιστοῦσιν (B1-2): He is no longer one of them. The rather vague claim he made at 450D2-3 (and cf. ἀπιστίας just above it, C6), for the sake of encouraging Socrates to go on, has now been tested, and has become true. To the extent that he offers to help him prove his point in the present conversation, the “disbelievers” consist of the others present. Glaucon is now siding with Socrates, even against them if necessary.

2690

συμμαχίαν (B3): Socrates acknowledges Glaucon's reference to 472A1-2.

2691

τοῖς μέν … τοῖς δ’ ἄλλοις (C1-3): The paradox is duplex. Not only are we asked to imagine men with their heads in the clouds running the state, but perhaps worse we have to imagine obeying them! Socrates’s observation also applies immediately to Glaucon himself, who will either lead or follow on the philosophic path. Knowing the place Glaucon has just placed him in (ἔχων τοιοῦτον βοηθὸν πειρῶ, B1), Socrates does not shrink from telling him to follow (ἀκολούθησον, C5, right after ἀκολουθεῖν, C3).

2692

ἐάν … ἐξηγησώμεθα (C5-6): Here for the fifth time (cf. 455B1-2, 432C2, 427D3-4, 358B8 and n.689), we encounter the polite and auspicious construction in ἐάν, a virtual prayer in the face of doubts as to their ability to find the truth (cf. εὐξάμενος μετ’ ἐμοῦ, 432C5).

2693

With ἄλλῳ (D3) he makes a forgiving little joke about Glaucon’s apologetic promise to answer well (cf. ἄλλου του, A8).

2694

φιλόπαιδα καὶ ἐρωτικόν (D5): Reverse καί, the newer and more specific term (φιλόπαιδα) padded with a restatement of the general term (ἐρωτικόν) that implied it (cf. n.440). That Glaucon is an ἐρωτικός is clear from the enthusiasm he recently showed at 468B12-C4. At 402D10-E1 he had evinced a certain fastidiousness about looks that he claimed he was ready to suspend if the boy’s soul was fine. It is this sentiment that Socrates thought he might remind him of, with his remark about loving the whole and looking past the part.

2695

πρὸς τοὺς καλούς (D7): It is characteristic of the allusive erotic vocabulary that the noun should be omitted (cf. Phdrs.227C6).

2696

The example (D7-E5) is embarrassing but it is true. Eros is not beautiful, as Diotima taught Socrates, but it is divine.

2697

συγχωρῶ τοῦ λόγου χάριν (475A4): The byplay about Glaucon the compliant answerer is continued.

2698

The argument (474C5-5B7) is a straightforward and neatly constructed epagoge such as we have not seen since the conversation with Polemarchus in Book One. The exemplary cases consist first of the most immediate or actual case, Glaucon’s love (the πρόχειρον or the ἐναργέστατον: cf. 437D3, 459A1-5; Charm.161D3-7; Gorg.448B4-6; Ion 537A5ff; Meno 71B5-7, 75D6; Prot.312B1-2; Soph.233E-4A) amenable to elaboration because of its familiarity, and then two generic cases threaded to the first by parallel adjectives in φιλο- (from φιλόπαις to φίλοινος and φιλότιμος: 475A5-B2). The last case is again elaborated but in a way different from the first (A9-B2), which itself brings into view that the methods of elaboration are logically complementary: the second elaboration (of φιλοτιμία), because it shows that the lover loves the object no matter what quantity there is of it, reveals in retrospect that the first elaboration exhausted a spectrum of qualitative sub-kinds (quality being set out, as usual, by pairs of opposites, from σιμός to ἐπίγρυπτος, and dark to light: 474D8-E5). Once the set of cases has reached a symmetrical completion, the general principle is enunciated for the interlocutor’s approval (475B4-6), its enunciation being a restatement of the thesis originally presented at 474C9-11, in which the term φιλεῖν (C9) is replaced by the more psychodynamic term ἐπιθυμεῖν (475B5) and the thing loved (bare τι at 474C9) is replaced with the logical and general term εἶδος (εἴδους, B5). It is noteworthy that the stated purpose of the epagoge is not to prove the general point but to remind Glaucon of it (ἀναμιμνῄσκειν, 474D1).

2699

The meaning of φίλοινος (A5) was clear, but φιλόσοφος (B8) is as ambiguous as σοφία is.

2700

ἄλλως τε καὶ νέον ὄντα (B11-C2): The stress is on one’s natural erotic disposition, which “learned” behavior could mask.

2701

οὐ … φιλομαθῆ οὐδὲ φιλόσοφον (C2): The proximity in meaning between μάθησις and σοφία allows the inference to be drawn with an epexegetical οὐδέ (C2). On the synonymity of the terms cf. 376B8-9.

2702

οὔτε πεινῆν … οὔτ’ ἐπιθυμεῖν σιτίων (C3-4): The enumeration denies two verbs, which in turn warrants denying an adjectival attribute (φιλόσιτον) to their subject (οὐδέ [C4] is illative as at 341D1, 520A6, 546A2, 582B5, 586A5 and 6, 608B3-5). If the person were hungry we could not reliably infer an underlying fastidiousness about food, just as the prudence that accrues with maturity might mask an underlying aversion to learning. The articulation of the parallel leaves something to be desired. For κακόσιτον rather than μισόσιτον as the contradictory of φιλόσιτον the schol. glosses thus: κακόχυμον, βεβλαμμένον.

2703

Socrates describes (B11-C7) the behaviors that will serve as criteria for inclusion or exclusion with attributive participles. The disqualifying behavior is done with the attributive participle δυσχεραίνοντα (B11) and then supplemented with two circumstantial participles (ὄντα, ἔχοντα [C1]) that narrow it with an ἄλλως τε καί construction (if their distaste is inborn they are especially unsuited). An illustrative parallel from the appetite for eating follows (δυσχερῆ [C3] providing the segue). The description of the opposite and winning behavior (C6-8) repeats the construction in attributive participle -- again three -- but this time all attributive (ἐθέλοντα, ἰόντα, ἔχοντα [C6-7]), connected with flat καί and each given an adverb (both elements adding epideictic elevation). The parallelism suggests that the participles will describe behavior generically opposite to δυσχεραίνοντα, but the diction (esp. ἀσμένως, γεύεσθαι, and ἀπλήστως) brings forward the intervening appetitive illustration. Perhaps the three participles represent a gradation: an unimpeded willingness to taste anything, feeling pleasure at eating, and being (remaining?) insatiable. εὐχερῶς is usually and ἀπλήστος always derogatory: it is these that elicit Glaucon's response.

2704

καὶ ὁ Γλαύκων ἔφη (D1): With the fuller stage direction (cf. n.1211), Socrates again indicates to us the importance of what happened next.

2705

καταμανθάνειν (D3): Glaucon’s κατα-designates the sort of thing Aristotle has in mind when he proves that all men love to know by adducing the pleasure they take in visual perception of details and differences (Met. init.).

2706

φιλοθεάμων and φιλήκοος (D2, D3) are both coined here, with some help from the epagogic context in which φιλο- compounds have played a salient role.

2707

With ἕκοντες οὐκ ἂν ἐθέλοιεν ἐλθεῖν (D5) he picks up Socrates’s εὐχερῶς ἐθέλοντα and ἰόντα (C5,6).

2708

περιθέουσι (D6-7), in contrast with οὐκ ἂν ἔλθοιεν, and (οὐ) ἀπολειπόμενοι (D7-8) pick up Socrates’s ἀπλήστως ἔχοντα (C7); and πάντων χορῶν (D6) picks up παντὸς μαθήματος (C6).

2709

καὶ ἄλλους τοιούτων τινῶν μαθηματικοὺς καὶ τοὺς τῶν τεχνυδρίων (D8-E1), what we call an ἄλλως τε καί construction. A prejudice against the value of practical arts was given a new basis at 473A1-3.

2710

μέν (E2) is what Denniston calls emphatic (364-5). Socrates has been corrected and now takes a stab at salvaging what he has said. Glaucon will take it differently (E3).

2711

τοὺς δὲ ἀληθινούς (E3). Though Denniston notes some μέν ’s are solitaria because the speaker is interrupted (380) he doesn’t note the deft conversational move Glaucon here uses, asking his next question with δέ, as if he were completing the other’s idea.

2712

τοὺς τῆς ἀληθείας (E4): Socrates’s reply matches deft with defter.

2713

σὲ δὲ οἶμαι ὁμολογήσειν (E6-7), continues to play with the theme of the willing answerer (cf.474A8 and 474D3), and nothing more. Adam (ad loc.): “We are to infer that the Theory of Ideas was already familiar in the school of Plato,” which presumably means Glaucon studied under his little brother.

2714

εἰδῶν (476A5) needs not have a special meaning private to Plato for this sentence to make sense. The three sets of opposites here chosen for illustration constitute a triad commonly used to designate things that matter or serious topics of conversation (cf. n.2401).

2715

ἀλλήλων (A6), read by all mss. and often emended, can only mean that these attributes appear with each other—that beauty can show up in a just thing and justness show up in a beautiful thing. The other two items in the list (πράξεις, σώματα) are the quickest way of designating “everything there is” in the common sense—as if all were verbs and nouns. σώματα can be used of inanimate things (e.g.Leg.967C4-5) but, without specification, as in English, tends to be used of the animate (e.g.Rep.380E4-5). In the quick list of “everything” we usually get both the animate and the inanimate, and other terms than σῶμα are used: 601D4; Gorg.506D5-6; H.Maj.292D1-3; Leg.859D3-4. We might think it illogical that “properties” should be listed on a par with things that have them, but this very illogic of the world of appearances is a primary motive for the theory of forms in the first place. Cf. the lists at Gorg.474D3-4; H.Maj.298AB; Phdo.78D10-E1; Symp.211C1-D1.

2716

πανταχοῦ φανταζόμενα (A7). Compare the expression Socrates used in a similar context, again speaking with Glaucon, at 402A8-9: ἐν ἅπασιν … περιφερόμενα.

2717

ὁ αὐτὸς λόγος (A5): The individuality that is made salient by comparing an idea with its opposite (A2) becomes the basis for distinguishing the single idea from its many instances.

2718

φιλοθεάμονάς τε καὶ φιλοτέχνους καὶ πρακτικούς (A10). The final term πρακτικούς articulates the direction in which Glaucon’s list was itself trending at its end (475D8-E1). It restates more explicitly the prejudice against the value of the “practical” that has its new warrant at 473A1-3. Though remote from the immediate context, that crucial passage is enough to support its present use.

2719

The pair χρῶμα (here χρόα) and σχῆμα (B5) represents the visual realm with a complementary doublet, as usual (cf. n.1062).

2720

An overtranslation of πάντα τὰ ἐκ τῶν τοιούτων δημιουργούμενα (B6) is justified for making the point of the passage clear. Just as the phenomenal world consists indifferently of things with attributes AND the attributes themselves (as stated by ἀλλήλων above) so also the spectacle-lover can be said to enjoy sights (color and line) AND the things that exhibit color and line. The world of spatio-temporal objects is here characterized as τὰ δημιουργούμενα under the influence of φιλοτέχνους καὶ πρακτικούς above (A10): such persons do contemplate (or read) blueprints, but only to turn the σχήματα and εἴδη there depicted into artifacts.

2721

ἰδεῖν (B7) is not otiose. It means “see” and explains the bold assertion that a philosopher is a φιλοθεάμων τῆς ἀληθείας (475E4). Metaphors of mental vision abound throughout the sequel, aiding the argument at every step: βλέπειν (477D1 [vs.477C8]), εἰδέναι (476E6 [bis]; 477C4, E1; 479A1), ὁρᾶν (476B10, D1; 479E2), φαίνεσθαι (477C6; 478C14, D5, D8, D11 and 12, E3; 479A7, B2, D1 [bis], D7), and their cognates.

2722

ἰέναι τε καὶ ὁρᾶν (B10): The metaphor is prepared for by ἰόντα (475C7) and ἐλθεῖν / περιθέουσι (475D5-6).

2723

οὗτος (D8) points, directly and with a little sneer, at the person described just above (C2-8). His aversion to λόγοι has already been broached (475D4-5) and is connected with his love of spectacle. We know the type: there is no need to think of Antisthenes or any other character extra hypothesin.

2724

μετέχοντα (D2), which was made a Platonic technical term by Aristotle’s criticism, is suggested here by the metaphor of κοινωνία (A7).

2725

ἐκείνου (D1) denotes the remoteness of the thing itself from its presence in things, as being an aspect of the experience of καθορᾶν.

2726

τὴν διάνοιαν (D5): The sense is very general, as above (B7). Cf. 395D3 (with n.1474), 455B9, and 595B6. Cf. also H.Min.364A6.

2727

ὡς γιγνώσκοντος γνώμην (D5): The terms are borrowed from the term γνῶσις introduced just above (C3). For γιγνώσκειν absolute cf. 347D6.

2728

τοῦ δὲ δόξαν ὡς δοξάζοντος (D6): To the extent that δόξα, in comparison with γνώμη, already contrasts a sense of certainty brought by the subject (a “judgment” being made, e.g. ἔδοξε τῷ δήμῳ) against a mental perception that as such needs no further warrant (γιγνώσκω being able to take the participle as well as the infinitive), the expression itself grasps the distinction Socrates is making. But in the immediate context ὀνειρώττειν shortcircuits this distinction because exactly what was not directly seen is experienced as if it were, and as needing no further warrant.

An individual cannot tell if he is asleep or awake as easily as his neighbor can. The distinction between knowledge and opinion as presented here therefore brings in the Delphic admonition to see oneself from the outside, to know oneself (γνῶθι σεαυτόν).

2729

ἀμφισβήτῃ (D9) of misguided and incompetent resistance (cf. n.2222).

2730

οὐχ ὑγιαίνει (E2) perhaps continues the metaphor of δοξάζειν as a diminished mental state (ὄναρ rather than ὕπαρ: cf.Tht.190B1-C4 [n.b. οὐδ’ ἐν ὕπνῳ]; also Phlb.29D4-5, Alc.2.138C6-8).

2731

πυνθάνεσθαι (E5) of seeking information passively: cf. n.46.

2732

ἅσμενοι ἂν ἴδοιμεν (E6): This is of course the attitude of the philosopher as described above.

2733

ὄν ἢ οὐκ ὄν (E10), the expression is general and vague.

2734

τι (477A1) adverbial enclitic after the indefinite pronouns at E7 and E9 which were orthotone because of the contrast with οὐδέν (as again below, 478B7. cf.Smyth §187a).

2735

ἱκανῶς … ἔχομεν (A2) suggests the dialectical criterion, agreement (cf. n.482).

2736

παντελῶς ὄν : παντελῶς γνωστόν : : μὴ ὄν μηδαμῇ : πάντῃ ἄγνωστον (A3-4). The configuration is Aa : Bb : : A1a : bB1, chiasm used to combine the statements of opposite relations into a closed unit. The polysyllabic negative μηδαμῇ is sympathetic with the preceding monosyllabic μή.

2737

οὕτω ἔχειν ὡς εἶναί τε καὶ μὴ εἶναι (A6): the periphrasis of ἔχειν plus adverb deftly avoids a circular double use of εἶναι. (cf. Euthyphr.5D3; Prot.330E5-6 [setting up εἶναι in E6]; 331E1 [vs.E2-4], and cf. n.2766).The ground for the notion that something could both be and not be, resting on degrees of being, was laid by the distinction between something being and something being completely (παντελῶς) just above.

2738

ἐπὶ μὲν τῷ ὄντι γνῶσις / ἀγνωσία δέ... ἐπὶ μὴ ὄντι (A9-10): Chiasm of opposites again (A : a : : b : B). The opposition γνῶσις ~ ἀγνωσία is not so easy to reproduce in translation.

2739

κατὰ τὴν δύναμιν τὴν αὑτῆς (B8): The genitive can be subjective, or defining, or both. It is vague just as the formula ἐπί plus dative (A9-B1) was vague.

2740

πέφυκε (B10): The perfect varies the perfect τέτακται (B7).

2741

χρόα / σχῆμα (C7) again (cf. 476B5) representing the differentiating features of the visual realm (χρόα again substituting for χρῶμα: cf. n.1062).

2742

παρ’ ἐμαυτῷ (C9), another phenomenological way of designating the world of spatio-temporal objects (cf. περὶ ἡμᾶς, 510A5).

2743

βλέπω (D1), brings forward ἀποβλέπων from C8, the prefix dropped as usual (n.1567). The verb is now used of mental vision.

2744

ἐκεῖνο μόνον βλέπω ἐφ’ ᾧ τε ἔστι καὶ ὃ ἀπεργάζεται (D1): the single thing (ἐκεῖνο μόνον) becomes, with τε … καί, one thing with two facets. The former facet (ἐφ’ ᾧ ἔστι) is already established and the latter (ὃ ἀπεργάζεται) is added as if it came to the same thing.

2745

ὦ ἄριστε (D7) Again (cf. n.550) with his vocative adjective Socrates expresses not his opinion about the interlocutor but about how the conversation is going.

2746

πασῶν γε δυνάμεων ἐρρωμενεστάτην (D9): As the most able ability (γε) it leads the group.

2747

οὐδαμῶς (E2), answering the whole by answering the last part (cf. n.199).

2748

νοῦν ἔχων (E7).

2749

δυναμένη … πέφυκεν (478A4), brings forward the language of 477B10 (πέφυκε) and D1 (ἐφ’ ᾧ τε ἔστι καὶ ὃ ἀπεργάζεται), δυναμένη here meaning what ἀπεργάζεται there did and would.

2750

ὡς ἔχει (A6) again obviates the need for a second “is” (cf. 477A6).

2751

ἀδύνατον (A12), of logical impossibility just as ἀνάγκη is used of logical necessity.

2752

τὸ ὄν : γνωστόν : : δοξαστόν : τὸ ὄν (B3-4), another chiasm of opposites.

2753

ἐπὶ τὶ φέρει τὴν δόξαν (B7): ἐπί plus accusative with φέρειν presents itself as synonymous to ἐπί plus dative with εἶναι above (477D1-5).

2754

ἀλλ’ ἕν γέ τι (B10), with ἕν having exactly the meaning it has in οὐδέν. The phrase merely asserts the inverse of μηδὲν δοξάζει, which has been denied.

2755

οὐχ ἕν τι ἀλλὰ μηδέν (B12): The thought finds a way to express itself by etymologizing οὐδέν and μηδέν, as Democritus did when he said μὴ μᾶλλον τὸ δὲν ἢ τὸ μηδέν (DK 68 B 156). Cf. also n.353.

2756

Reading ἆρ’ (C10) with Stallb., Adam, Shorey, and Slings, parallel with ἆρα below (C13) rather ἄρ’ with Burnet and Chambry. The latter form does not sit well in first position nor combines well with οὖν.

2757

ἐκτὸς τούτων (C10): With the new terms ἐκτός and the contradictories σαφηνεία and ἀσαφεία (soon improved upon by the comparative contraries σκοτωδέστερον / φανότερον [C13-14]) the loose conception of a pair of discrete entities separated by an in-between state or location is tightened into a tighter conception of a pair of termini defining a spectrum of finite length imposed upon an essentially infinite continuum extending in both directions beyond the pair, which, as outside them, completes a spatially exhaustive set. Anything that is can then be conceived of as being (1) between the two points represented by the pair, (2) being one of these two points, or (3) being located on portions of the continuum that extend beyond the pair in the one direction or the other. The spatial exhaustiveness of the continuum provides the basis for an eliminatio: if X is neither of the two points and is not beyond the two points then X must be between the two points. In a sense the entire argument assumes at least as much as it proves, but this is inherent in most eliminationes. The purpose is not proof but illumination.

2758

ἀλλά (C13) used as at B12.

2759

ἔφαμεν (D5): at 477A6-B1.

2760

τὸ μεταξὺ αὖ φανέν (D8): the δύναμις correlated to the in-between object.

2761

πέφανται (D11), the perfect representing a dialectical result (cf. n.205), after the supposititious φανέν (D8) and φανείη (D5) above.

2762

τούτων δὴ ὑποκειμένων (E7): δή signals the reintroduction of the imaginary man as interlocutor. Reminders of what has been agreed to (as at 477A2-4, E4; 478A1, A12, C3, D5-11, E1 [λείποιτ’ recalling the program set forth at 477A9-B1]; 479D7; 480A2 [μνημονεύομεν]) play a crucial role in πείθειν ἠρέμα (476E1), by making the conclusion ineluctable once it comes into view (ἀνάγκη, 479E6 and E9).

2763

ὁ χρηστός (479A1): The nominative refers to the imaginary interlocutor in the third person, who was described at 476C2ff and subsequently impersonated by Glaucon for the sake of dialogue, at 476Eff. Socrates now brings him back into the conversation in order to remind Glaucon what his original position is by means of the extensive relative clause (A1-5). By calling him χρηστός, as well as now addressing him as ὦ ἄριστε (A5), Socrates marks the success of the conversation with him so far and reiterates his hope to learn something from this worthy man!

2764

μηδεμίαν (A2), by its emphasis suggests not only the absence of belief but the refusal to believe.

2765

ἰδέαν (A1) anticipates the use of φιλοθεάμων just below (A3). It designates a sight that the lover of sights will not be vouchsafed to see. Cf. the pregnant use of ἰδεῖν (τὴν φύσιν τοῦ καλοῦ αὐτοῦ) at 476B7 right after χρόας καὶ σχήματα (B5).

2766

ὡσαύτως ἔχουσαν (A2-3): ἔχειν again avoiding equivocal or circular use of “is” (cf. 478A6, 477A6, and n.2737). The series of abstract qualifications (ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχον, A2-3) resembles the one Socrates introduced in Book Four (ταὐτὸν … κατὰ ταὐτὸν … καὶ πρὸς ταὐτὸν … ἅμα, 436B8-9: cf. 436E9-7A1) when he formulated the “law of non-contradiction” so as to enable Glaucon to “perceive” that the soul’s aspects are independent of each other with that aspect of soul whose nature is likewise to be independent (cf. nn.2220, 2222, 2224, 2226, and 2229). It appears elsewhere in Plato’s writings anytime Socrates talks about the “forms” (e.g., Euthyphr.5D1-5; Phdo.78C, Soph.248A, Tim.41D, 82B, etc.).

2767

νομίζει (A3) is repeated from 476C2-3. He brings the word back in order to say νόμιμα below (D4), by which he can refer back to 451A7. As the back-references reach further back we come closer to a major stop.

2768

οὐδαμῇ ἀνεχόμενος (A4) describes a willful resistance due to more than just ignorance, preferring ignorance over bewilderment, confusion, wonder, or questioning.

2769

γὰρ δή (A5) “arresting the attention” (Denniston, 243) of the man being addressed.

2770

καλά, δίκαια, ὅσια (A6-8): The examples are repeated from 475E9-6A5, with a substitution of ὅσιον for ἀγαθόν, a natural doublet with δίκαιον (cf. n.101 ad 331A4). In the liberal manner of epagogic conversation overlap substitutions are more the rule than the exception (cf. n.155).

2771

ἔφη (B1), not φήσει: Socrates reports the answer Glaucon gave on behalf of the imaginary interlocutor, complying with his request at 476E7-8, which he had just renewed with the third singular imperatives at 478E7-9A1.

2772

Any doubling (of items) will look like a halving (of four times as many others); and yet these are contrary appearances.

2773

The scholiast repeats the riddle for us:

αἶνός τις ἐστιν ὡς ἀνήρ τε κ’ οὐκ ἀνὴρὄρνιθά τε κ’οὐκ ὄρνιθα ἰδών τε κ’ οὐκ ἰδὼνἐπὶ ξύλου τὲ κ’ οὐ ξύλου καθημένην τε κ’ οὐ καθημένηνλίθῳ τὲ κ’ οὐ λίθῳ βάλοι τὲ κ’ οὐ βάλοι.

The scholiast fills in the blanks: a eunuch is and is not a man, the bat is and is not a bird, his reed is and is not a branch and his pumice is and is not a stone; but he does not explain the verbs but we can imagine he saw but did not recognize, and that he threw but missing failed to pelt.

2774

καὶ οὔτ’ εἶναι οὔτε μὴ εἶναι οὐδὲν αὐτῶν δυνατὸν παγίως νοῆσαι ... (C4-5): Glaucon, we must imagine, invents an answer very much in character for the lover of spectacles, which actually undermines the rationality of his position. The lover of spectacles takes the opportunity to entertain us with a witticism he picked up at one of the many parties he has gone to, while at the same time his expression παγίως νοῆσαι is an exaggeration that reveals a prejudice against a preoccupation with mental things.

2775

καλλίω θέσιν (C7): Socrates chooses the adjective to appeal to the lover of τὰ καλά. The more natural expression would have been ὀρθωτέραν.

2776

οὐσίας τε καὶ μὴ εἶναι (C7), the abstract noun used as equivalent to the infinitive εἶναι. A distinction between what something is and whether it exists is not needed to make sense of the argument, as Socrates indicates at the beginning (κἂν εἰ πλεοναχῇ σκοποῖμεν, 477A2).

2777

ἀληθέστατα (D2): The “relativist” enthuses a superlative that his ideology really should have banned, and that, moreover, he has “absolutely” no right to use!

2778

τῶν πολλῶν (D3): That the attitude of the φιλοθεάμων is commonplace was indirectly broached by the converse σπάνιοι (476B11); with τῶν πολλῶν Socrates states the fact directly, so that it becomes an axiom that can be repeated later (493E2-4A4). νόμιμα relies on the use of νομίζων at 476C2-3 and 479A3, and καλοῦ τε πέρι καὶ τῶν ἄλλων relies on the typical list of “important” subjects done just above at 475E9-6A; but together these terms and their phrasing refer all the way back to the striking phrase καλῶν τε καὶ ἀγαθῶν καὶ δικαίων νομίμων πέρι (451A7, cf. n.), where Socrates at the beginning of his defense against paradox had expressed reluctance to destabilize the conventional outlook. Given all this, the rather edgy and derogatory anaphora πολλῶν πολλά he uses here (D3) shows how far we have come over the last twenty five pages! For the anaphora cf. 576C3.

2779

εἴ τι τοιοῦτον φανείη (D7), referring to 478D5-6: εἴ τι φανείη οἷον ἅμα ὄν τε καὶ μὴ ὄν.

2780

πλανητόν (D9). For the idea cf. περιφερόμενον (402A9) and nn.1627 and 2716. The metaphor will repeated in the sequel (e.g.484B6) with a slant toward its subjective application to the person who pays attention to things that wander, a subjective state broached at the end of Book Four (ταραχὴ καὶ πλάνη, 444B6-7); cf. also 586A3, 596E1, 602C12.

2781

καλά (E1): That the particular many under scrutiny is the καλά rather than the ἀγαθά or the δίκαια (i.e., the other μέγιστα, to which, Socrates is careful to argue, the argument equally pertains) is no accident. In all it seems that the resistance of the φιλοθεάμων is not a hatred of metaphysics nor some scruples about the reasoning of an ontological proof, but a fear that his beauties will be taken away from him if he countenances beauty itself in his mind – in short, that he might be wakened from a pleasant dream (476CD).

2782

The pair καλόν and δίκαιον generalized by πάντα (E1-3), expands upon καλοῦ τε πέρι which had been generalized by τῶν ἄλλων, above (D4: cf. n.2778).

2783

ἀνάγκη (E6 and 9): Glaucon recognizes the force of the argument -- i.e., the ὁμολογήματα and what their logic implies. The reminders (cf. n.2762, supra) have done their job.

2784

τοὺς αὐτὰ ἕκαστα θεωμένους καὶ ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ὄντα (E7-8). The expression is brought forward from A1-3. Supply ἔχοντα with ὡσαύτως. ὄντα (“fully real”) is new, and not merely attributive since there is no article.

2785

τι (480A4) is adverbial with ὡς, not predicative with ὄν.

2786

χαλεπαίνουσιν (A7) refers back to the imaginary interlocutor (476D8), but πλημμελήσομεν (A6) refers back to the point at the beginning of this Book, where Socrates expressed fear that defending the city in words against paradox might itself be an offense against his friends tantamount to manslaughter (Glaucon’s ἐάν τι πάθωμεν πλημμελές, 451B3).

2787

With οὐ θέμις (A10) Glaucon points to a criterion of proper human behavior beyond the arena of interpersonal squabbling, as Socrates did at the beginning of this section (476D8-9 and nn.2728 and 2730). Themis is of course a much stronger force and sanction than “rights” could ever be (the latter concept barely exists in Greek) but these days it is exactly the claim of personal “rights” that rises to the lips of the man who feels resentment and takes offense. It is unlikely, in human affairs, that the others will in fact “leave it up to” Glaucon once they hear what he has to say or see it coming, no matter how gently he says it or how gradually it arrives. They will say instead, “Who are you to say?” Resentment overstates an empty hand instead of keeping quiet about it.

2788

διὰ μακροῦ τινος διεξελθόντες λόγου μόγις πως ἀνεφάνησαν (484A2), reading διεξελθόντες with F against the διεξελθόντος of ADM, which impossibly places the verb that governs διά plus genitive into the phrase it governs.

2789

καὶ οἱ μή (A1): μή rather than οὐ to deny a characteristic rather than a fact (cf. Smyth §2734).

2790

Thus though the distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers is only a few pages long (475E-480A), the crisis that required but also enabled the distinction to be drawn occupied the entirety of Book Five: whence Socrates's διὰ μακροῦ τινος διεξελθόντες λόγου (A2). We shall see below several instances of Socrates making summary statements that make sense only on a deeper or more substantial level (cf. n.2816).

2791

πολλὰ τὰ λοιπά (A6-7): The largeness of the task can only be taken to refer to plurality of types of vice and corresponding constitution (i.e., four each) that was brought into view at 449A.

2792

τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο ἡμῖν (B2): The formulas τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο and τὸ ἑξῆς announce that what comes after what we have just done will be the next thing, as this passage teaches us – a rule as irrefragable as Humpty Dumpty's rule that one should start at the beginning. The perfectly otiose remark merely reminds us that the structure of the conversation will continue in the next section: one person is speaker (or questioner) and the other is the listener (or answerer). But what, truly, does come next? In hindsight we can see the sequence of prior and posterior (Soph.257A, Phlb.34C), but the view forward is empty because the future does not yet exist. The topic will become thematic in the “sequence of studies” of Book Seven. Meanwhile, the formulas of “after” and “next” are used in three kinds of circumstances:

(1) The conversation already has an underlying sequence of topics known to both speaker and audience, so that the speaker says “Next, ...” only to indicate that he has finished a topic in the sequence, which thereupon becomes the “previous” topic (Rep.580D2, the five regimes; Rep.526C9, geometry comes after arithmetic in a background list of four studies: cf. nn.3468 and 3487; Polit.257B9).

(2) The speaker justifies a transition to his own next topic by arguing ad hoc that it belongs next (Rep.528B1: stereometry comes next after geometry just as three dimensions comes next after two – even though stereometry does not exist! (cf. n.3498), Leg.796E4, 'if that was gymnastic, music would come next;' Tim.72E1: 'what we've treated has to do with soul so next would be to treat the body.'

(3) In the most important use by far, the speaker postpones to take the step he next wants to take by calling it τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο without saying what it is, so as to confirm that the interlocutor agrees with what he has just said (Phlb.42C5), especially when it will now serve as the basis or principle for asserting something unforeseen or controversial (Crito 49E3; Euthyd.279A1; Gorg.454C1, 494E1ff [ἐχόμενα]; Leg.782D7; Phdo 100C3; Phlb.29C6; Prot.355A5).

2793

ἐφάπτεσθαι (B5): “catching hold” of stable beings stabilizes the self, whereas being among the variables sets it adrift (πλανώμενοι): cf. 479D9. and 485B2.

2794

ἐν πολλοῖς (B5): more exactly, among things in their mode as “many's,” rather than as they always are, on their own terms (ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτά, B4).

2795

παντοίως ἴσχουσιν (B5) The apparatus of Burnet reads as follows: παντοίως F [ut vid.] : γρ. παντοίως in marg. D : πάντως A [sed in marg. τοίως A] D M). I read παντοίως, “taking on various states” as opposed to holding in the same state (ὡσαύτως ἔχοντος, B4). For ἴσχειν in this sense cf. 411C6, D3. The main warrant for reading παντοίως with the modern editors over the more widely attested πάντως of ADM is the quantity/quality doublet that παντοίως completes, after πολλοῖς.

2796

τὰ ἐνθάδε νόμιμα καλῶν τε πέρι καὶ δικαίων καὶ ἀγαθῶν (D1-2), referring to 479D3-4 (but echoing also the list at 451A7: cf. n.2401). The received opinions (νόμομα) about the most important topics, which Socrates had there been reluctant to undermine among non-philosophers who were raising philodoxic concerns, have now become the province of philosopher-kings, who now and long since have come into view, to adjust as necessary and to maintain. What has brought them into view is just the empirical fact that in some men there is to be found a love of wisdom which the objects of opinion cannot satisfy. The love implies the existence of its proper object; and the existence of that proper object becomes the criterion for whatever truth the rest (the νόμιμα) can have.

Adam, ad loc., by an unconscious conversion imagines the philosopher calling truth down “from Heaven to Earth by assimilating it to the earthly canons:” confusion of original and copy is a common slip under the influence of metaphysical enthusiasm.

2797

στησόμεθα (D5), from καθιστάναι (B10), with the usual omission of prefix (n.1567).

2798

ἐγνωκότας (D5), answering the perfect ἐστερημένοι τῆς γνώσεως (C7).

2799

ἐν ἄλλῳ μηδενὶ μέρει ἀρετῆς (D7): The traditional quadripartition (cf. n.101) is suggested: ἄλλῳ is adverbial.

2800

τούτῳ γὰρ αὐτῷ σχεδόν τι τῷ μεγίστῳ (E9): His answer has some subtlety. To be equal in all else but superior in the one makes them choiceworthy even if there are others equal in all else but superior in some other attribute, since of all the desired attributes this philosophical attribute makes the greatest individual difference (μεγίστῳ a dative of degree of difference).

2801

ἐλέγομεν (485A4), imperfect of citation (n.582), refers to 374E7-8: ποῖαι φύσεις ἐπιτήδειαι εἰς πόλεως φυλακήν.

2802

δηλοῖ ἐκείνης τῆς οὐσίας (B1-2): The genitive with δηλοῖ is a categorical partitive, like the one with κινήσειεν at 445E1. Cf. 365A6, 375E1-2, 389C6, 399E11, 515D2, 544D6, 572A2, 576D7 with n.1155; Riddell, Digest §26; Smyth §1441.

2803

οὐσίας … μὴ πλανομένης (B2), the wandering of the object, corresponding to the subjective wandering (πλανόμενοι) of οἱ μὴ φιλόσοφοι, at 484B6. Cf. n.2803.

2804

γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾶς (B2-3): The formulation perhaps owes something to the “philosophers” of Ionia. It seems we are moving into a new kind of conversation: cf. n.2790.

2805

ἀτιμοτέρου (B6) recalls the advice of Parmenides to the young Socrates (Parm.130C5-E3). Cf. also οὔτ’ ἐν σμικρῷ οὔτ’ ἐν μεγάλῳ ἠτιμάζομεν, 402A9-B1.

2806

ἐν τοῖς πρόσθεν (B7): i.e., 474C8-475A2.

2807

περί τε τῶν φιλοτίμων καὶ ἐρωτικῶν (B7-8): The reference is to 474C8-475B10. The ἐρωτικοί are lovers of boys: again the erotic vocabulary denotes something specific with a general term (cf. 474D7 and n.). The items are recalled in reverse order (φιλότιμοι, 475A9-BB2; ἐρώτικοι, 474D4-475A2), forming a “chiasm of before and after” (for which cf. n.14).

2808

τὴν ἀψευδίαν ... (C3-4): Truthfulness was given similar prominence in the first paideia (389B2ff), where again it was ranked alongside the canonical virtues. Cf. n.1371.

2809

πᾶσα ἀνάγκη (C6), not just εἰκός. Here and throughout the passage Socrates insists on the attributes as natural correlates of the essential character of the philosopher discovered at the end of Book Five, as his summary at 490D6-7 shows (esp. ἀληθῶς, φύσιν, and ἐξ ἀνάγκης). He expresses these essentially logical relations in a variety of ways, more and less colorful (ἀεί, B1; ἀνάγκη … ἐν τῇ φύσει, B10; μηδαμῇ προσδέχεσθαι, C3; φύσει, C7; δυνατόν … φύσιν … οὐδαμῶς C12-D2; τῷ ὄντι … δεῖ, D3; ἀληθῶς, E1; even προσήκει, E5, refers not to propriety but essential correlation; φύσιν, 486A2; ἐναντιώτατον, A4; ὑπάρχει, A8; οἶόν τε, A9; τοιοῦτος, B1; φύσει … ἀληθινῆς, B3; ἔσθ’ ὅπῃ, B7; συγγενῆ, D7; φύσει, D1; αὐτοφυές, D11; and climactically, ἀναγκαῖα … καὶ ἑπόμενα ἀλλήλοις, E1-2, and φύσει, 487A3) His method throughout is an instance of what he called κατ’ εἴδη διαιρεῖσθαι τὸ λεγόμενον at 454A6.

2810

παιδικῶν (C8). Though generic in sense ἐρωτικός tends in to be specific in use (whence τὸν φιλόπαιδα καὶ ἐρωτικόν [474D5: cf.n. ad loc.], and cf. how του may be presumed to be masculine at 607E4), resembling in this the term ποίησις (Socrates draws the comparison in Symp.205BD). Conversely τὰ παιδικά, which is the desired object of an ἐρωτικός in the specific sense, is here made to stand for the object of ἔρως in general. We can class the figure as a synecdoche (specific for universal), and compare ἀγωνία at Leg.764D3 (cf.D5 and Engl. on ἀθλητής ad loc.); βέλος at Leg.873E6-9; γηράσκειν at Tht.181D1 (if it stands for ἀπόλλυσθαι: cf. Tim.82B6-7); δικαιοσύνη when used as the genus of virtue as e.g. at Leg.957E2-3; ἐκβάλλειν at Polit.309A2-3; παρασκευή at Rep.495A7-8. The use of φλυαρία as a genus, at Gorg.490C8-9, Phdo.66C3, and Symp.211E1-4, as well as of παγκρατιαστική at Euthyd.272A5, ἀναλίσκειν at Rep. 420A5, φιλοπραγμοσύνη at Rep.549C4-5, are instances of “specious genus” used for satire, a different matter altogether. Compare also Phdrs.229E1. Synecdoche and metonymy appears to be a special affectation of the erotic vocabulary.

2811

πεπλασμένως (D12) is the relevant opposite to ἀληθῶς in the present context, since the truth of the philosopher’s orientation is being sought in his underlying nature, while πλάττειν is the specific term for producing something out of a raw material that is malleable. Conversely, in the context of imitating the divine model rather than the human, the philosophic type becomes mere clay (500B1-D8, n.b. πλάττειν, D5).

2812

μεγάλη ἀνάγκη (E2): Glaucon echoes Socrates’s πᾶσα ἀνάγκη (C6), by which he acknowledges that he has accepted the correction of his original answer, εἰκός (B5-8).

2813

φιλοχρήματος (E3): After the things of the body (D12), brought forward by the virtue of temperance (E3), come the things of the things of the body, the third category of goods (χρήματα).

2814

χρήματα μετὰ πολλῆς δαπάνης (E4). For μετά in enumeration introducing a distinct idea as though it were merely, or primarily, a qualification of one of the others, cf. 431C5-6, 591B5 and B6; and Leg.630A8-B2, 661D6-E1, 693D8-E1, 906A7-8; Phlb.15A6-7. The resulting phrase is an hendiadys.

2815

Again φύσις (486A2) is used in synecdoche for the man, to indicate the “essentialism” of the argument (cf. 485A10, B12). φύσις is like an immanent Platonic Idea if such there could be. Note that the attributes being assembled can be conceived of as implications of his philosophical nature and also as criteria for knowing whether he is truly philosophical.

2816

σμικρολογία (A6): The λόγος-etymon momentarily has to do with calculation rather than the kind of philosophical reasoning Socrates goes on to praise. The comparison he is drawing between common human personality traits (of the sort that Theophrastus makes his subject in the Characteres – e.g. σμικρολογία, μεγαλοπρέπεια [infra A8], and ἀλαζονεία [infra B7]) and the life of the philosopher, suggests that the two types of men are living in two separate worlds.

2817

ὅλου καὶ παντός (A5) another emphatic doublet in quality and quantity (cf.445B6, 469C3, 527C7; Alc. I, 109B8; Crat.434A1; Leg.734E2, 779B6, 808A6-7; Phdo.79E3-4; Tht.174A1) common as an epideictic pleonasm, though in the present context a new meaning for such terms as “whole” and “all” is coming into view, to which the romantic enthusiasms of Goethe or Longinus, here often quoted, are but pallid parallels. Hippias the Sophist is made to use just these highsounding abstractions to complain about Socrates’s dialectical “σμικρολογία:” τὰ ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων οὐ σκοπεῖς (H.Maj.301B2: compare his strange expression thereunder, μεγάλα … καὶ διανεκῆ σώματα τῆς οὐσίας πεφυκότα, B6-7, and H.Min.369B8-C2), ἀλλά … τί οἴει ταῦτα εἶναι συνάπαντα (304A4-5), and τὸ ὅλον (288E7). Cf. his showy use of the term ὁμόφυλα, DK86B6.

2818

ὑπάρχειν (A8), of characteristics inherent in or due to the thing’s nature, used likewise of the guardians’ nature at 376C7. διανοίᾳ is the antecedent “incorporated” into its relative clause, placed, as usual, at the end and without article (Smyth, ¤2536). It stands in metonymy for the philosopher (as φύσις has [485A10, B12, 486A2] and ψυχή will [486B10]), whence it is picked up by masc. τούτῳ in the next line.

2819

θεωρία (A8) reinterprets the commonplace μεγαλοπρέπεια to specify the way it appears in the philosopher. We are, indeed, moving into a different universe of discourse (cf. n.2804).

2820

δεινόν (B1): His love of wisdom warranted that he is in touch with truth and that he will be wise, if anybody can be; next, and therefore, he is truthful, and temperate (the second of the cardinal virtues), and magnanimous. Now the third cardinal virtue, bravery, is introduced. The contrapositive is then adduced (B3-4), with a typical chiasm of before and after (first bravery then magnanimity): cf. n.14.

2821

ἀλαζών (B7): The term is new; it represents the opposite of ἀψεύδεια (cf.490A1-3).

2822

δυσσύμβολος ἢ ἄδικος (B7): Thus we reach the great fourth cardinal virtue, δικαιοσύνη, by a path very different from the one we took in Book Four. Here it appears in a commonplace meaning, as the antonym for δυσκοινώνητος and δυσσύμβολος, for which cf. the discussion between Socrates and Polemarchus back in Book One (333AB) and nn.169 and 183.

2823

καὶ τοῦτο (B10) idiomatic (as 419A3 and 420A2; Crito 50A1-2; cf. Smyth §947).

2824

εὐθὺς νέου ὄντος (B10-11) like εὐθὺς ἐκ νέου (D3-4) guarantees that the attributes are there by nature. Cf. Glaucon’s argument at 441A7-B1.

2825

ἀλγῶν τε πράττοι ... (C3-5) bringing forward the argument of 475B11-C8.

2826

ἐγκρίνειν (D2), reminiscent of the inclusion and exclusion of poets and their poems from Book Two (377C1 and n.1171).

2827

δεῖν (D2): cf. n.2809.

2828

οὐκ (E1), after μή (per Smyth §2651d) negates not the “whole sentence” (i.e. it doesn’t negate διεληλύθαμεν), but the “single words” ἀναγκαῖα and ἑπόμενα: “Don’t [μή] tell me they aren’t [οὐ] necessary and aren’t [οὐ] interdependent... .”

2829

With μεταλήψεσθαι (E3), the language of participation that has described (e.g. μετέχειν, 476D1-2) and will describe the “objective” relation between the manys and the ones from which they have their identity (i.e., μετεῖναι, μετέχειν, μεταλαμβάνειν), appears already in the description of the soul’s “subjective” relations, both to these same “ones” that are the true objects of her knowledge (the opposite being στερεῖσθαι, 484C7) and to the virtues that enable her to know them (μετεῖναι, 486B4; μετέχειν, 486A4, μεταλαμβάνειν, 486E3).

2830

ἐπιτήδευμα (487A2): Philosophy has become a “pursuit” and we should be careful to delimit just how and in what sense. “Philosophy” first appeared as a personal type (adjective) and as an activity (verb) in the same sentence (473C11-D3). The very use of the terms, as yet undefined, caused a stir (473E6-A4). The definition that then ensued focussed on a personal disposition or nature rather than any activity (474B6-C2), identifying that disposition as an erotic orientation toward knowledge and learning (474C8-475C8). Glaucon thought this description included too many types of people (475D1-E2), and the meaning of the personal term was then narrowed by an extraordinary distinction between fixed reality and fluid reality as the proper objects of the erotic orientation in question (475E5-480A, the end of Bk. Five), which in the course of the drawing became involved with belief in, as well as the ability to reach, that proper object (476B7-8, C2-3, 477C1ff, etc.). This ability and desire then (Bk. Six, init.) became the definitive personal characteristic of the “philosopher” (δυνάμενοι ἐφάπτεσθαι, 484D2-3) and his suitability to rule was to be studied by an investigation into the natural requisites (φύσις) of this ability and desire as it appears in individuals (who could therefore be called, by synecdoche, φιλόσοφοι φύσεις, 485A10). It was then seen that the standard maniple of conventional virtues were all prerequisites and helpmates to this ability and to this desire, in the course of which the very attempt to reach the proper object, with which the φιλόσοφος was by definition preoccupied, could be referred to as a πρᾶξις (486C10-11, from πράττοι, C4), an activity that a person lacking the prerequisite nature would hate rather than love to do, in contrast with a person equipped with the prerequisite nature, who would thereby be able, through this activity (πρᾶξις), to capture something of his proper object (μεταλήψεσθαι, 486E3). The activity and its purpose having been revealed, the philosopher’s activity can be now referred to as an ἐπιτήδευμα, and distinguished from other activities in pursuit of other ends (as e.g., at 489C9-10).

2831

φίλος τε καὶ συγγενής (A4-5) is a “shell entry” in the enumeration. It presents itself as the next item but in truth serves only to create, syntactically, a new phase in the list so as to emphasize the fact that the four μέρη ἀρετῆς desiderated at the beginning (484D7) have indeed been found in the φύσις of the philosopher, by now presenting them side by side as dependent genitives. For another such shell-entry, cf. Leg.764C8-D3 (ἐπιμελείας). Related and almost indistinguishable is the sudden move up to a genus in an enumeration of species, down from which a further series of species is then hung, as at Gorg.517D6-E2 (δημιουργόν); Leg.743D2-4 (χρηματισμόν: note that πολύν amplifies it so it can embrace several types); Polit.299E1-2 (σύμπασαν ἀριθμητικήν); Prot.354A4-6 (τὰς ὑπὸ τῶν ἰατρῶν θεραπείας).

2832

Μῶμος (A6). Envy strictly attaches not to the occupation but the person who holds it, though of course it can twist itself any way it has to. The occupation of the philosopher as now described requires so much in an individual that people who lack it cannot even imagine how to imitate those who have it. Why else would Momus, who found fault even with the gods, fall silent? The theme returns with a vengeance, at 500D1-2 (with n.3066).

2833

παιδείᾳ τε καὶ ἡλικίᾳ (A7-8): The φύσις of the philosophical type will of course need παιδεία and ἡλικία before he can receive the office of rule. That Socrates mentions these does not (pace J.-C.) “introduce” a treatment of the philosopher’s education, which will in fact begin at page 502, but only indicates we have finished treating the φύσις. What made the treatment complete is the discovery that this φύσις is naturally virtuous, and thus satisfies the second supplementary criterion mentioned at 484D6-7.

2834

μόνοις ἂν τὴν πόλιν ἐπιτρέποις (A8): Socrates’s question unexpectedly braves the paradox of the philosopher king, which had originally met with more than Momus's grumbling (473E6-474A4) but no less irrationality. To the extent that envy wishes to deny the truth of the fact it cannot stand to face, it has trouble articulating itself in words. What words it uses must defy speech and logic or make speech impossible and logic impotent (as we saw in the behavior of Thrasymachus), unless of course certain actions are taken that make talk unnecessary!

2835

πρὸς μὲν ταῦτα (B1): With μέν Adeimantus already limits the scope of his assent. Momus, it would appear, has not been silenced after all. Shorey characteristically interprets out the drama of Adeimantus's interruption of Socrates, by suavely assuring us that the interruption is “a locus classicus for Plato’s (sic) anticipation of objections,” as though Plato were arguing with persons who are not present, rather than Socrates with persons who are.

2836

ἑκάστοτε ἃ νῦν λέγεις (B3): a generalization (ἑκάστοτε) attached to a specific (νῦν), which led Adams to imagine that Adeimantus is complaining about a specific argument on the inherent virtue of the philosopher that the historical Socrates “made all the time.” But ἅ is adverbial (as ὅ in ὃ λέγεις often is). Adeimantus complains about a kind of Socratic argument that leads a person on in small side-ways steps, which Shorey (ad 349D [Loeb 1.88 note a]) citing Jevons calls “substitution of similars.” The so-called “affinity” argument in the Phaedo (78B-84B) with its table of opposites is a parallel case (cf. also Leg.889D3-4 and 6, 898A8-B8; Rep.401A1-8; Tim.28Aff, 51D3-2B7). Euthyphro’s complaint that Socrates makes his own thesis move before his eyes (11AB) and Meno’s confession that Socrates's arguments leave him stunned (80AB) are resorts to imagery, but Adeimantus’s complaint appears to be far more logical in its formulation (the image of the board game is logical not emotional). In essence he is accusing Socrates of contriving a sorites, but soon enough we see that the original thesis, away from which the victim has putatively been led, had not after all been a thesis but a plain fact of observation: Adeimantus abandons his methodological quibble by trumping it with the more derisive charge that Socrates can’t see what’s happening around him.

2837

οἱ ἀκούοντες (B3). Adeimantus’s previous interruption was also on behalf of unnamed persons (419A2), while his second was spurred by Polemarchus, who grabbed him by the cloak from behind (449B1-B7), and whom he soon acquiesced to join, using a first plural (ἡμῖν, C2). We may well wonder, Why does Adeimantus not speak in his own person? Does he think he can? What he would say if he did? and Who actually does he think he is? We should keep in mind that what particularly peeved him about Socrates’s portrait of the rulers was that they would be liable to the charge of not having more when it was in their power to take more (καὶ ταῦτα δι’ ἑαυτούς, 419A3). We also may just be reminded of the asymmetry with which the dialogue began, the one brother accompanying Socrates (i.e. Glaucon: 327A1) and the other (this one) accompanying Polemarchus (327C1) who had there caused Socrates similarly to be grabbed by the cloak from behind and brought to a halt (327B4).

2838

ἀναφαίνεσθαι (B7): The unnamed persons generalize their experience with the present (cf. ἀποκλείεσθαι below, C1). Adeimantus says παραγόμενοι (487B5), brought along with him, but he means ἀπαγόμενοι, led away from their original opinion, as the verb is used at Phdr.262B6. By condescending to defend the naive answerer he buys an opportunity to take pot-shots at the clever questioner, a behavior characteristic of him (cf. n.790 and D8-9 below with n. 2848).

2839

οὐδέν τι μᾶλλον ταύτῃ ἔχειν (C3-4): I take οὐδὲν μᾶλλον as a brachylogy (n.353) and ταύτῃ in its second person sense. For a fuller statement of the οὐδὲν μᾶλλον trope cf. Lys.220A1-3 (πολλάκις λέγομεν ὅτι … ἀλλὰ μὴ οὐδέν τι μᾶλλον οὕτω τό γε ἀληθὲς ἔχει), and Gorg.464B1, Meno 78E6, Soph.233B4.

2840

ἔργῳ δὲ ὁρᾶν (C6): Adeimantus blandly presumes with his imaginary objector that what a person “sees in fact” is eo ipso sufficient to gainsay what one was compelled to agree to in argument (λόγῳ μὲν οὐκ ἔχειν … ἐναντιοῦσθαι, C5), despite the fact that fifteen minutes ago his brother and Socrates had agreed that the common presumption that ἔργον trumps λόγος was something they would have to leave behind (473A1-3, where n.b. κἂν εἰ μή τῳ δοκεῖ), and despite the analysis that this agreement led them to, by which sight was demoted to a rank below thought and the φιλοθεάμων as essentially a philodoxer was excluded from the company of the philosophers (475D-480A).

2841

ἐπὶ φιλοσοφίαν ὁρμήσαντες (C6-7) suggests an erotic element (compare the idiom ἰέναι ἐπί meaning to woo) that ἁψάμενοι, “taking up,” (C7) lacks. Though truth and being have been subject matters in the conversation, philosophy as a subject matter or a branch of learning or an occupation to “take up” has not. Adeimantus has plunged us into a realm of discourse already populated by something called “philosophers,” though we do not yet know whether a person is a philosopher because he loves wisdom, or loves wisdom because he is a philosopher. Since he presents his opinion as patently true and needing no argument we must assume not only that (1) he is relying on a commonplace or doxic definition of philosophy or philosophers, probably the sort of thing that had elicited the strong reaction from Glaucon when Socrates announced the philosophers would have to become kings (it is certainly not the extraordinary definition Socrates and Glaucon just reached), but also that (2) the image of such “philosophers” as being ἀλλόκοτοι, or παμπόνηροι, or ἄχρηστοι ἐπιεικεῖς has some recognizable meaning to his audience.

2842

On ἀλλόκοτος (D2) see Appendix 2. It expresses an enervated embarrassment about how to react to someone else’s behavior, its own meaning being hard to pin down since embarrassment at first courts the option of expressing vague disapproval in hopes that the audience will feel the same way. When push comes to shove condemnation is not far behind (as here, ἵνα μὴ παμπονήρους, D2-3), while on the other hand a person less mild will cut to the chase immediately, as Callicles does on the same subject in the Gorgias (484C5-6D1) and Crito’s counselors, at the end of the Euthydemus, want him to do (304D4-6D1). Adeimantus is of a wavering disposition; Crito as we learn from his dialogue is still more so. In the Sophist Socrates gives an objective statement of the doxic attitude (δόξαν παράσχοιντ’ ἂν ὡς ἔχοντες μανικῶς, 216D1-2).

2843

ὅμως τοῦτό γε … πάσχοντας (D3-4): Their promise (δοκοῦντας) of usefulness is undermined by the effect of the study (πάσχοντας). τοῦτο points forward to the next participial phrase, which properly should have been a noun phrase in the infinitive, but by the time Adeimantus gets there he wants to describe the outcome with the perceptual participle in order to continue his contrast between the anticipation of thought and factual outcome in front of one's eyes.

2844

ταῖς πόλεσι (D5): The plural advertises the claim as being supported by empirical observation.

2845

καὶ ἐγὼ ἀκούσας (D6). Socrates indicates to us that he took a deep breath: cf. n.1211.

2846

τοὺς ταῦτα λέγοντας (D6): Socrates generalizes Adeimantus’s anonymous τις into a plural.

2847

τὸ σοὶ δοκοῦν (D8). In the context of the last few pages Adeimantus’s casual and unthinking use of δοκοῦν (D8) reveals a measure of unreflective philodoxy, as does his characteristic mix of gratuitous deference and presumptuousness. Moreover, σοί is emphatic. Socrates finally calls him on his reluctance to own up to his own δόξα but still he does not notice.

2848

ἀκούοις ἄν (D10) gently mocking Adeimantus’s smooth ἡδέως ἂν ἀκούοιμι.

2849

ἀχρήστους (E3) With this Adeimantus makes it clear that his allegation that philosophers are scoundrels was mere foil (n.b., concessive μέν, 487D1) for the charge of their being useless. Surely the charge that philosophy makes men scoundrels would be the stronger argument against Socrates’s thesis, if Adeimantus cared to make the charge seriously; and in the event, Socrates will not ignore this charge, either (489D1ff). For as usual he takes the interlocutor’s objection far more seriously than the interlocutor does, and takes it further, too.

2850

δεόμενον ἀποκρίσεως δι’ εἰκόνος λεγομένης (E4-5): Typically the apology for making an argument (λεγομένης) in images is that it makes the point easier to grasp (Gorg.517D, Leg.644C: cf. δυσαπόδεικτον here [488A1]; and cf. Xen.Oec.17.15). But is it the nature of the question or the nature of the person asking it that calls for this kind of answer? The etymological figure, ἐρωτᾷς ἐρώτημα, suggests either interpretation, and keeps both Adeimantus and ourselves in the dark on this point. One should keep in mind that the ideal state itself is an εἰκών, and ask whether the speeches of Adeimantus and Glaucon at the beginning of Book Two were likewise raising questions that needed to be answered with an εἰκών.

2851

δέ γε (E6) in retort, taking the interlocutor’s word one step further (cf.407A9, 450B6, 497A3; Xen.Mem.4.4.6). “But you speak in images all the time (sc. so quit complaining).” The response reveals Adeimantus thinks Socrates finds the challenge hard to meet rather than the challenger hard to educate. This is of course his special blind spot. At the same time he barely notices Socrates has accommodated him with a different method of discussion than the close dialectic of question and answer that he, or the persons he imagines he is speaking for, had found so confining.

2852

For γλίσχρως (488A2), cf.Crat.414C.

2853

ἐκ πολλῶν αὐτὸ συναγαγεῖν (A5): Socrates is announcing that his image is multi-faceted. It will explain not only the useless men but the people and situation they find themselves among and in. It will include many points of comparison with “real life.” Already we see it might be the suitable antidote to Adeimantus's blinkered impetuousness.

2854

νόησον (A7): With this term of “mental perception,” Socrates replies to Adeimantus’s attempt to gainsay reason with observation (ἔργῳ δὲ ὁρᾶν, 487C6), by inviting him to “see” something in his mind’s eye, with a verb that likewise takes the participial indirect discourse of perception (cf. Adeimantus's 487C6-D5: γιγνομένους [D2], πάσχοντας [D4], γιγνομένους [D5]; and Socrates's 488A7-489A2: γιγνόμενον [488A7], στασιάζοντας [B3], φάσκοντας [B7], etc.).

2855

εἴτε πολλῶν πέρι εἴτε μίας (A7-8): With an almost too elegant anastrophe Socrates tucks in a jab at Adeimantus’s claim of empiricism (ταῖς πόλεσι, 487D5, E2). His image, though concrete, is of course not empirical: as such, one boat will do.

2856

ἕτερα τοιαῦτα (B2-3) For ἕτερος in euphemistic or dismissive understatement cf. n.1224. The statement (B1-3) is tentatively vague, and smacks more of criticism than description. Things become clearer below (E8-489A2 and n.2871).

2857

περὶ τῆς κυβερνήσεως (B3-4). Some kind of distinction is being set up by the use of ναύκληρος instead of κυβερνήτης, and our first clue comes here (B4), where the expected term (though in abstract form, viz., κυβέρνησις) does appear, but describes the office not the man.

2858

κυβερνᾶν (B4). For the present compare the use of ἄρχειν at 444B3 and at 442B1 (after inceptive aorist καταδουλώσασθαι): cf. n.2305.

2859

ἔχοντα ἀποδεῖξαι (B5): “nor could say:” Just who are we to imagine asking the sailors these questions, the very questions the Athenians finally tired of having put to them by a certain bug-eyed barefoot citizen in their midst?

2860

αὐτοὺς δὲ αὐτῷ (B8): The phrase steps beyond their claims and beliefs to the factual persons, and in this context the κυβερνήτης is again called ναύκληρος.

2861

ἄρχειν (C5) again present, of occupying (rather than merely assuming) the office. The infinitive among the many participles is climactic but strictly begins an anacoluthon as if the story were in the accusative infinitive continued by πλεῖν. With ἐπαινοῦντες (C7) the original construction is resumed.

2862

πλεῖν ὡς τὸ εἰκὸς τοὺς τοιούτους (C7): a dismissive phrase strikingly parallel to dismissive βραχύ τι καὶ γιγνώσκοντα ἕτερα τοιαῦτα above (B2-3).

2863

ναυτικὸν μέν … καὶ κυβερνητικὸν καὶ ἐπιστάμενον τὰ κατὰ ναῦν (D1-2), a metabatic triad that now reveals the distinction that has been lurking between the man at the helm (ναύκληρον) and the true captain (κυβερνητικόν) by avoiding the former term and introducing the latter in order to cap it with ἐπιστάμενον τὰ κατὰ ναῦν.

2864

Read ἐπαΐοντες (D5) with all best mss. instead of the ἐπΐοντας of the recentiores. To assume anacoluthon in extended indirect discourse is easier than to assume an error common to all mss. The nominative construction is continued by οἰόμενοι, again unanimous, at E2.

2865

ἐνιαυτοῦ καὶ ὡρῶν καὶ οὐρανοῦ καὶ ἄστρων καὶ πνευμάτων καὶ πάντων τῶν τῇ τέχνῃ προσηκόντων (D6-7): Repetition of καί with each of six items (D6-7) emphasizes the scope of the captain’s job as if for an inexpert audience that might have left one of them out.

2866

τῷ ὄντι ἀρχικός (D8): cf. the parallel passage, ἀρχικοῦ γένους ὄντι (444B5) from the climactic portion of the conversation with Glaucon. Here, as there, the mere holding of a position is distinguished from having the inner resources to execute what the position requires, expressed above with the tenses of the infinitive (n.2305).

2867

ὅπως δὲ κυβερνήσει (D8), an object clause parallel to ὅπως ἄρξουσιν (D2), contrasting the goal of being at the tiller with that of knowing how to manage it, and the goal of being at the controls with the goal of being in control. Their attitude has the same blind spot as Thrasymachus’s, that for all the envy it might incite, being in charge incompetently is tantamount to not being in charge at all, the paradox from which Thrasymachus so cheekily sought to escape by asserting that the ruler qua ruler never errs (340D1-341A4).

2868

Reading οἰόμενοι (E2) with all mss., rather than the accusative οἰομένους of the recentiores, analogous to ἐπαινοῦντες above (C7), with its parallel object clause (D2-3).

2869

μήτε τέχνην τούτου μήτε μελέτην … ἅμα καὶ τὴν κυβερνητικήν (E1-3). ἅμα is not always temporal (under which circumstance it implies a logically “biconditional” relation). We find it placed with a connective in expressions like A ἅμα καὶ B and A τε ἅμα καὶ B, etc., where it is strictly redundant (unless of course it does denote temporal simultaneity in the terms being connected, as at Leg.665D1-2, 814C8, 900A8-B1). When redundant it can strengthen the link between A and B, just as the redundant τε in A τε καὶ B does, and thereby with καί can take on the various functions and meanings that τε καί does, such as to link opposites or complements or to insist on the equal importance of the two terms (LSJ § A.3, s.v. misses this logical use, giving examples only where it links finite verbs).

All of the Platonic examples I have come from his “onkos” style, where ἅμα tends to be otiose or even decorative: Leg.626E4 (opposites), 634C7, 679E3 (equals), 699C7-8 (decorative), 740B1 (complements), 766E1-2 (decorative) 768E2-3, 770C4, 771B1, 776B1-2, 796A8-B1, 796C2-3, 798A7-8, 808C4, 809B3, 816B4-5, 817B3 (complements), 822D7, 832D5-6, 836E5-37A1 (with the second of three items as here), 897C5 (hendiadys), 927E6-7, and Phlb.26A7-8, 34C6-7, 42A8 (opposites), 53B1. It can appear with the first item in a list of several items where it takes on a job commonly assigned to τε: Leg.829B5, 842E1-2, and cf. Leg.733E1-2 (where it goes with the first doublet of two, τε going with the other), and Leg.950E5-6, πλείστους ἅμα καὶ καλλίστους τε καὶ ἀρίστους, where it prepares for a doublet of quantity and quality but leaves place for τε to form a sub-doublet for quality. It may appear in this logical meaning after καί, as Leg.665D1-2 and Phlb.26A7-8, 34C6-7, 53B1. It can be proclitic (A ἅμα τε B, Leg.728E3), and so as a preposition with the dative can approach the meaning of καί (Leg.716A6); but it can also be enclitic (A, B τε ἄμα, Tim.64A5). Leg.782A6-7, βρώσεως καὶ βρωμάτων τε ἅμα καὶ πωμάτων, is a pretty mystery.

When words intervene between the τε and καί (as here, μήτε … οἰόμενοι δυνατὸν εἶναι λαβεῖν ἅμα καί) the intimacy of the connection already suggested by τε can be restored or resumed by adding ἅμα (cf. Leg.822D7, 832D5-6, 900A8-B1). Hence in the present case there is no need to repeat the negative μήτε with this third item (τὴν κυβερνητικήν). The closest parallel I have to our passage is Leg.927E6-7, τιμαῖς δὲ καὶ ἀτιμίαις ἅμα καὶ ἐπιμελείαις, where as here it signals a new kind of item after a pair of closely related ones.

The τήν with κυβερνητικήν helps it refer to κυβερνητικόν (D1), the climactic term the sailors ignorantly use in praise of the usurper’s skill.

2870

ὡς ἀληθῶς (E3-4) is contrasted with τῷ ὄντι (E4) as λόγος with ἔργον. Socrates is playing with Adeimantus’s distinction (487C5-6).

2871

μετεωροσκόπον τε καὶ ἀδολέσχην καὶ ἄχρηστον (E8-489A1): a derogatory triad corresponding to the their triad of praise above (D1-2), climaxing in the demonstrandum, ἄχρηστος (from 487E3 and 487D5). The insertion of the reflexive σφισι (A1) will have laid the main predicate of the entire tale. μετεωροσκόπον reveals that the picture we were given of the ναύκληρος at the beginning (ὑπόκωφον ..., 488B1-3) described how he appeared in the eyes of the sailors. To them he is hard of hearing but the fact is he doesn’t heed them, nor sees them particularly; and their opinion that his knowledge is no better than his sight means only that they have no idea what he is thinking about.

Amazingly Aristotle (Rhet.1406B35, followed by the anonymous [Proleg.27 = 51.29-31 Westerink] and by Adam and Shorey [citing Polyb.6.44 against his own purpose] and most others) takes the ναύκληρος to be the Demos rather than a hegemonic leader, though clearly it is the sailors that embody the proud stupidity of the crowd, as Cope noted ad Rhet.1406B35.

2872

πλωτήρων (A2), a parting shot, compensating for the play on ναύκληρος and κυβερνήτης that has run through the passage. These creatures who float with the ship hardly even deserve the name of sailors (cf. 341C9-D4).

2873

ἐξεταζόμενον (A4), continuing the participial construction with the verb of mental vision ἰδεῖν.

2874

τὴν διάθεσιν (A6), acc. of respect. It is not the question how useless philosophers can rule (487E1-3) that Socrates says he has answered, but how the attitude of “the cities” (Adeimantus's empirical observation, again! cf. 487D5 and nn.2844 and 2855) toward true philosophers arises, according to which attitude they are useless (not to mention weirdoes and scoundrels) -- a διάθεσις that belongs to Adeimantus and anybody who understood and agreed with his rap (cf. nn.2841, 2849).

2875

μανθάνειν (A6): There was no proof, only learning. The ambiguity of δυσαπόδεικτον (488A1: cf. n.2850) has been cleared up and the method of likenesses was successful.

2876

ἐκεῖνον τὸν θαυμάζοντα (A8): Socrates's ἐκεῖνον avoids the confrontational or vindictive coloring Adeimantus would have felt if he had said τοῦτον (“that man of yours” – a little too close to “you”): instead his pronoun stresses his acquiescence in receiving Adeimantus's speech as an objective account about a third person. The θαῦμα Socrates refers to is, then, his own interpretation of the paradoxical antithesis Adeimantus had put into the mouth of his critic, ἐπιεικεστάτους δοκοῦντας / ἀχρήστους γιγνομένους (487D3-5). Socrates will double the paradox below (489C9-D2): the noblest preoccupation is unpopular because the opinion-makers are preoccupied by the opposite sorts of things, but the greatest cause of its bad name is the very people who allege to be preoccupied with nothing but this same sort of things.

2877

οὐ τιμῶνται ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι (A9): Again Socrates interprets the words of Adeimantus's critic, who said they actually come to be useless for the cities (ἀχρήστους ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι γιγνομένους) not that they merely come to be deemed so. His interpretation implies that he takes the critics words to be disingenuous, an expression of his own loss of respect rather than an assertion that they actually become useless, which implies moreover that he takes the critic's θαῦμα to be disingenuous. too. By taking this interpretation Socrates is separating the critic, who was originally Adeimantus's spokesman, from the Adeimantus who has now heard and learned something from the simile.

2878

ἀλλὰ διδάξω (B2). Socrates had avoided confrontation by suggesting Adeimantus teach the imaginary person (δίδασκε, A9). By agreeing to do so Adeimantus admits he was wrong a little more than he tries to hide it (with ἀλλά). Where, after all, will he find this man so as to teach him, unless underneath it all it is himself he is talking about? Adeimantus tends to present his own contrary opinions as objections of possible others, but when Socrates gets him to change his mind the first thing he thinks of is those who haven’t and need to be taught. Compare his behavior subsequent to his previous intrusive interruption, in Book Four, and his subsequent behavior (424D7-E4, 426B3-E3). Cf. Appendix 8.

Shorey, again viewing the action from his superior distance, suavely converts the dramatic change within Adeimantus into a mere deployment of a Platonic habit of style, to “represent thought as adventure or action.” He goes on to cite passages in the corpus in which a thought-adventure is narrated (e.g. Socrates’s autobiographical passage in Phaedo) but these are merely instances of plays within plays. In the present case the converse of what Shorey says is true: the action of the dialogue, if we choose to notice it, consists of an advance in the thinking of Adeimantus. In response to that advance, Socrates separates Adeimantus from his old way of thinking by exploiting his own conceit that the thinking belonged to somebody else. A most striking deployment of this technique awaits us in Book Nine (588B1-8: cf. nn.4631 and 4632).

I sense that the dialogue form is not only a polished creature of Plato’s literary imagination, but also a loyal representation of the rude and unmediated effect the Socratic encounter had upon himself.

2879

Reading λέγεις (B3) with all mss. (λέγει scr. Parisinus 1810). Only after Adeimantus has indirectly accepted responsibility for his statement does Socrates treat the ideas as his own, even offering a way to redeem what he said!

2880

τῆς ἀχρηστίας τοὺς μὴ χρωμένους (B4-5). The criticism is hoist on its own petard. To the extent that it is a criticism of the philosophers it is false, and to the extent it is true it is not a criticism of the philosophers but of the citizens who fail to see their value. The term αἰτιᾶσθαι (B5) nicely straddles between the realms of praise and blame (αἰτία) on the one hand, and logic and reasoning (“etiology”) on the other. With the eyes, which Adeimantus has privileged over reasoning, one cannot after all see causes. Cf. below where Socrates invites Adeimantus to reason about the cause of the knavery he sees (αἰτία, D11).

2881

ἐπιεικεῖς (B5) in truth is attributive not predicative. My over-translation is meant to reveal the Thrasymachean tendency in Adeimantus’s thought, and anyone else's who allows his surroundings to define him—but Socrates does not confront Adeimantus with this point, here.

2882

οὐ γὰρ ἔχει φύσιν (B6), for which J.-C. compare Hdt.2.45, to which Shorey adds 473A1 and Dem.2.26, as well as pointing out that the idiom ἔχειν λόγον (e.g., 378E4, 491D7) is parallel.

2883

ὁ τούτου κομψευσάμενος (B8): Socrates’s immediate allusion is to the ἀγύρται καὶ μάντεις that Adeimantus mentioned in his speech in Book Two (364B5-6). Trying to determine just which individuals might have put the image into Adeimantus’s mind distracts the commentators from the main point, that Socrates only means to exonerate Adeimantus from responsibility and thereby, once again, to avoid confrontation. For the topic compare the schol. with Arist. Rhet.1391A8, D.L. 2.69, and Xen.Apol.17.

2884

μετεωρολέσχας (C6), a coinage that telescopes the hendiadys μετεωροσκόπον τε καὶ ἀδολέσχην (488E8-489A1) into a single word. Though the reference to the τὰ μετέωρα is particularly appropriate in the context of the pilot, the slander and ridicule against Socrates (Apol.19C2-5) also comes to mind (cf. also n.2859).

2885

τοίνυν (C9): For the third straight time (B3, A8). Socrates aims these comments at Adeimantus and no one else, but continues to avoid confrontation by the conceit that Adeimantus was speaking for someone else.

2886

εὐδοκιμεῖν (C9), a variant for τιμᾶσθαι (A4-B1). It recalls the brothers' use of the term in connection with ἐπιτηδεύειν (358A5-6, and n.685), as well as Socrates’s criticism of the term in the context of his response to Adeimantus’s objection at the beginning of Book Four (423A7). Another chip from Adeimantus’s speech is being taken off the table.

2887

οἱ πλεῖστοι τῶν ἰόντων ἐπ’ αὐτήν (D3-4): Socrates frontloads his program by now broaching the stipulation that the παμπόνηροι Adeimantus pointed to are imitation philosophers, persons “making an approach on her,” not real ones (ἀληθινούς, A5). In all strictness Adeimantus had claimed one can see young men who study philosophy too long becoming (γιγνομένους) weirdoes if not utter knaves. Socrates is about to separate the force that inevitably causes most young men to become knaves (τῆς τῶν πολλῶν πονηρίας ἀνάγκην, D10), denying that that force is philosophy, from a class of putatively philosophical knaves, denying they are philosophers. His program will become explicit below (490E2-491A5).

2888

σε (D5): Socrates no longer avoids attributing the assertion to Adeimantus (cf. n.2879). It is of course true that Adeimantus asserted the majority of persons who have been engaged in philosophy are weirdoes or scoundrels, but the statement was mere foil for the assertion that the most decent of them were useless: it was only these he continued to speak about when he put the question about the philosopher-kings at 487E1-3. This is why Socrates summarizes the statement and asks for his distinct approval of the summary.

2889

ἀνάγκην (D10), markedly stronger than αἰτίαν (D7), with which the parallels of syntax and word order force us to compare it.

2890

τῶν πολλῶν (D10), refers to οἱ πλεῖστοι (D3-4 and 487D1-2) but varies the expression in order to bring in the derogatory tone of “οἱ πολλοί,” itself borrowed from B3.

2891

ἀκούωμεν δὴ καὶ λέγωμεν (E3): With this pair of verbs Socrates characterizes the dialogical and dialectical joint search (cf. n.708). He makes the allusion in order to acknowledge that Adeimantus has now come on board as a true partner after his poorly argued and emotional objection to dialogue (487B2-C4), his evasive use of an imaginary objector, and the subsequent byplay attaching to his request to “hear” Socrates’s response (487D8-10). The rhetoric and tone of the conversation now takes an unprecedented turn. Cf. Appendix 3 §2.

2892

διῇμεν (E4) re-introduces the dialectical treatment step-by-step (διά) that Adeimantus had objected to at 487B4-7 (esp. ἕκαστον τὸ ἐρώτημα σμικρὸν παραγόμενοι).

2893

καλόν τε κἀγαθόν (E4), reverting not only to the topic of the philosophic nature, but also the manner of viewing it in the light of conventional notions of virtue (cf. nn.2816, 2819, and 2822).

2894

πρῶτον μὲν ἀλήθεια (490A1), referring not only to the aversion toward mendacity (485C3-4) but to the desire for the truer truth from which that characteristic was derived (485A10-B8), in contrast to which the opposite characteristic is here shunned (ἀλαζονεία, more Theophrastean material: Char.23 [cf. n.2816]).

2895

μετεῖναι (A3): again the language of participation is used “subjectively” (cf. n.2829).

2896

τοῖς νῦν δοκουμένοις (A5-6) the present instead of the usual perfect, straining to draw a contrast with Adeimantus’s already strained periphrastic expression ἦν γὰρ οὕτω λεγόμενον (A4). The contrast is further supported by re-use of οὕτω and the contrast of the past (ἦν) with the present (νῦν).

2897

οὐ μετρίως ἀπολογησόμεθα (A8) is the reading of all the mss. The optatives in the ὅτι construction that depend on this verb (εἴη [A9] through λήγοι, [B7]) do not require the verb to be emended into a secondary sequence indicative (ἀπολογησάμεθα ci. Ast : ἀπολογισάμεθα ci. Madvig, which both commit Socrates to asserting that something happened that didn’t) but are due to the compendious expression of the question (ἆρ’ οὖν δὴ οὐ μετρίως ἀπολογησόμεθα, A8). Socrates is not asking whether they will make this ἀπολογία moderately but whether, after they make it, it shall have been warranted -- though in truth the question itself is merely a rhetorical artifice for making the ἀπολογία. A fuller expression of the underlying question would be, εἰ ἀπολογησαίμεθα ὅτι A,B,C,D, οὐκ ἂν μετρίως ἀπολογησαίμεθα; The verbs dependent upon ὅτι are optative not by the sequence of moods but to correspond to the optative of such a suppressed protasis.

2898

πεφυκώς / ὄντως (A9). The language of “natural implication” returns (cf. n.2809) but here and in the sequel gives way to a rhetorical elevation above logic.

2899

προσήκει (B4), of what a thing’s inner nature suits it to do, as at 485E5 and, first, at Book Four, 442B2 (cf. synonymous πρέπειν at 444B4). The expression γένει used there corresponds to συγγενεῖ here. Cf. n.2809.

2900

προσήκει δὲ συγγενεῖ (B4): Here is the point of the subjective participation he has stressed up to now.

2901

μιγείς (B5): Intercourse of the man with what is real makes the former knowing and the latter true. Note that both these attributes are here rendered with nouns (νοῦς, ἀλήθεια).

2902

χορόν (C3). With the metaphor Socrates tries to acknowledge how the array of qualities ancillary to the philosopher’s pursuit, which he listed off like Santa’s reindeer to Glaucon (487A4-5, and n.2832), might in fact have incited Adeimantus’s envy and caused him to interrupt. In effect he gently broaches that list with a litotes, saying that the listed items were “not bad things.”

2903

With these questions (B9-C7) Socrates subjects Adeimantus to just the stepwise sort of induction he had lately condemned. Note also that the steps are completely different: ὑγιές (C5) played strictly no role in the conversation with Glaucon (485A4-E3); and δίκαιον (ibid.) was there deduced, inter alia, from σωφροσύνη (486B7), whereas here the converse occurs.

2904

Reading ἀναλαμβάνοντα (C9), a scribitur in Ven.184 (against the ἀναγκάζοντα of all mss.) to which Socrates himself refers back, with ἀνειλήφαμεν at D6 below, and which alone justifies his use of μέμνησαι two words later.

The theme of compulsion is eminent in the context, but the syntax of ἀναγκάζοντα is awkward. An “absolute” or intransitive use (LSJ §6, s.v.) is dubious. The only explicitly stated object it can take is χορόν, in which case both τάττειν and ἀναγκάζοντα govern it and the meaning is that the marshalling of them is done with forcible argument (per LSJ §4): cf. the expression ἐξ ἀνάγκης ὁρισάμεθα at the end of the paragraph. Perhaps the object is Socrates or Adeimantus represented by understood με or σε and the meaning is, 'There is no need for you to marshal them all forcing me to carry it out, or for me to marshal them all forcing you to agree' (per LSJ §1, s.v.): cf. the sense Socrates gives the word two lines below (C11) in the course of summarizing Adeimantus’s interruption (at 487B1-C3). Adeimantus had virtually accused Socrates of forcibly tyrannizing his interlocutor (his word was ἀποκλείονται, 487B8), but rather than showing that the compulsion was unfair (i.e. that the arguments were not as necessary as Socrates and Glaucon had agreed they were, at 486E1), Adeimantus, by an act of sophistry we have each of us perhaps committed ourselves, makes a show, under color of defending those unskilled in argument, of trumping mere talk with fact (λόγος with ἔργον, 487C5-6, Glaucon and Socrates’s agreement to suspend that distinction at 473A1-3 notwithstanding). Having for some pages now (cf. nn.2854, 2873, 2874) played the with notion that sense data is ἐναργές, which Adeimantus there relied upon and employed, the play including serving him up an “image” by which he could “see” that he would rather be a captain accused of poor “eyesight” rather than a sailor who deserves to be “disregarded” (nicely supplemented with the purely philosophical outburst and ἀπολογία just above, 490A8-B7), Socrates finally and gently welcomes Adeimantus to drop the crutch—a crutch we all recognize—and come over to the side of λόγος.

2905

ἀνδρεία, μεγαλοπρέπεια, εὐμάθεια, μνήμη (C10-11): The asyndesis imitates the metaphors of χορός and τάττειν. For the metaphorical use of χορός of amassing a list or lists, where invidiousness, derogation, and praeteritio also may loom, cf. 560E, 580B; Euthyd.279A4-C4; Polit.291AC; Tht.173B4, and cf. Phdrs.246E4-7A4: Φθόνος γὰρ ἔξω θείου χοροῦ ἵσταται). By combining praeteritio with an abbreviated version of the list (cf.487A4-5) Socrates again softens the blow at the same time that he insists on his point (nn.2876-2879).

2906

κακοὺς πᾶσαν κακίαν (D3) represents Adeimantus’s παμπονήρους (487D2: cf.489D3), an expression he showed some reluctance to use, whether real or feigned. As usual Socrates represents what his interlocutor said in the finest detail (cf. n.359), but at the same time he has reversed the order, placing the scoundrels second because the current topic is to account for the charge of πονηρία.

2907

τί ποθ’ οἱ πολλοὶ κακοί; D5): The expression perhaps inadvertently echoes the wise saying of Bias of Pittacus (οἱ πλεῖστοι κακοί, DK 1.65.2).

2908

θεάσασθαι (E2), not λέγειν or διελθεῖν, but a new verb of mental vision.

2909

τὰς μιμουμένας ταύτην (491A1): The concept and the language of men imitating (but not emulating) their natural superiors is unprecedented, though φάσκοντες (489D2) prepared for it and the image of the sailors arrogating the role of the pilot to themselves has provided an image. In now saying that their φύσεις are different Socrates reveals that he has two sets of scoundrels in mind, some who, despite being suited for the pursuit of philosophy as he and Glaucon before and as he and Adeimantus just now have defined it, will become πονηροί; and others whose nature is so ill-suited to pursue it that their very claim to be philosophers confers upon philosophy the bad name she now has acquired, in some quarters.

It is these latter, the φάσκοντες or μιμούμενοι, that common parlance would think of as knavish φιλόσοφοι (according to Adeimantus, representing their view in his interruption) just as it was against these in the prospect of whom becoming kings Glaucon had represented the violent indignation of οἱ πολλοί at 473E6-474A4. Neither Socrates nor Plato takes the trouble to identify them beyond the satirical image of the tinker below and the obiter dictum at 490A5-6 that they are reputed to lack humility and have little regard for truth. The worry about who the masses have in mind is mere gossip in comparison with the question whether Adeimantus (and Glaucon for that matter) will continue to acquiesce in the dictates of the logos rather than cave in to the outlook of the mass, since the entire drama of the dialogue hinges on it.

2910

ἀνάξιον (A2) is intentionally oxymoronic. Cf. πολλῶν κακῶν ἄξιοι, 495C5-6.

2911

πλημμελοῦσαι (A4), a term that understates truly offensive behavior (as at 451B3 and 480A6), offensive enough to overshadow other virtues (Apol.22D8).

2912

With ἐγώ σοι (A7) Socrates adopts something of the pose of the lecturer (cf.329A1 and n.48, and πυθοίμην, below [C6]), announcing what will be a sustained elevation of tone unprecedented in the conversation so far. For a full review of the new style cf. Appendix 3.

2913

προσετάξαμεν (A9), like τάττειν χορόν (490C8-9), refers to the interdependency (ἑπόμενα ἀλλήλοις, 486E2), community (μετεῖναι, 486B4) and homogeneity (οἰκειότερον, 485C10; συγγενῆ, 486D7) of the attributes derived above (485A10-487A5).

2914

On πυθοίμην (C6) cf. 328E2, where as here it is used by the person about to receive a lecture (cf. nn.46 and 901). Adeimantus's distinct eagerness to receive Socrates's account recalls that exactly this opinion played a key role in his speech in Book Two – that on the basis of bad models the talented young man can only be expected to choose the wrong path (364A4,ff).

2915

τὰ προειρημένα (C8): Socrates is acknowledging that what he has said is more a matter of advertisement or preparation than a final statement. Cf. 510C1.

2916

κελεύεις (C10), reacts to Socrates’s imperative, λαβοῦ (C7), itself reacting to Adeimantus’s πυθοίμην (C6). Adeimantus is cool and formal in comparison with the erotic Glaucon, his coolness, even in the face of a treatment of the problem that lies particularly close to his heart, being of a piece with his tendency to present his own opinion as if it belonged to somebody else.

2917

σπέρματός … ἢ φυτοῦ (D1) isolates the earliest phases of life before external τροφή comes into play: cf. σπαρεῖσά τε καὶ φυτευθεῖσα infra, 492A3-4.

2918

ἄκρατον (E4), from its use in connection with wine denotes both purity and strength and thereby makes Socrates’s argument for him.

2919

νεανικῆς (E4), the word-choice referring back to the similar argument made at 425B10-C5 (n.b. νεανικόν, C5). For the negative connotation of νεανικός cf. 606C7 and νεανιεύματα, 390A2.

2920

εἰς πᾶσαν ἀρετήν (492A2) mildly taunts πᾶσαν κακίαν (490D3).

2921

σπαρεῖσά τε καὶ φυτευθεῖσα (A3-4) repeats the doublet σπέρματος πέρι ἢ φυτοῦ (D1). Socrates is elaborating the concept Adeimantus used in his characterization of the vulnerable young at 365A6-7 (εὐφυεῖς τε καὶ ἱκανοί).

2922

θεῶν (A5): Socrates seems to remember Adeimantus's remark at 366C6-7.

2923

ὥσπερ οἱ πολλοί (A6): Again Shorey (ad loc., 2.34, note c) hears Plato anticipating critics rather than Socrates speaking to Adeimantus about the prejudice against philosophy he voiced out of envy over its high standards, another of the prejudices that would be aroused against Socrates during his trial. In all likelihood it is “sophists” that Adeimantus has in mind when Socrates speaks of “philosophers”—people that is who seem apart from the mass because of their inordinate interest in special talk. For Socrates to say that these are kowtowing to the mass, and that the mass rather than they are the sophists, is a stunning surprise and a maximal paradox that he will explain over the next page and a half, particularly at 493A6ff.

2924

τινας (A6 and A7), though governed by the noun, modifies the whole idea. Cf. λύττοντά τινα (329C3-4), τινων (430E7), ὥς τι ὄν (480A4); and cf. expressions like μέγα τι καὶ καλόν (n.2382). The vagueness has more the force of dismissal than uncertainty, as at Apol.18B6. Cf. n.523.

2925

ἰδιωτικούς (A7) The term awkwardly suggests training in private (cf.493A6), its occurrence being a proleptic skew (n.1591) that anticipates the paradoxical σοφισταὶ δημόσιοι Socrates is about to invent.

2926

μεγίστους (A8), not greatest in the sense of best or finest but of having an effect most worthy of mention (ἄξιον λόγου).

2927

παιδεύειν τελεώτατα (B1) is a bit ominous. τελεώτατα suggests more that their “education” is irreversible than that it is polished. Cf. E4.

2928

To the young, the list (B2-3) adds the only expected and relevant entry – its opposite -- so as to generalize; and then this movement toward generalization becomes fully obvious by a second polar doublet that is entirely irrelevant to the question at issue, which was the corruption of the young.

2929

πότε δή; (B4). One expects the question, “Who in the world do you mean?” If we find Adeimantus’s question – “Just when?” -- surprisingly narrow, we could compare the challenge Socrates imagines in his image of the sailors (488B4-6: when did the sailors do their learning?). But more likely Adeimantus is recognizing the stress Socrates has given to the early effect of the sophists (note emphatic placement of νέους at 492A7), and asks how Socrates can now displace the effect of these novel sophists away from an effect on the young man and toward “young and old, and men and women,” which implies that their effect takes place at another time than youth. In any event his temporal question makes a nice segue to the answer Socrates will be giving.

2930

πολλοί (B5) without substantivizing article as at 484B5, in hendiadys with ἁθρόοι: the crowd is large and unified. Cf. Gorg.490B2, Xen.Anab.7.3.9. and the use of ἁθρόον at Tht.182A9. The two adjectives are predicates for the subject understood and brought forward from Socrates's previous sentence.

2931

σύλλογον (B7): The list of σύλλογοι usually comprises political ones (Gorg.452E1-4; Phdrs.261A8-9, Tht.173D1-2) but Socrates, picking up the question πότε, is stressing the effect when people gather rather than where – i.e. regardless of their reason for gathering and their credentials for being included in the group -- and so the list is extended to include the strikingly diverse items of the theatre audience and the army. The expansion of the list is of a piece with the expansion at 492B2-3.

2932

κοινόν (B7) means what δημόσιοι means at Phdrs.261A8-9.

2933

τίνα οἴει καρδίαν ἴσχειν (C3), another echo (cf. A5) from Adeimantus's speech (365A6-7: τί οἰόμεθα ἀκουούσας νέων ψυχὰς ποιεῖν;). The “idiom” (καρδίαν ἴσχειν) consists in replacing the more usual adverbial complement of ἔχειν (e.g., πῶς) with an adjectival one (i.e., the interrogative adjective τίνα), which is given its syntactical purchase by the introduction of a noun, in this case καρδίαν (cf. E. IA 1173) but other nouns elsewhere, e.g. διάνοιαν (Symp.219D3), γνώμην (Isoc.6.77, 14.15, 14.48, etc.), θυμόν (Theognis 748), and ψυχήν (Lys.32.12; Dem.28.21, 50.62), all to be taken as adverbial accusatives rather than direct objects of the verb: “How will he be in his heart?”

2934

ἄν with ἀνθέξειν (C4) was deleted by Cobet and bracketed by Burnet and Chambry. Smyth (§1793) perspicaciously says, “In Attic, ἄν with a future is found in a few passages which have often been emended.” Riddell, on the ἄν at Apol.29C (also deleted by Cobet), is blunter: “The future with ἄν is abundantly established,” and cites in his Digest (§58) Rep.615D, Symp.222A (emended out by Bekker), Euthyd.287D2 (emended out by Heindorf and Schanz but not Burnet), Phdrs.227B (where Burnet takes refuge in the Parisinus 1811 against B and T), and even two passages in indirect discourse: Leg.719E (Burnet accepting Bekker’s emendation against all mss. and Stob.) and Isaeus 1.32 (deleted by Cobet). Add to these Euthyd.275A1 and Lach.198E3 where edd. prefer the optative of far inferior witnesses over the future indicative of BTW. Cf. also Goodwin, GMT 197, and compare ἄν plus future infinitive (and GMT 208). We might note the variant in ms.T at Phd.61C4-5: ἄν σοι … πείσεται (σοι B, idque legunt edd.).

2935

κατακλυσθεῖσαν … φερομένην (C5): inundated and borne off whithersoever (by the noise). For κατακλυσθεῖσαν cf. 473C7-8. Contrast Adeimantus’s metaphor, ἀποκλείονται καὶ οὐκ ἔχουσιν ὅτι φέρωσιν (487B8-C1, being walled in and left no direction to move, by reasoning).

2936

φήσειν (C7): The νέος now resumes the role of subject, ousting παιδεία which has been serving as a sort of synecdoche for him (cf. the uses of φύσις and διάνοια above, 485A10, B12, 486A2). For the syntactical shift midstream compare 486A8-10, where the antecedent to the masculine τούτῳ is the feminine synecdoche, διάνοια. Note the continuation of the infinitival construction in indirect discourse: Socrates is challenging Adeimantus with echoes from his speech.

2937

ἅπερ ἄν (C8): περ adding precision and ἄν adding universality.

2938

φήσειν τε τὰ αὐτὰ τούτοις καλὰ καὶ αἰσχρὰ εἶναι καὶ ἐπιτηδεύσειν ἅπερ ἂν οὗτοι, καὶ ἔσεσθαι τοιοῦτον (C7-8): The list is metabatic (cf. n.1288): the external individual act (φήσειν) congeals into a pattern of behavior and an orientation toward the world (ἐπιτηδεύσειν), and finally he loses his original identity and allows theirs to be stamped onto himself (ἔσεσθαι τοιοῦτον) – meant to illustrate the profound pedagogical effect of their “instruction.”

2939

οὗτοι οἱ παιδευταί τε καὶ σοφισταί (D5-6): He has called them the real sophists not because they have σοφία but because they “teach” the young man more thoroughly than any infamous sophist could. Where I put “teach” into scare-quotes, Plato appears to have coined a word (παιδευτής, used for the first time here and below at 493C8, but then later at Polit.308E and Leg. 811E, 812E, etc.).

2940

ἀτιμίαις τε καὶ χρήμασι καὶ θανάτοις (D7). The plurals are sensationalistic and minatory, as at 387B9-C1; Crito 46C5-6; Leg.885C2-6, 890C4-5, 949C6-7. The shift from active to passive nicely downplays how their attempt to “persuade” was only a veiled command to obey.

2941

ἄλλον σοφιστήν and ποίους ἰδιωτικοὺς λόγους together bring forward the putative σοφιστὰς ἰδιωτικούς τινας of A7: Socrates again forces Adeimantus to recognize it is not some teachers or other but his own ambitio that drives his heart away from the the quiet voice of justice.

2942

ἀλλοῖον (E3), with feigned derogation, states the converse of the idea above, ἀπεργάζεσθαι οἵους βούλονται εἶναι (B1-2: cf.τοιοῦτον, C8), there generalized for all kinds of humans regardless of age and sex. For the strong παρά (E4), cf. 529C5; and for the expression οὐ μὴ γένηται cf. Leg.696A2-3.

2943

ἐξαιρῶμεν λόγου (E6): the phrase means not only to make an exception but to do so out of respect: cf. Paroem.Gr.2.164 (=M.III.93) and n. ad loc.

2944

οἷον (493A1) continues τοιοῦτον (492C8), ἀλλοῖον (492E3) and οἵους (492B2).

2945

καταστάσει πολιτειῶν (A1) brings forward Adeimantus’s empirical plural (489A9, 489A2, 488A8, 487D5).

2946

Socrates’s δοξάτω (A4) picks up Adeimantus’s use of δοκεῖ (A3). δόξα becomes thematic just below.

2947

ἀντιτέχνους ἡγοῦνται (A7): The psychology is as subtle as it is ubiquitous in democratic society and is the engine of fashion. That the mass creates its own leaders is something the mass refuses to acknowledge with one part of itself so that the other part can continue to feel flattered by them one day and complain about them the next. Dissatisfaction and fastidiousness are, after all, the readiest means we have to display our own good taste, as La Rochefoucauld somewhere said. Perhaps the deepest understanding of it we have so far is René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, according to which we borrow our desires from others who then become our rivals (the groundbreaking treatment is presented in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque [Paris 1961] = Deceit, Desire and the Novel, eng.tr. Y.Freccero [Baltimore 1965]). Cf. Diomedean Necessity, 493D6.

2948

οἷόνπερ ἂν εἰ θρέμματος μεγάλου (A9-10): The unity of the beast gives an image for the congealing of the individual members of the crowd, which had been as yet only verbally indicated by ἁθρόοι (492B5: cf. ἁθροισθῶσιν, A9), since it required the plural to be retained (πλῆθος at 492B7 was a start but only an abstraction). It is the unanimity of the crowd that gives it its power: if it were merely large and unruly it would not have the concerted effect on the single individual that is envisioned. In the sequel to the image the term πλῆθος vividly denotes this unanimity (494A1) and by a virtual personification we can then come to speak of a mass as being a philosopher (A4). Shorey’s citation of widely disparate parallels (ad loc., 2.38, note e), by including the horrors of a many-headed beast, sacrifices pertinence for breadth, as often.

2949

δογμάτων τε καὶ ἐπιθυμιῶν (B8). The straddling between the language appropriate to the comparandum and the comparans begins (for “straddling” cf. n.2306): δογμάτων points back to the mass (A8) and ἐπιθυμιῶν to the animal (B1). τε καί is the usual way to link the metaphor and its meaning (cf. n.75292).

2950

ὀνομάζοι and ἐπὶ ταῖς … δόξαις (C1-2) correspond with φθεγγομένου (B4) and ἐφ’ οἷς (B3). καλόν, ἀγαθόν, and δίκαιον (the usual triad for important things: cf. n.2401) become mere terms of praise; and αἰσχρός, κακός, ἄδικος mere terms of disparagement.

2951

ἐκεῖνο (C3) is humorously approbatory, expressing the deference and constant attention (esp. τριβῇ, B6) that this expert must dedicate to the beast and its behavior.

2952

τἀναγκαῖα δίκαια καλοῖ καὶ καλά, τὴν δὲ τοῦ ἀναγκαίου καὶ ἀγαθοῦ φύσιν … μήτε ἑωρακώς ... (D4-6). By a non-distributive binary structure (all with all: n.2410, contrast n.2537) the triad is parcelled out over the positive and negative limbs, δίκαιον and καλόν in form going with the first limb and ἀγαθόν in form with the second, whereas in content all three go with both limbs.

2953

τήν … ὀργὴν καὶ ἡδονάς (D1), redoing τὰς ὀργὰς καὶ ἐπιθυμίας (B1-2): the singular ὀργήν is striking.

2954

εἴτε δὴ ἐν πολιτικῇ (D3): On δή infixed with final item (cf.nn.34, 152). The list is redone just below with ἢ ποίησιν ἤ τινα ἄλλην δημιουργίαν ἢ πόλει διακονίαν (D4), where the general terms δημιουργία (generalizing the arts of poetry and painting as acquired specialties) and διακονία (generalizing the political sphere and service rendered) reveal the meaning that the examples in the present list only suggest (cf. n.1985 ad 420A5 and n.2152 ad 431C1-3)—namely the distinction originally drawn back in Book Two between work that requires skill and work that is merely ancillary (371CD).

2955

ἐπιδεικνύμενος (D3) The speaker aspires to elevate the consciousness of the crowd by conveying something great (ἐπίδειξις): that a poem might be offered to a public gathering for its edification and benefit and not only its entertainment is an ideal since antiquity (Leg.659B) corruptible since antiquity (Gorg.502BC).

2956

ἡ Διομηδεία λεγομένη ἀνάγκη (D6). The sense of the proverb (λεγομένη) is unknown. The phrase before it (κυρίους αὑτοῦ ποιῶν τοὺς πολλούς πέρα τῶν ἀναγκαίων, D5) suggests we should look for an interpretation according to which one brings the necessity onto oneself. The sense is that in courting forces beyond his control the man who set out to be leader becomes follower, as in the story of Odysseus and Diomedes stealing the Palladium during a night raid on Troy (cf.Paroem.Gr.1.59-60 [=Z.III.8] and 2.367 [=Ap.VI.15]). On the way back Odysseus walking behind raises his sword to kill Diomedes so as to take all the praise for delivering the Palladium alone; Diomedes sees the shadow of the sword in the moonlight and maneuvers to capture Odysseus, and binds his hands and spanks him back to the camp with the broad side of that same sword, producing a very different spectacle upon return from what Odysseus had envisioned. It is exactly this necessity that Tolstoy's General Kutuzov avoids by acquiescing to it in advance – that is, by ordering the army to do only what it would do anyway (War and Peace 2.7.15 et passim). Cf. the μακαρία ἀνάγκη that the tyrant brings onto himself (567D1).

2957

καταγέλαστον (D8). The “needs” of the beast (τἀναγκαῖα, C4) become the necessity impinging on the ἐπιδεικνύων; and the account he would give in praising what they require him to praise would be absurd, since its needs are so far (ὅσον διαφέρει, C5) from the natural subjects of praise (i.e., the good, beautiful and just).

2958

ἀνέξεται (494A1), brought forward from 479A4, though again the emotional resistance is left unexplained (cf.476D8-E2).

2959

ἡγήσεται (A1): of settled belief (n.434).

2960

εἶναι (A2): “exist and have any significance.” Nothing prevents our expatiating on what Plato means by the single term εἶναι.

2961

φιλόσοφον (A4). The unity of the mass allows it to be treated as a single person for the sake of satire. To call this conclusion, so hard won over the last fifty pages and still so fresh, “a commonplace among idealists,” as Shorey does, giving parallels, underestimates its importance to the development of the argument. To be philosophical requires dialogue and dialogue requires inwardness or thinking. But as soon as we begin down that path we will find ourselves sooner or later at the radical result Socrates reached with Glaucon at the end of Book Four and the powers and principalities will crumble once again!

2962

τοὺς φιλοσοφοῦντας (A6) The participle is used, rather than the adjective in the adjacent context (φιλόσοφον), in order to refer back to the assertion as originally made by Adeimantus (487C6-D5), where, saliently, philosophy was for the first in the discussion described as an activity or area of study (ἐπὶ φιλοσοφίαν ὁρμήσαντες [C5-6], ἐνδιατρίψωσιν [D1]: cf. n.2841).

2963

ὄχλῳ (A9) an alternative singular term for the plurality assembled. τούτων indicates that the ἰδιῶται he refers to are the μισθαρνοῦντες of 493A6 (cf. also 492A7), not the type of the “layman” Shorey finds at Gorg.481E, 510D, 513B. Philosophy is unavailable to the many as well as to the sophists that mouth their ideas back to them just when they were about to think them.

2964

φιλοσόφῳ φύσει (A11): Still and again the man is called, by synecdoche, a φύσις (cf. 486A2). Socrates’s questions recall the speech of Adeimantus in Book Two (365A6: τί οἰόμεθα ἀκουούσας νέων ψυχὰς ποιεῖν ὅσοι εὐφυεῖς, etc.), and another chip has been taken off the table.

2965

ἐπιτηδεύματι (A12): That philosophy could be an ἐπιτήδευμα is first said at 489C10 and D2. What approaching the goal of the ἐπιτήδευμα (πρὸς τέλος ἐλθεῖν, A12) can mean was described in passing, at 490A8-B7.

2966

ἐκ τῶν ἔμπροσθεν (B1), referring back exactly and only to 490C10-11, the reduced list of virtues he gently requested Adeimantus to approve, not the whole chorus he had reached with Glaucon at 487A, which in its plenitude had elicited Adeimantus’s invidious interruption.

2967

σχηματισμοῦ καὶ φρονήματος κενοῦ ἄνευ νοῦ ἐμπιμπλάμενον (D1-2): For Socrates’s oxymoronic uses of empty and full compare 486C7-8, during his conversation with Glaucon. νοῦς is notably a new term in this context (cf. D5 below). The present passage may allude to the paradigmatic and notorious case of Alcibiades (cf. Alc.I.104A4-C1), but more importantly it (again) echoes, in language, style and method, the speech of Adeimantus in Book Two (πρόθυρα καὶ σχῆμα κύκλῳ περὶ ἐμαυτὸν σκιαγραφίαν ἀρετῆς, 365C3-4). Compare also the manner of citing poetry (the tragic rhythm and diction of ὑψηλὸν ἐξαιρεῖν and σχηματισμοῦ καὶ φρονήματος κενοῦ [494D1-2]: cf. πότερον δίκᾳ τεῖχος ὕψιον ἢ σκολιαῖς ἀπάταις ἀναβάς [365B2-3]), and compare the theme of outer show and inner substance with 365C3-6. Cf. the echoes at 494A11, 492C3, 492A5, and nn. ad locc.

2968

ἠρέμα προσελθών (D4) retains the notion of a wild animal, but προσελθών also suggests that this intimating of the truth is being done out of the earshot of others whom he would fain impress, another reminiscence of the conversation Adeimantus depicts occurring within the young man who, conversely and in truth, is trying to gather the nerve to drop his scruples (365C6-366B2).

2969

εὐπετές (D6) one of the morally slippery words Adeimantus used in his speech (364A4 with n.796, and 364C6) repeated here in a wheedling litotes.

2970

δ’ οὖν (D9): οὖν “marking the opposed idea as essential” (Denniston, 460 and 465).

2971

Reading εἰσαισθάνηται (E1) with Burnet (based on ms.F), against the εἷς αἰσθάνηται of ADM, which is intolerable even without the τε of AD. Slings’s objection (Crit.Notes, 101) that the compound is absent from LSJ only begs the question. It comments upon the common compound εἰσακοῦσαι just above: even if his disposition is not such as to hearken, his inborn powers might instinctually notice.

2972

αὐτοῦ τὴν χρείαν (E3), a cynical pun, revealing the mendacity of the ἑταιρία associated with χρεία. Their use for him (cf. χρῆσθαι, B8 supra) will pass away when he becomes useless in the same way all philosophers are (ἀχρήστους, 487D5).

2973

πᾶν μὲν ἔργον πᾶν δ’ ἔπος λέγοντάς τε καὶ πράττοντας (E3-4): The chiasm (E3-4), more the rule than the exception, clears the decks for the καί / καί parallelism that ensues (E5-7). For the collocation of λέγειν τε καὶ πράττειν for political maneuvering, cf. n.4146. Socrates has now revealed to Adeimantus what the fathers' and caretakers' motives for giving a flawed moral upbringing might be (362E5-363A2)!

2974

πολλὴ ἀνάγκη (495A1): The phrase should perhaps be seen as an affectation of Adeimantus’s (cf.492D1, 496A4).

2975

φιλοσοφήσει (A2), the verb is borrowed from the participle at 494A6.

2976

ὁρᾷς οὖν (A4): Along with using empirical arguments from likelihood, Socrates continues to turn Adeimantus’s privileging of sight back against him (ὁρᾶν repeated from 487C6 at 490D2; then θεάσασθαι, 490E2; then ὁρᾷς 494A11; and here, ὁρᾷς). ἄρα (A4) emphasizes that thought has brought new “insight.”

2977

κακῶς ἐλέγομεν (A4) a rather broad expression, meaning not only making a bad argument but also, reminiscent of Adeimantus’s challenge against argument per se, making the mistake of relying on argumentation.

2978

πλοῦτοι (A7), a derogatory plural (cf. n.1206), as παρασκευή (A8) is a derogatory characterization in place of a generalization (cf. nn.2152, 2810).

2979

ὀρθῶς (A9) the more proper term (than κακῶς, A4).

2980

τοσαύτη τε καὶ τοιαύτη (B1), answering to πολλοὶ ὄλεθροι καὶ μεγάλοι (491B4-5). The chiastic binary pleonasm (οὗτος / ὄλεθρος // διαφθορά / τοσαύτη τε καὶ τοιαύτη, A10-B1) is striking.

2981

ὡς ἡμεῖς φαμεν (B2), recalling 491B1-2.

2982

ἀληθέστατα (B7), a relatively unreserved response from Adeimantus. The superlative in answer acknowledges an excess in agreement – that one is agreeing to the preceding statement in all its complexity and perspicacity, perhaps as to form as well as content, or to whole and parts (n.2058).

2983

ἔρημον καὶ ἀτελῆ (C1), relying on the picture of mutual fulfillment drawn at 490B1-7.

2984

συνόντες (C5) is prurient, suggesting a perversion of the true philosophical ἔρως that was described at 490B1-7.

2985

οἱ μὲν οὐδενός, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ πολλῶν κακῶν ἄξιοι (C5-6): With this it seems Socrates affords a new interpretation for Adeimantus’s criticism, as if these interlopers might somehow be the persons made either useless or evil by philosophy.

2986

καὶ γὰρ οὖν (C7): οὖν with καὶ γάρ describes the persistence of the ὄνειδος and γε approves the accuracy of Socrates’s portrayal of it, but with the passive participle Adeimantus disowns, as often, all responsibility for making the statement.

2987

καλῶν δὲ ὀνομάτων καὶ προσχημάτων μεστήν (C9-D1): A description from the benighted point of view, like the description of the captain’s bad hearing and eyesight (488B1-2). Only the ignoramus could find ἀλαζονεία in philosophy. The paradox of empty fullness (μεστήν, cf. 494D1-2 and n.2967) is lost on this pretender.

2988

For συγκεκλασμένοι (E1) cf. Tht.173B1: κάμπτονται καὶ συγκλῶνται, which itself describes σμικροί ... καὶ οὐκ ὀρθοὶ τὰς ψυχάς (173A3), relating the effect on the servant whose job is to protect an unjust master. κάμπτονται refers to οὐκ ὀρθοί and συγκλῶνται to σμικροί. The root metaphor is fragmentation; there is no warrant for LSJ’s “mangled.” For ἀποτεθρυμμένοι cf. n.1051 on τρυφᾶν (aspiration transferred). The present passage is an exception to LSJ’s note (s.v. θρύπτω, § I) that the literal sense (“shatter”) is found more commonly in compounds, while uncompounded the verb has moral senses. Again the underlying sense is fragmentation, now a short attention span and a nervous impatience with the larger unities, and τε καί links synonyms. The banausic occupations are directed to concrete and external goals that upon completion leave the mind nothing to occupy itself with (cf. Leg.644A). – All three perfects (including λελώβηνται) suggest that these effects of his work are permanent.

2989

ἰδεῖν (E4) an adverbial accusative (Smyth §2005), like ἀκοῦσαι at 491B11.

2990

ἀργύριον κτησαμένου χαλκέως (E4-5): Socrates’s metaphor incorporates the myth of the metals about the nature inborn (415A), into the job the man is imagined to have (χαλκός) and the wealth he is imagined to have come into (ἄργυρος), placing the adventitious event into the larger perspective of what the underlying nature of things (both his own and that of the world around him) has in store.

2991

λελυμένου / λελουμένου (E6): note the satirical rhyme.

2992

πενίαν, ἐρημίαν / δεσπότου // θυγατέρα / γαμεῖν (E7-8): The upstart imagines replacing his master, an undermeaning conveyed by the chiastic order; but the order requires δεσπότου to squint as a subjective genitive with the words before it as well as a possessive genitive with θυγατέρα after it.

2993

Reading ἄξιον ὡς ἀληθινῆς with ms.D (496A8-9), against ἄξιον ἀληθινῆς (mss.AM) and ἀληθινῆς ὡς ἄξιον (ms.F), and against the deletion of ἄξιον by Ast (followed by Burnet and Chambry) and its emendation into ἀξίως by Campbell. The entire phrase, καὶ οὐδὲν γνήσιον οὐδὲ φρονήσεως ἄξιον ὡς ἀληθινῆς ἐχόμενον, ascends to an elegant closure by intimating that the authentic (γνήσιον) element rests on (καί) being worthy of mind (φρονήσεως ἄξιον), because connected that is with true mindfulness (ὡς ἀληθινῆς ἐχόμενον [φρονήσεως])—the intimation forces the explanation into hyperbaton.

2994

ἀπορίαι τῶν διαφθειρόντων (B2-3), an oxymoron: his loss is gain.

2995

ἐπ’ αὐτὴν ἂν ἔλθοι (B6): The language of wooing is continued (cf. 496A5-7).

2996

τὰ μὲν ἄλλα πάντα παρεσκεύασται πρὸς τὸ ἐκπεσεῖν φιλοσοφίας (C1-2): That is, he was a man of significant mental and psychic virtues, with external goods besides (πάντα = all goods but the bodily)—another striking oxymoron.

2997

νοσοτροφία (C2) another oxymoron: the word was coined at 407B1. The list of disabilities and unfortunate circumstances once again save a man from injustice, a transmogrification of the sentiment Adeimantus expressed at 366D2-3 (carrying forward what Glaucon had said at 359B1).

2998

Reading τούτων τῶν ὀλίγων οἱ γενόμενοι (C5) with mss.AFD and most edd. (vs. γευόμενοι M). For the construction J.-C. rightly compare Thuc.3.56.6, ὧν ἡμεῖς γενόμενοι; and Adam finds, closer to hand, Rep.360A7-8; Leg.754D4; Parm.127D2-3; Phdo.69D2-4. Shorey adds Ar.Nub.107. It is not Plato's purpose to make a veiled allusion to certain individuals whose names we are supposed to guess, but Socrates’s purpose to defend philosophy for the sake of Adeimantus, who might be too easily swayed by what the majority might think about him (cf. n.2909). Shorey discounts speculation with suave prudence (2.48 note a, 2.50 note b, 2.51 note f), but can't resist mentioning Alcibiades (2.43 note f).

2999

ἀνωφελὴς αὑτῷ τε καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις γένοιτο (D5), a euphemism for “dead.”

3000

καταπιμπλαμένους ἀνομίας (D8-9), another oxymoron of empty fullness: cf. 495C9-D1, 494D2, 486C7-8.

3001

ἀδικίας τε καὶ ἀνοσίων ἔργων (D9): representing virtue in general with the pair δίκαιον / ὅσιον is a commonplace (cf. n.101), but pairing the abstract feminine singular with a concrete neuter plural achieves special elevation. καθαρός recalls the purity we had sought to protect in the guardians (416E6-417A5), though of course we are now speaking of the good ἰδιώτης. We shall be given another glimpse of him in Book Eight (549CD).

3002

μετὰ καλῆς ἐλπίδος ἵλεώς τε καὶ εὐμενὴς ἀπαλλάξεται (E2) To the extent that both the drama and the argumentation have now showed that the underlying intolerance toward philosophy derives from envy over the philosopher’s participation in truth, it becomes important to ask whether the philosopher feels some Schadenfreude when he looks back at those who would persecute him. The reader must decide for himself whether this passage, and whether the passage at the end of Book Three in which ἀκήρατον appears (416D3-17B8), adequately recognize, and provide a credible immunization against, such a temptation. Socrates, as Plato depicts him at the end of the Apology (esp. 41D5-42A2) and in the Crito and Phaedo, achieves the very state of mind that Plato here has him describe!

3003

οὐ τὰ ἐλάχιστα (497A1): Adeimantus is responding to the litotes in ἀγαπᾷ (D9).

3004

αὐξήσεται / σώσει (A4-5): His future indicative (rather than optative or past indicative with ἄν) implies that Socrates sees this eventuality as perfectly possible and even inevitable under the right circumstances. The “optimistic” tone encourages Adeimantus to infer a little too much from the remark – that there in fact (νῦν, A10) exists a πολιτεία that is suited to such a man.

3005

Burnet marks the transition with a paragraph break. Transition to a new point is often effected by making an engaging remark (αὐξήσεται / σώσει, A4-5) followed by a self-interruption (μὲν οὖν, A6) to note that one’s comments on the topic at hand are complete. The interlocutor may then ask about the engaging point (ἀλλὰ τὴν προσήκουσαν αὐτῇ τίνα, A9-10), which turns out to be the topic the speaker had in mind to bring up next.

3006

μετρίως εἰρῆσθαι (A7), cf. 450B5.

3007

σὺ ὁ νομοθέτης (D1), a strikingly personal reference to Adeimantus and their conversation about the details of legislation in Book Four. The particular point, that the preservation of the city rested on the continuing presence of “one certain thing” (C8-D1), was first made by Socrates and Glaucon, at 412A, the one thing being an ἐπιστάτης who manages the balance between music and gymnastics. In the subsequent conversation with Adeimantus at 423D8-424A2 Socrates brought this point forward, saying that he and Adeimantus may dispense with detailed legislative advice for their guards (προστάγματα) as long as they can rely on them to keep the one main thing in mind, the education (and as to the rest, κοινὰ τὰ φίλων!). In the present passage this “element” (τι, C8) is now said not to maintain the education per se, nor the balance between music and gymnastics per se, but the same λόγον τῆς πολιτείας Adeimantus (and Socrates) had in mind when they were formulating their legislation. This entirely vague way of referring to the παιδεία creates space for μεταχειρίζεσθαι φιλοσοφίαν (D8), itself an entirely new concept, to be introduced as a specification or elaboration of παιδεία. The personal reference emphasizes Adeimantus's role in fostering Polemarchus's interruption at the beginning of Book Five, for which Socrates now more explicitly attributes an anti-philosophical motive, now that philosophy has been defined (474B-480A) and Adeimantus's objection to philosophy (487BD) has been answered. Alongside the ὄκνος motifs in the sequel we might by now suspect that Socrates is trying to bring or keep his interlocutor on board as he moves through another paradoxical or scandalous transition, like the ones he had to work his way through with great labor in Book Five, a task to which he ruefully refers with the perfect, δεδηλώκατε (D5).

3008

ἀντιλαμβανόμενοι (D4), with Adam the opposite of ἀφιέναι (as used at 449B6, et passim). Cf. 505A1 with n.3138, and 336B2 with n.260.

3009

δεδηλώκατε (D5), the plural referring to the whole group. The verb has now been used four times with four meanings in twelve lines (497C1-D5).

3010

Reading πάντως (D6) with all mss., against Bekker's πάντων read by edd. It is merely a litotes.

3011

On εἴπερ (E3) brachylogical, cf. Stallb. ad loc., Riddell Digest §252, Shorey ad loc., and Denniston 489.

3012

ἄρτι ἐκ παίδων (497E9-498A1): Socrates here states positively what Adeimantus at 487C7-D1 (νέοι ὄντες) stated negatively. For μεταξύ designating something between an explicit and an implicit term, see the passages cited by Shiletto in Dem.Falsa Leg. 181: Aesch.Choeph.63; Ar.Ach.433, Av.187; Dem.Cor.233.32; E.Hec.436; Thuc.3.51; and cf. μεσότης at Arist.NE 1127A13, where Immelman’s emendation is unneeded.

3013

τοῦ Ἡρακλειτείου ἡλίου (A7-B1): cf. DK B6. The sun is new every day (but the day is new only because of sunrise). Some things don’t come back.

3014

πᾶν τοὐναντίον (B3), a reiteration of τοὐναντίον ἢ νῦν (497E6, above), for emphasis. The opposition runs through each stage of life and guides our understanding of the passage. In youth youthful studies rather than mature; in old age nothing but philosophy instead of none; and in the middle, laborious servitude (ἐπιτείνειν … γυμνασίαν: cf. δουλεύσαντι τῇ κτήσει αὐτοῦ, 494D6) rather than supercilious dabbling.

3015

μειρακιώδη παιδείαν καὶ φιλοσοφίαν (B3-4): The παιδεία of Books Two and Three was aimed at this age group. To speak here of the development of the body as providing an ὑπηρεσία to the soul slants away from the internal temperamental balance sought, in Book Three, for younger persons in the balancing of gymnastics and music. We are moving closer to the conventional idea that gymnastics is for the body and music (philosophical music) is for the soul, but in a continued obeisance to the notion of balance Socrates next speaks of philosophy as the gymnastic of the soul.

3016

τὰ ἐκείνης γυμνάσια (B7-8): This gymnastic was what he called τὸ χαλεπώτατον above, and then described with signal vagueness as τὸ περὶ τοὺς λόγους (A3-4).

3017

Contrast εἰ μὴ πάρεργον (C2) with πάρεργον αὐτὸ πράττειν (A6), and compare the Aristotelian proverb, ἀσχολάζομεν ἵνα σχολάζωμεν (EN 1177B4-5).

3018

οἶμαι μέντοι τοὺς πολλούς (C6-7): Adeimantus according to his manner makes a condescending joke about Socrates’s opinion of οἱ πολλοί: that he’ll find that such πολλοί constitute the majority (τοὺς πολλούς) of his current audience.

3019

ἀπὸ Θρασυμάχου ἀρξαμένους (C7-8): Again Adeimantus deflects the final responsibility to others at the same time that he insulates himself from Socrates’s theme by condescending to his sincerity—though indeed Socrates set himself up for such treatment (σκόπει ..., 497E5-6). He singles out Thrasymachus because he is a teacher of rhetoric, just the sort to be hired by the rich to teach their lads how to become top people, and also because he is the most likely to jump in at this point and exonerate himself from having to agree in his own person.

3020

ἄρτι φίλους γεγονότας, οὐδὲ πρὸ τοῦ ἐχθροὺς ὄντας (C9-D1): The only time that is neither since nor before at which they could have become friends, is the time during which they argued. The perfect indicates the friendship he refers to was produced during that time and the double negative οὐκ ἐχθρούς is a litotes that means there was nothing between them that brought the argument on. διάβαλλε is a conative present: cf. Symp.222D1.

3021

ἐμὲ καὶ Θρασύμαχον / ἀνήσομεν (C9, D2): The “us” consisting of Thrasymachus and Socrates (in relation to Adeimantus as the second person), is directly replaced by a “we” that consists of Socrates and Adeimantus (ἀνήσομεν), that places Thrasymachus and the others into the third person (Thrasymachus is referred to with “second person” τοῦτον because Adeimantus brought him up). And yet by hesitating or demurring to agree and redirecting the argument toward a fight among others than himself, Adeimantus indirectly but indisputably placed himself among the others Socrates still needs to persuade!

3022

αὖθις γενόμενοι (D4) suggests rebirth into this life more than the transmigration to another that was suggested for the others just above (τὴν ἐκεῖ μοῖραν, C4). Socrates speaks darkly to Adeimantus's conscience, as does the prophet of Apollo. We shall see in the end how one's knowledge in this life might give him an advantage in the next (618B6-619B1).

3023

εἰς μικρόν γε χρόνον εἴρηκας (D5) This is the fourth time Adeimantus indulges in bluffing misdirection (cf. καὶ φαῦλόν γε, 423C5 continued at D7; οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐργάζεται, 424D7; σὺ δέ γε οἶμαι οὐκ εἴωθας, 487E6). In the presence of superiors such behavior borders on impertinence.

3024

εἰς οὐδὲν μὲν οὖν (D6) By this retort of Adeimantus's remark Socrates trumps the assertion Glaucon made at the beginning of the treatment of the “paradoxes” at the beginning of Book Five. There, all of a man’s life was the measure of how much time we should spend on the most important questions (450B6-7); but now a man’s life is seen as a speck in all of time; and in a moment we will hear that it is completion, not simple termination, that qualifies something to be a measure. On μὲν οὖν adding a stronger term (οὐδέν vs. μικρόν), cf. Denniston, 476.

3025

τοὺς πολλούς (D7): Socrates picks up only the conceptual meaning of οἱ πολλοί and slips past the reference to the persons present that Adeimantus had laid in his path.

3026

εἶδον γενόμενον τὸ νῦν λεγόμενον (D8).

3027

ῥήματα (E1), in a context rightly dominated by λόγοι, become mere. He is referring to the accidental παρίσωσις and παρομοίωσις in the expression, γενόμενον / λεγόμενον.

3028

παρισωμένον καὶ ὡμοιωμένον (E3) importing the sophisticated rhetorical figures of an Isocrates or a Gorgias (παρίσωσις / παρομοίωσις) into the actual life of the man.

3029

οὐ πώποτε ἐωράκασιν (499A1): Socrates tenaciously continues to pit reliance on argument against reliance on what one sees (εἶδον [498D8], ἑωράκασιν [499A1], both taking participles). Cf. 487C6 and nn.2840, 2854, 2873, 2904).

3030

With anticlimactic πλείους (A2) he nods to οἱ πολλοί.

3031

οὐδαμῶς γε (A3): For that is not there to be seen.

3032

οὐδέ γε αὖ λόγων (A4): He echoes Adeimantus’s γε (A3). Though the philosopher must enslave himself to truth he is free from the requirements (ἀναγκαῖα, 493C4) of the crowd.

3033

ὦ μακάριε (A4), a term reserved for the highest things (cf.nn.254, 1975), the vocative revealing as usual Socrates’s attitude about the logos rather than his interlocutor (cf. nn.550, 2391ad 450D2, 2435, 2745, 2763, 3175).

3034

καλῶν τε καὶ ἐλευθέρων (A4): ἐλευθέρων rather than formulaic ἀγαθῶν is striking, and proleptically frames the alternative he is about to describe.

3035

Though they are here to be heard. ἐπήκοοι γεγόνασιν (A5), periphrastic for ἀκηκόασιν or ἐπακηκόασιν, stresses the merely auditory aspect of hearing arguments, in order to associate the experience with the visual experience he has been contrasting with thought.

The ἐπι- makes them eavesdroppers. In a moment of stunning candor Socrates leaves only one alternative open to Adeimantus, that he be an eavesdropper rather than a fellow researcher; but with ἱκανῶς he provides the small comfort that even the eavesdropper can be brought along if he hears enough.

3036

πόρρωθεν ἀσπαζομένων (A9-10): “embrace at a distance,” is strictly an oxymoron (cf.E.Hipp.102, πρόσωθεν αὐτὴν ἁγνὸς ὢν ἀσπάζομαι).

3037

τείνοντα (A7) is pale in comparison to συντεταμένος (A5) with which it shares its etymon. The goal of mastering opinion (δόξαν) for the purpose of defeating others (ἔριν) refers back to the sophist as the philosopher’s counterpart, and to his attempts to make money (μισθαρνούντων, 493A6) by managing the approval and disapproval of the beast, in contrast to the liberal (ἐλευθέρων, A4) pursuit of the philosopher whose only profit is coming to know the truth (τοῦ γνῶναι χάριν, A6). There is in the comparison a kind of παρίσωσις or παρομοίωσις of ideas rather than mere words.

3038

συνουσίαις (A8) refers to the present gathering as much as to any other.

3039

τοι (A11) is personal, but less confrontational than τοίνυν would be.

3040

ἡμεῖς (B1): Socrates continues to use the first plural, even though at this point it can only include himself, because he wishes not to exclude those who have not participated.

3041

ὑπὸ τἀληθοῦς ἠναγκασμένοι (B1-2): A glance back at the topic of compulsion: cf. 490C8-D7 and n.2904. For the theme of yielding to the power of truth despite the implication of paradox cf. the expression ὁ λόγος αἱρεῖ (n. 4966).

3042

οὔτε πόλις οὔτε πολιτεία οὐδέ γ’ ἀνήρ (B2): The πόλις is the empirical polis; the πολιτεία is the theoretical polis against which Polemarchus and Adeimantus had anti-philosophically raised problems of the empirical polis to criticize; and the ἀνήρ is the true subject of the whole treatise, the search for whose personal justice was the occasion to construct the theoretical πολιτεία in the first place. The implication, as at 472C4-D2, is that until the λογιστικόν within the man assumes command and his other parts acquiesce to it, the virtue that Glaucon and Socrates had discovered at the end of Book Four will never be achieved. With this bold assertion (reinforced by shift from οὔτε to οὐδέ γε, B2) Socrates finally begins to close the digression into paradox (C2-5: for εὐχαῖς ὅμοια, C4-5, cf.450D1-2, μὴ εὐχὴ δοκεῖ ὁ λόγος) with which Book Five began. The last twitches of envy still need to play themselves out.

3043

Reading dat. sing. κατηκόῳ (B6), Schleiermacher’s brilliant and slight emendation of the κατήκοοι of the mss. The meaning got by the dative is corroborated by πειθομένην at 502B5 and by the schol. here (ἀντὶ τοῦ κατακουόμενοι). The scholiast's plural is epexegetical and should not be taken as evidence that he read κατηκόοις, as Slings apparently did (“malim κατηκόοις”).

3044

ἢ τῶν νῦν … ἢ αὐτοῖς (B6-C2): The two alternatives are reproduced from 473B4-7 and C11-D2: cf. n.2678. Again the expression (here by the periphrasis, τῶν νῦν ἐν δυναστείαις … ὄντων, 499B7) distinguishes the name of the office from its truest function.

3045

ὑέσιν ἢ αὐτοῖς (B7): Inheritance of rule is a new idea, preparing for the special inter-generational sequence among men (not πολιτεῖαι) that will provide the matrix for the decline of the city in Book Eight (n.b. for δυναστείαις, B7, cf. n.3717). It is perhaps a more likely “development” that a king’s son should become philosophical than that a king himself should. To attach this remark (with Adam) to tyrants off in the future of Sicily and putative events of the invisible author’s personal biography, require the reader to have ignored its immediate relevance to the avuncular role Socrates has assumed on behalf of Adeimantus and Glaucon's father, Ariston.

3046

ἢ οὐχ οὕτως; (Soc.) / οὕτως (Adeim.). Compare the prompting Socrates used at 499A2-3, 495E2-3, 491B2-3.

3047

οὐ γάρ (D4). A single instance would show it possible, and we can reasonably wait for one as long as the conception itself is not already a logical impossibility, which of course it is not. The brunt of the objection never was logical or theoretical anyway, as we are next reminded by Adeimantus’s reaction.

3048

αὖ (D8), again not otiose: cf. 468A3 and n. ad loc.

3049

μὴ πάνυ οὕτω τῶν πολλῶν κατηγόρει (D10-E1): Compare Adeimantus’s strong condemnations of “somebody else,” and Socrates’s reactions to them, at 424D7-E2 and 426A1-427A1. Socrates knows that Adeimantus will take the point as long as he is sure somebody else still needs to be taught it. This very sort of “superior behavior” is perhaps one of the sources of resentment against those who would and could improve things. Socrates’s remarks are therapeutic and do not need to be “reconciled” with his characterization of οἱ πολλοί as a great beast, above. Shorey’s far-fetched attempt to exonerate Plato by quoting a contradiction in St. Paul (2.66, note a), only shows his insensitivity to the personal drama taking place in the conversation between Socrates and Adeimantus.

3050

τοι (E1).

3051

ἀλλοίαν (E1) suggests an opinion of a different sort (sc. different from the judgment designated above by δοκεῖ, D8), not just a different propositional content: cf. τίνα καρδίαν ἴσχειν (492C3-4 and n.2933). Once the questioner takes the edge off, the respondent will receive the question differently and will answer differently. It is merely a matter of rhetoric: Socrates is seeking to adjust Adeimantus’s attitude no less than that of the many.

3052

ἐνδεικνύῃ (E3): The hyperbaton holds back the surprise of the second singular verb just as long as possible!

3053

ἄρτι (500A1) without its own verb exonerates Socrates from having to finesse the fact that the argument was his and not Adeimantus’s as he now makes it out to be.

3054

ἢ καί … ἀποκρινεῖσθαι (A2-4) could be saved from the wholesale excision of Burnet by construing ἀλλοίαν in a new relation: “Even if they do consider it, will you insist they will (continue to) adopt an opinion at variance with ours and answer at odds?” But the future λήψεσθαι suggests taking on a new opinion, and τοι pushes in the wrong direction after having had exactly the right meaning with the other ἀλλοίαν above, making dittography or scribal exegesis in the margin more likely. J.-C.’s expedient of reading ἦ for ἤ has Socrates ask the question for which (with ἕξουσιν, E1) he has just asserted an answer. Baiter (apud Shorey) ingeniously emends the τοι into τ’ οὐ, a single stroke that removes all the problems and gives good sense (represented in the paraphrase).

3055

χαλεπαίνειν / φθονεῖν // ἄφθονόν τε καὶ πρᾷον (A4-5): The chiasm (of effect and cause) is to be expected. Plato does not here “(remarkably) assert the goodness of ordinary human nature” (J.-C.), nor allude “to the universally admitted πραότης of the Athenian δῆμος” (Adam). Socrates simply makes the argument that one can expect the sort of treatment he dishes out, or doesn’t.

3056

προφθάσας λέγω (A6): The byplay is very delicate. There is a mild reminder of the give and take at 497C3-6 and of the promptings along the way (n.3046). The last thing Socrates would do is answer for his interlocutor! On the other hand he will do whatever he must to save the argument.

3057

With καὶ ἐγώ (A8) Adeimantus succeeds to echo his καὶ ἐμοί from 499D6), but the gesture no longer suggests Adeimantus's derogatory sequel, τοῖς δὲ πολλοῖς. Adeimantus has made an adjustment, as his conciliatory ἀμέλει indicates. Socrates’s repetition of συνοίεσθαι in retort (B1) shows he notices the gesture.

3058

αὑτοῖς (B4) treats them as a closed group, where ἀλλήλοις would have treated them as the separate individuals they vie at being. Stallb.’s αὐτοῖς (sc. τοῖς φιλοσόφοις accepted by edd. olim) has no historical support, makes an unneeded point, and fits ill with the middle voice.

3059

ἀεὶ περὶ ἀνθρώπων τοὺς λόγους ποιουμένους (B4-5): the expression continues the theme of describing normal human behavior from a standpoint divine and beyond (cf. 496D8-E2, 497C2, 498C4, 500B9, C9-D1, 501B5-7).

3060

πρός (B9) is in tmesis with ἔχοντι (pace Smyth §1653).

3061

οὐδέ … σχολή (B8): cf. ὅτι μὴ πάρεργον, 498C2.

3062

κάτω βλέπειν (B9): That he should refer metaphorically to human things as being “below” does not (pace Shorey) commit Plato or Socrates to identifying the objects of the philosopher’s contemplation with “things above” in the narrow sense of heavenly bodies. It is certainly the eternal things he has in mind, Glaucon’s error at 529AB notwithstanding.

3063

φθόνου τε καὶ δυσμενείας (C1-2). The force that has been at play beneath the surface of the conversation, since at least 487B (and μέμψῃ / Μῶμος, 487A) if not since the beginning of Book Five, can finally be named; now it will more and more become Socrates’s explicit theme.

3064

Reading ἀδικούμενον (C4) with AM and D (ex ἀδικούμενος factum) rather than the ἀδικούμενα of F, accepted by Burnet and Chambry (and Shorey). The distributive construction with singulars in exegesis of the plurals ὁρῶντας and θεωμένους (C3) reestablishes these men’s individuality in the way that αὑτοῖς above (B4) had submerged that of the others. There is no cogency in projecting a metaphor of unjust behavior (more exactly its absence) onto the objects of contemplation if the sole purpose is to explain thereby actual injustice (more exactly its absence) in the behavior of the men that contemplate such objects. The point is that in imitating the orderly, men avoid the disorderly behavior that is specifically human, i.e., injury to each other.

3065

ὅτῳ τις ὁμιλεῖ ἀγάμενος (C6), just as the pretenders to philosophy imitate each other (αὑτοῖς for ἀλλήλοις, B4, and n.3058), and just as any man can be expected to return scorn for scorn (A4-7).

3066

διαβολὴ δ’ ἐν πᾶσι πολλή (D1-2): We may quote Bacchylides βρότων δὲ μῶμος πάντεσσι μέν ἐστιν ἐπ’ ἔργοις (13.202-3 Maehler), and look back to the moment just before Adeimantus intervened (487A2-8, n.b. Μῶμος, A6).; nor should we forget the moment he brought up Thrasymachus (μὴ διάβαλλε, 498C9). Socrates’s point, quite to the contrary of J.-C.’s assertion ad loc. that “the divine life is not complete until its excellence is acknowledged by mankind,” is that the ubiquity of envy proves nothing and makes nothing impossible, as an encomiastic poet knows better than anyone. With this remark the challenge Adeimantus brought at 487B, and the mood that drove him to bring it, are identified and dismissed.

3067

μελετῆσαι (D5) picking up ἐπιμεληθῆναι from 499B6 and C8 but narrowing its meaning.

3068

δημιουργόν (D6) begins to focus our attention, so as to prepare a place for the ζωγράφος below.

3069

δημοτικῆς (D8). Socrates refers back, through the several moments at which he referred to the νόμομα καλά τε καὶ ἀγαθὰ καὶ δίκαια (484D1-2, 479D4, 451A7), to the moment when he and Glaucon first reached the conclusion that “public” virtues are but paltry likenesses of true virtue, which is intra-psychic rather than external (443C4-444A2. n.b. τὴν ἔξω πρᾶξιν, C10), an insight that was immediately forgotten at the beginning of Book Five, because exactly the forces of envy he has now exposed there diverted the conversation away from that conclusion with their scandalizing shift of focus to the community of wives.

3070

χαλεπανοῦσι δὴ τοῖς φιλοσόφοις καὶ ἀπιστήσουσιν (E1): As at 476D8-9 resentment expresses itself in resistance (χαλεπαίνῃ / ἀμφισβητῇ, ibid.). Compare the tinge of superciliousness in Adeimantus’s response (ἐάνπερ αἴσθωνται) with the openhanded enthusiasm and naïveté of Glaucon's response at 480A6-10: ἐάν γέ μοι πείθωνται.

3071

διαγράψειαν … ζωγράφοι (E3-4): The metaphor of portraiture is presented without the characteristic apologies, though a pertinent analogy between the theoretical work and portraiture was drawn at 472D4-7.

3072

αἰσθάνεσθαι (D10, E5) is not otiose: the portrait will be the proof in the eyes of hoi polloi.

3073

Reading the singular ἐκεῖνο (501B3) with all mss. which echoes the persistent singular of the list (B2-3) and ignores the plural with which it closes, so as to stress the contrast between τὸ φύσει and τὸ ἐν ἀνθρώποις. Doubled πρός with τε … καί and αὖ explain ἑκατέρωσ’. The “remote” demonstrative ἐκεῖνο is set up by ἑκατέρωσε (see next n.): They are already in progress (ἀπεργαζόμενοι, B1), and are looking both from their painting to the true and original version, and then back to the painting (ἐκεῖνο). The only problem is the syntax of τό and ἐμποιοῖεν. One solution is to read the poorly attested ὃ for τὸ (Monacensis 237 and Venetus 184 and 187); but ἐκεῖνο wants a definite article to establish its predicative position and once it is has been placed, ad sensum, its lurking potential as a demonstrative might become recrudescent so as to function as the object of ἐμποιοῖεν: “and to the other one, that one they are trying to implant.” The optative ἐμποιοῖεν in a relative clause under leading potential optative is a virtual protasis and needs no special explanation, as also the optative after ἕως below (C1-2): cf. Goodwin GMT §§259, 613.4.

3074

πρός τε τὸ φύσει / πρός … τὸ ἐν τοῖς ἀνθρώποις // συμμειγνύντες τὸ ἀνδρείκελον / θεοειδές τε καὶ θεοείκελον (B2-7): τὸ φύσει is akin to the θεοειδές, so that the entire construction is essentially chiastic (mentioning A and then B, elaborating B, and then limiting that elaboration by elaborating A) imitating the back and forth movement ἑκατέρωσε whose description is continued in the sequel (B9-C2).

3075

καί (B6) is formulaic in quotation and certainly not derogatory. Cf. 404B10 (and n.1671), 468C10. For the term in Homer cf. Il.1.131, Od.3.416.

3076

θεοειδές τε καὶ θεοείκελον (B7), an instance of reverse καί, the epexegesis being placed before the expected term (θεοείκελον, announced as Homeric and parallel to ἀνδρείκελον). The term is eschewed by Heirocles in his paraphrase of the passage (apud Photius Bibl.464B [7.200-201 H.]) The special sense of ἀνδρείκελον (of the human tint, e.g. Crat.424E2) occasions the etymological parallel with the old term by which Homer expressed what we might call a higher grade of reality.

3077

θεοφιλῆ (C1), with all mss., completes the point made by the reference to Homer and the comparison of the ἀνδρείκελον with the θεοείκελον: the transfiguration of human society by this “painter” ignores the love (and hatred) of men to attend to the higher reward of the love of the gods. Badham’s emendation into θεοειδῇ, by which he seeks to create a parallel with the previous statement, prevents this point from being made.

3078

ἔφησθα (C5). Though Socrates to all appearances is addressing Adeimantus, it was Glaucon who made this remark (esp. διατεταμένους, 474A2), and did so at the time when he had decided to come over to Socrates’s side and had offered to defend him against others, Adeimantus among them for all we know.

3079

πολιτειῶν ζωγράφος (C5-6): The philosophical ruler introduced at 472D4-7 has now become an artist and produced a work they can understand and admire with their eyes, as Adeimantus’s remark καλλίστη γοῦν (C3) suggests.

3080

γάρ (D1) indicates the point has been substantially made and that ancillary corroboration can now be added. Socrates takes nothing for granted but gradually removes any basis for future resistance that may still lurk within, just as he did the last time he reached a pinnacle of speculation (442D10,ff. and n.2317 on εἴ τι ἡμῶν at 442E1; note derogatory use of ἀμφισβητεῖν here and there. For “pinnacle” cf. 445C4-5). Shorey (2.74, note a) notes the use of corroboration by means of refuting the opposite position in oratory (citing Lysias 30.26, 31,24, 13.49, 6.4), but Aristotle uses it in his “philosophical” πραγματεία as well: αἱ γὰρ τῶν ἐναντίων ἀποδείξεις ἀπορίαι περὶ τῶν ἐναντίων εἰσίν (de Caelo 279B6-7).

3081

πότερον μή (D1): Socrates takes Adeimantus back to the first step in the attempt he and Glaucon had made to define the philosopher, the proposition that philosophers are ἐρασταί of reality and truth, from Book Five (474C8-11); with ἄτοπον (D3) Adeimantus accepts the proposition as virtually analytic.

3082

τὴν φύσιν αὐτῶν οἰκείαν (D4): With this expression Socrates retrieves for Adeimantus all the results he had reached with Glaucon at the beginning of Book Six (485A4-7A5), when Adeimantus had interrupted (487B).

3083

With τυχεῖν and προσήκειν (D7) Socrates now moves forward into the territory he and Adeimantus had moved into (491D1-492A5, esp. A2-3).

3084

ἢ ἐκείνους φήσει μᾶλλον (D9): Socrates now selects the matter most important for securing Adeimantus’s continuing agreement, the misidentification of the philosophers and the ill reputation it entails, which were Adeimantus's original reason, or pretext, for interrupting Socrates’s conversation with Glaucon (487BC6-D3: cf. 495B8-6A9). For ἀφωρίσαμεν cf. 499B3-4 and διορίζῃ, 499E3.

3085

ἀγριαίνουσι (E2), more than just χαλεπαίνειν, recalling (again) the extreme reaction Glaucon voiced when the paradox was first uttered (474A1-4).

3086

ἴσως … ἧττον (E6): On this, the most controversial point, Adeimantus characteristically wavers: the improvement of others diminishes his own relative superiority – and Socrates notices.

3087

Reading ἄλλο (502A2) with all mss. The is insufficient warrant for Ast’s conjecture of ἀλλά, accepted by editors. τι ἄλλο is adverbial, parallel with the adverbial (i.e. circumstantial) participle αἰσχυνθέντες. Cf.Symp.222E7-8.

3088

βασιλέων ἔκγονοι (A6): Again the two alternatives, this time taken one by one, that either philosophers take on power in addition to being philosophers (501E2-3), or that persons in power become philosophical, the latter event more and more explicitly being conceived of as a result of the education of the rulers' sons (an idea first broached with ὑέσιν ἢ αὐτοῖς, 499B7). The step by step recapitulation leaves Adeimantus, or more accurately some unknown persons on whose behalf he once again finds himself speaking, nowhere to go. For one more time, with ἴσως ἧττον, he tries for some wiggle room on their behalf, and Socrates calls him on it with a very strange locution (ἵνα εἰ μή τι ἄλλο αἰσχυνθέντες ὁμολογήσωσιν, A1-2). Subsequently (A3-C8) Adeimantus's answers are a study in ways to say “Yes,” as Glaucon’s were just before he interrupted (485B-487A), so that it devolves upon Socrates to bring up the topic of envy (D4-8: parallel to Glaucon’s Momus at 487A6).

Insisting that such a State should or could arise in time and space is not to be taken as an index of Plato’s optimism or pessimism (sic Adam ad 502C) -- a question of little importance -- but within the drama represents the barest and most minimal inverse of the essentially anti-philosophical attitude that threatened the progress of the argument since the interruption of Polemarchus. Cynicism has by now been made to recede or else become so thoroughgoing as to deny any possibility anywhere and anytime.

3089

Socrates reverts (B11-12) to his admonition against Adeimantus's superciliousness: cf. 499D7ff.

3090

συμβαίνει (C5), of the logical entailment of propositions previously agreed to. As such its primary use is impersonal (e.g., Gorg.459B5-6, 461B8, 481E3, 495B5, 496E4-5, 498B1, 508B3-4; Lach.213B8; Lys.217A1; Phdo.74A2; Polit.261E4) but since the speakers are responsible for having agreed to the underlying propositions, the entailment has personal repercussions, either on the upholder (σοι, Phdo.92B4-5) or on both interlocutors (because engaged in a common search: cf. ἡμῖν, Gorg.498A10-11; Lys.213B8; Phdo.80A10-B1; Phlb.35C3; Soph.223B6—and here). The fact that the entailment might be unforeseen (Gorg.479C5-6, 496E4-5) proves they are logically necessary rather than intended. The verb is used in the area of the συμπέρασμα and in the context of συλλογίζεσθαι (Gorg.498E10-11).

3091

καὶ ἐκ τίνων μαθημάτων τε καὶ ἐπιτηδευμάτων … καὶ κατὰ ποίας ἡλικίας (C10-D2): The pair of issues – παιδεία (here done with μαθήματα καὶ ἐπιτηδεύματα) and ἡλικία – had been broached just when Adeimantus interrupted (487A7-8). Together they stand for the criterion of ἐμπειρία desiderated at 484D6. But μαθήματα broaches a completely new topic as we shall soon see.

3092

τήν τε τῶν γυναικῶν τῆς κτήσεως δυσχέρειαν … καὶ παιδογονίαν καὶ τὴν τῶν ἀρχόντων κατάστασιν (D4-6). All three items—κτῆσις, παιδογονία, κατάστασις—involved δυσχέρεια: the list expresses its own criterion—difficulty both emotional and argumentative—by synecdoche in its first item. Conversely, ἡ παντελῶς ἀληθής (sc. κατάστασις, D7-8) looks back at all three items, though its proximate and current application to establishing the truest kind of ruler is in the forefront.

3093

ἐπίφθονός τε καὶ χαλεπή (D7) the phrase echoes the pair χαλεπαίνειν / φθονεῖν (500A4-5: cf. χαλεπήν [500A7], χαλεπῶς [500B1], χαλεπαίνειν [500E1, E5, 501C7]), not (pace Shorey) χαλεπά as used at 502C6. The “difficulty” is the resistance that a social policy radically reliant on truth (παντελώς) can be expected to meet with, even at the mention of its being brought into reality (γίγνεσθαι).

3094

αὐτά (D8), a treatment centering on these subjects in themselves (cf. n.1794), rather than treating them obiter, “in passing.”

3095

ὥσπερ ἐξ ἀρχῆς (E2) simply describes what αὐτά already announced.

3096

ἀποκριτέον (A4): cf. 414A4.

3097

ἀκήρατον (503A5) from 414A1, but cf. also the climactic use at 417A1 (and n.1938).

3098

στατέον (A6): cf. κατάστασιν (502D6), referring back to καταστατέον, 414A1.

3099

καὶ γέρα δοτέον καὶ ζῶντι καὶ τελευτήσαντι καὶ ἆθλα (A6-7): Cf. 414A2-3 (and 465D8-E2): even the chiasm is repeated. The καί ’s, moreover, are striking.

3100

Obsolete both in that the truth of the conclusion does not depend upon the civic construction that was their springboard to discovering it, and also in the special sense that the discovery is so radical that it makes virtue asocial and apolitical, the sort of thesis that would elicit Callicles's reaction – that it turns life as we know it upside down (Gorg.480B3-4).

3101

He could not sit still and witness the sweet reasonableness with which Socrates and Polemarchus were “caving in to each other,” as he put it (ἀλλήλους ὑποκατακλινόμενοι, 336B1-C2).

3102

Cf. 372E2-373A8; 420A2-7; 487D6-6. The way he adds the paradox of the philosopher-king to the two paradoxes raised against him by Polemarchus is ultimately of the same ilk.

3103

The far ranging observations resemble his rambling satire of valetudinarians and litigiousness during Book Four.

3104

The sailors and captain, the echoing mob, the beast, the image of one’s forebears fawning over their youth, the oxymoronic escapes from corruption, the taking refuge below a wall, the painter of the orderly city.

3105

The style and rhetoric of the passage is described in Appendix 3.

3106

καταγελῴμεθα at 499C4, τοῖς δὲ πολλοῖς at 499C8, φιλονικῶν at 499E1, χαλεπαίνειν … πρᾷον at 500A4-5, φιλαπεχθημόνως at 500B4, φθόνου τε καὶ δυσμενείας at 500C1-2, the maxim διαβολὴ δ’ ἐν πᾶσι πολλή at 500D1-2, ἀνδρείκελον / θεοείκελον at 501B5-7 [cf. n.3077], ἐχαλέπαινον at 501C7, αἰσχυνθέντες at 502A2.

3107

The ἀληθεστάτη πρόφασις ἀφανεστάτη δὲ λόγῳ, if you will (Thuc.1.23.6).

3108

νόησον (503B7). The verb has been used in the common idiom of getting the meaning intended by the words (335E2, 440D7), but also and more lately of the impossibility of grasping shifting phenomena with the mind (479C4: cf. 478B7) and the act of grasping the essential element by which to judge them (ἐννοήσας, 493E2; cf. also 368D4 and n.951), and—in an instance similar to the present aorist imperative directed to Adeimantus—at the beginning of the simile of ship and captain. There, in response to Adeimantus enjoining Socrates simply to “look around him,” Socrates asked him to contemplate a simile with his mind’s eye (488A7: cf. n.2854).

As for the noun (νοῦς), besides its appearances in idiomatic phrases (ἐν νῷ ἔχειν: 344D, 362C, 490A1; ἔχειν νοῦν: 331B6-7, 396B3; κατὰ νοῦν: 358B3) it has appeared once to augment the sense of δόξα ἀληθής (431C5-6: cf. n. 2154), and to name very tellingly the part of the soul in which philosophical γνῶσις resides or occurs (490B5, γεννήσας νοῦν) and the crucial element whose absence allows the talented young man to go the wrong way (494D2 and 5).

In the next few pages both noun and verb will be used many times.

3109

ἅμα φύεσθαι … οἷοι κοσμίως (C3-5). The construction is ἅμα φύεσθαι οἷοι κοσμίως, κτλ, with ἅμα drawing forward the notion expressed by εἰς ταὐτόν and the συμ- added to φύεσθαι above (B8). Despite the fact that the list (εὐμαθεῖς … ὀξεῖς, C2) seemed to be closed by the generalization (ὅσα ἕπεται), καί (primum, C4) adds another pair of items to it (νεανικοί τε καὶ μεγαλοπρεπεῖς τὰς διανοίας) in order to set them into relief for comparison with κοσμίως, κτλ. For other lists resumed after generalization to highlight specific items, cf. 466A8-B2, 475DE, 529E1-3, 610B1-3; H.Maj.295CE, 298AB; Leg.759A2-4, 847B8-C4, 849C3-4, 949C7-D2, 956E1-7; Phdrs.238A6-C4; Phlb.11B7-8; Polit.288D7-E4; Symp.207D8-E3, 211A6-B1; and compare Leg.813D8-E3, 815A2-4.

3110

ἣν διήλθομεν φύσιν (B7-8) indicates that the list of attributes rehearses the master list at 487A4-5 that summarized the argument developed by Socrates and Glaucon, from the beginning of the Book, namely, μνήμων, εὐμαθής, μεγαλοπρεπής, εὔχαρις, φίλος τε καὶ συγγενὴς ἀληθείας, δικαιοσύνης, ἀνδρείας, σωφροσύνης (487A4-5: n.b. φύσει, A3). Of these attributes the ones most seldom found together are the last two, ἀνδρεία and σωφροσύνη (it is a commonplace to worry whether moderation can be reconciled with bravery). Of these the former is here done with νεανικοί τε καὶ μεγαλοπρεπεῖς τὰς διανοίας and the latter with κοσμίως μετὰ ἡσυχίας καὶ βεβαιότητος (θέλοντες) ζῆν. As to the former, νεανικοί is new but τε immediately announces that it is not meant to stand alone. καί then introduces μεγαλοπρεπεῖς (τὰς διανοίας), which mitigates the novelty of νεανικοί by associating it with a term already established (an instance of “reverse καί” done with τε καί as often: cf. n.440), while at the same time it shades the established term in the new direction of “boldness” (for the connotation of unruliness in νεανικόν cf. 491E4, 606C7, and n.2919). As to the latter, κοσμίως is a virtual synonym-in-usage for σώφρων and therefore brings σωφροσύνη forward from the previous list, unaltered; but its elaboration with ἡσυχία and βεβαιότης pinch the virtue into a behavioral disposition, as νεανικός had done to μεγαλοπρεπής.

3111

ὕπνου τε καὶ χάσμης ἐμπίμπλανται (D4), an oxymoron resembling λήθης πλέως (486C7) and πλάνης ἐμπλέῳ (505C7).

3112

δέ γε (D7) is self-deprecating, as is the complacently approbative εὖ τε καὶ καλῶς (the adverbial version of the formulaic adjectival hendiadys καλός τε καὶ ἀγαθός, euphonically adjusted: cf. 400E2 and n.1591).

3113

ἔν τε οἷς τότε ἐλέγομεν (E1): Tests lately mentioned at 503A3-4: τότε refers back to 412Eff.

3114

καὶ ἔτι δὴ  τότε παρεῖμεν (E2): Socrates continues the conceit of confessing to the charge that he skipped important subjects.

3115

γυμνάζειν (E3) not only continues the physical theme of πόνοις (E1) but also recalls Socrates’s use of the gymnastic metaphor at 498B6-8, where he advocated a gymnastic of the soul.

3116

σκοποῦντας (E3) a subject accusative rather than the more common possessive dative as agreeing with the subject of the verbal adjective (i.e. the “we” who must test them). The more common dative would suggest that the action described by the participle is the basis of the testing being incumbent upon us, as for instance the purpose we would mean to achieve by it: we are testing by investigating not in order to investigate. Cf. εὐλαβουμένῳ, 539A9 and n.3656.

3117

ἀποδειλιᾶν (504A1) was already used of themselves cowering at the prospect of theoretical difficulty, when their investigation seemed very early destined to fail (374E11). Cf. Crat.411A6, Euthyph.15C12, Euthyd.277D3.

3118

ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις (A1). καὶ before μαθήμασι makes Orelli’s emendation, ἄθλοις, redundant. It was not to test their love of honor that we had stressed the guards but their physical and emotional endurance (πόνοις τε καὶ φόβοις καὶ ἡδοναῖς [503E1-2: cf.412C-14B]). The present point is that endurance plays a role in mental work as well as in the other areas (ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις) where its importance is already acknowledged.

3119

διαστησάμενοι (A5) refers to 435E-441C.

3120

συνεβιβάζομεν (A5), referring to 441C-443B, where it was Glaucon not Adeimantus that was Socrates's interlocutor. The metaphor depicts the careful step by step scrutiny of an argument—i.e., dialectic or dialogue. Cf. H.Min.369D4-5 (διαπυνθάνομαι καὶ ἐπανασκοπῶ καὶ συμβιβάζω τὰ λεγόμενα), where Socrates re-characterizes dialectical scrutiny against Hippias’s characterization of it as nitpicking: πλέκεις λόγους καὶ ἀπολαμβάνων ὃ ἂν ᾖ δυσχερέστατον τοῦ λόγου, τούτου ἔχῃ κατὰ σμικρὸν ἐφαπτόμενος, 369B8-C1).

3121

μὴ γὰρ μνημονεύων … τὰ λοιπὰ ἂν εἴην δίκαιος μὴ ἀκούειν (A7-8): There is dramatic irony as well as dramatic characterization in Adeimantus’s reply. In his summary (502D4-3B1) Socrates had left out this entire section of his conversation with Glaucon (435-443), the very part that culminated in a conclusion that rendered further speculation about an ideal state unnecessary (443C4-444A3) and therefore rendered Polemarchus’s objection, which Adeimantus himself had brought into the conversation with Socrates, irrelevant. Moreover, in the blush of succeeding to remember, Adeimantus characteristically imagines a punishment to mete out to others for failing (μὴ ἀκούειν).

3122

ἐλέγομέν που (B1): at 435C4-D9.

3123

ἡμεῖς (B4), referring to Adeimantus and Glaucon together, Glaucon after all having been Socrates’s interlocutor for that part of the discussion (435C4-D9).

3124

τῆς μὲν ἀκριβείας (B5) repeated from 503B5, goes back to ἀκριβῶς μέν, 435D1.

3125

ἀλλ’ ἔμοιγε μετρίως· … ἐφαίνετο μὴν καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις (B8): In one breath Adeimantus makes his own adherence to the position less questionable by mentioning the adherence of others; but in his next breath he will castigate others for failing to understand (below, C5, q.v.) -- a further portrayal of his “internal conflict,” which Socrates will now encourage him to resolve.

3126

τοῦ ὄντος (C2), designedly open. Since 490B it has become able to mean truth or reality or both.

3127

ἀλλ’, ὦ φίλε, μέτρον τῶν τοιούτων (C1): Adeimantus’s ἀλλ’ ἔμοιγε μετρίως (B8) gives Socrates a chance to reverse the wordplay Glaucon had used on him to exhort him to present a full treatment of the paradoxes at the beginning of Book Five (450B5-7: cf. n.2388), when he said all of human life would not be too long a time to listen to Socrates’s answers on the weighty paradoxical questions. But now, as the comparison gives us occasion to notice, it is truth that has become the measure, not just all we have to give up for it. As usual Shorey misses the back-reference but finds an opportunity to wax eloquent with parallels from elsewhere (2.84, note a).

3128

δοκεῖ (C3), hardly otiose.

3129

καὶ μάλ’ ἔφη, συχνοὶ πάσχουσιν αὐτὸ διὰ ῥᾳθυμίαν (C5): Again Adeimantus readily allows his praise of the good to blend with condemning those who fall short of it, even naming their sin (ῥᾳθυμίαν): cf.371CD, 424D, 425E-6E, 499DE, his over-broad condemnation of students of philosophy (487C6-D5), his supercilious diagnosis of their pathology (πάσχουσιν, 504C5 [and 487B3]; πάθη, 426A5), and his readiness to accuse even Socrates of the shortcoming he here condemns (449C2). We should replace Adam’s remark, that Adeimantus betrays no consciousness that τισιν in 504C3 alludes to himself, by noting instead Socrates’s forbearance to confront him directly, and his use of a vaguer expression (for which cf. his οὐκ οἶδα ὅτου, 465E4-5). Adeimantus’s reply does show an “unconscious consciousness” of his own fault, for he quickly sees it in others (!): indeed he had himself been guilty of accepting a moderately complete treatment just above (μετρίως, B8).

3130

By the vocative ὦ ἑταῖρε (C9), Socrates expresses “solidarity” with the decision Adeimantus has (rather diffidently: εἰκός) made. At the same time, although he speaks of someone in the third person (τοιούτῳ, D1), he is arguing (with τοίνυν) that Adeimantus himself must rise to the level of the study in question rather than shirk it (ἀποδειλιάσει, A1). In short, it is Adeimantus's preparation for the μέγιστον μάθημα that is here being tested (βασανιστέον, 503E1) – and perhaps our own.

3131

ὃ νυνδὴ ἐλέγομεν (D2) placed right after ἤ with the sense “or else,” refers back to 503D7-9 where this same ἤ was used (D8). Hence translate “Or else, as we were saying, … .”

3132

γάρ (D4): Denniston (77-78) rightly detects a note of incredulity or disagreement in Adeimantus’s γάρ because of the way Socrates repeats his words (οὐ μέγιστα, D4) in response (καὶ μεῖζον, D6).

3133

ὑπογραφήν (D6) as well as ἀπεργασίαν in the next line refer back to the metaphor of the painter (501A2-C2), but only to bring forward the distinction between a preliminary outline and the finished work. In fact Socrates means now to abandon the entire “rough draft” that constitutes their thought-experiment, namely the experiment of searching for justice written large in a city, for a method of study that is higher and finer than this: ἀπεργασία is now connected with ἀκριβεία and avoiding the ἀτελές (ἐπὶ τέλος, D3).

3134

ἢ οὐ γελοῖον (D8). As the second play on μέτρον (B8-C4) already suggested, Socrates is comparing the subject he is about to take up and the seriousness it deserves, with the irrelevant questions about the paradoxes and the anti-philosophical attitude that forced them upon him. He is schooling Adeimantus just as he schooled Glaucon at 472B3-473B3. That it is laughable to worry about the small things rather than the large was a constant topic in his discussion with Adeimantus in Book Four (423C2-427A7).

3135

Reading ἄξιον τὸ διάνοημα (E4) with all mss. (against Ficinus’s tr. which does omit the words [Ridiculum prorsus. At enim putas...], and against most editors, who have accepted Schleiermacher’s excision). διανόημα refers to the general attitude or methodological outlook Socrates has just articulated (for this sense cf. διανοεῖσθαι at Phdrs.228D8, 236C7), which Adeimantus grants so as to ask Socrates for his position on the special question of the greatest study.

3136

οἴει τιν’ ἄν σε … ἀφιέναι μὴ ἐρωτήσαντα τί ἐστιν; (E5-6): Despite all of Socrates's preparation Adeimantus reverts to his old ways. His remark inimitably combines (1) bluffing challenge (οἴει τιν’ ἄν); (2) threat (confinement, the opposite of ἀφιέναι, reminiscent of 449B6 and echoing back to 327C11); and (3) displacement of responsibility for his own criticism onto an anonymous “someone else” (τινα). There is something of a taunt in his repetition of μέγιστον μάθημα (cf. n.3132); and his question is churlishly off-center (καὶ περὶ ὅτι αὐτὸ λέγεις), as if he were asking for the title and the subject of the course before deciding to enroll. The problem returns at 506B2ff.

3137

ἀλλὰ καὶ σύ (E7): Socrates calls on Adeimantus to be the person he warns Socrates about.

3138

οὐκ ἐννόεις ἢ αὖ διανοῇ ἐμοὶ πράγματα παρέχειν ἀντιλαμβανόμενος (E8-505A1), the second use of a νοῦς-word and already placing mental vision in contrast with Adeimantus's argumentative agenda (echoing Adeimantus's own use of διανόημα just above). Though it is true that Adeimantus has “hassled” Socrates before (not only near the beginning of Bk. Five but at the beginning of Bk. Four, too), αὖ means “instead, alternatively” rather than “again” (pace J.-C. and Adam), since it follows ἤ rather than διανοῇ. Socrates is responding to the riddled importunity of the question Adeimantus has just asked him. On ἀντιλαμβανόμενος (A1), cf. 497D4 and n.3008: the conative present shows Adeimantus is busy enough trying to obstruct Socrates to forget what he has often heard before. Why does he act dumb?

3139

The full formal dress of the phrase (ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα, A2) resonates without having a specific reference or precedent in the conversation so far. Socrates (with the perfect, ἀκήκοας, A3 and 504E8) refers to it as something about which Adeimantus has witnessed several discussions before.

3140

προσχρησάμενα (A3) a new term.

3141

δίκαια καὶ τἆλλα (A3): the absence of the article with δίκαια (per all mss., contra Proclus) signifies, if anything, that “things that are just” is meant rather than justice, helping to make the point that justice is not eo ipso good but only eo ipso just, and leaving room for the point to be made that if justice is good it is because it is good to be just. τἆλλα stands for the usual complement, καὶ ἀγαθὰ καὶ καλά (cf.n.2401), but the current context requires him to suspend the narrower sense that ἀγαθά has as a co-species in that triad, in order to make room for the general sense he is trying to elucidate.

3142

Reading κεκτήμεθα (B1) with all mss. Bekker's emendation (κεκτῇμεθα) is unnecessary: the analogy is empirical, not conceptual (whence indicative, not optative), as the following contrapositive assertion (κεκτῆσθαι without ἄν) indicates.

3143

πλέον (B1) significantly not ἄμεινον or βέλτιον nor even μεῖζον, since again he has to avoid using the good as a measure of the good (cf. note on τἆλλα, above). It is not an accident that the vice of materialism is called πλεονεξία not βελτιονεξία, vel sim. Cf. πλῆθος at 550E2 and n.3839.

3144

πᾶσαν κτῆσιν κτᾶσθαι (B1-2): πᾶσαν plus the internal accusative indicates possession per se; conversely, Socrates takes it for granted that the goodness of the possession (expressed as a predicate with the adjective ἀγαθήν) is identical to the presence of good in it (the inverse of ἄνευ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, B1). The identification is repeated by the restatement of φρονεῖν ἄνευ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ with the expression καλὸν δὲ καὶ ἀγαθὸν μηδὲν φρονεῖν (B3).

3145

φρονεῖν (B2,3).

3146

φρόνησις (B6), apparently picking up φρονεῖν. The disagreement between the majority and the clever is permanent; there is no need to name names. There is moreover something fundamentally wrong about identifying the good and pleasure or the good and mindfulness, or identifying any characteristic with any other characteristic, as if they were one and not two. Thrasymachus’s “answer” for instance, in its form identifies justice with the advantage of the stronger, but all he meant was that there is no justice in human affairs and therefore no sanction against πλεονεξία (cf. n.312). The “assertions” that knowledge is the good or that pleasure is the good likewise seek merely to identify the ultimate sanction with knowledge, or with pleasure. But this is only true because the good, qua good, is the ultimate sanction, and remains so after such assertions are made. Socrates has already made the point indirectly (504E7-505B3) and will do so again (505D5-506A2): this is why he loses patience with Adeimantus for ignoring it (506B5-7). The idea will receive explicit logical articulation at 509B8-9.

3147

ἀναγκάζονται τελευτῶντες (B9) The argument that the good is mindfulness but that mindfulness is mindfulness of the good, is circular; and yet a dialectical investigation will reveal that those who assert the former can only maintain it with the latter – as spelled out below (C1-4). ἀναγκάζονται refers to the logical necessity of a dialectical investigation and τελευτῶντες alludes to the endpoint or συμπέρασμα when the questioner connects the answerer's last answer, that the knowledge in question must be knowledge of the good, with his opening thesis, that the good is knowledge.

3148

καὶ μάλα γελοίως (B11): Once again our Adeimantus is quick to ridicule error, in this case an error revealed in dialectical refutation, an event always witnessed by at least one other, in the face of whom one might be ashamed. And yet, as we know from the record of other Socratic encounters, anyone who does not know what is good but has an idea about it (we need to know, after all, whence it is an ὄνειδος not to [C1]), is liable to suffer this outcome, including Adeimantus. It is to only avoid the shame of such ridicule that one would prefer playing questioner to answerer (as Thrasymachus accuses Socrates), since in all strictness the answerer defending a false belief of his own would benefit to be disabused of it, even at the expense of ridicule – assuming, that is, that it is better to know you don't know than believe you do in error. All this implies that if pressed a person might respond to the Socratic encounter by claiming he has no beliefs, or avoiding to claim he does, so as to avoid what he himself sees as the ridicule of refutation (and we have seen Adeimantus behave just this way all along: nn. 3127, 3049, 3023, 3021, 3019, 2986); and it also implies as a corollary that Adeimantus is the very type of the group Socrates mentions in the Apology (23C2-7), the sons of the rich who have the leisure to go about imitating Socrates and to play at refuting people that think they know something – and (as I have noted above) there is a great abundance of such people (πολλὴν ἀφθονίαν, 23C6). Notably, Adeimantus's brother Glaucon is not of this type: in fact it is only Socrates that he subjects to Socratic treatment (357B3, 358A4-6, and nn.664, 682, 684)!

3149

μή τι ἐλάττονος πλάνης ἔμπλεῳ (C6-7): For the negative fullness cf.n.3111, 2987, 2967. The metaphor of πλάνη was introduced above in connection with opinion and the world of the many (479D9) but here has a sense, reminiscent of Euthyphro's complaint that Socrates's scrutiny of his arguments makes them seem to move like the lifelike statues of Daedalus [11C8-D2, 15B7-C1]. For the wide but ultimately analogous range of uses Plato makes of this metaphor cf. 602C12 and n.4920).

3150

The ἀμφισβητήσεις (D2) have just been revealed for what they are, superficial refutations of circularity (B8-C4) and self-contradiction (C7-8): μεγάλαι καὶ πολλαί, the common auxesis by combining quantity and quality, portrays their bothersomeness not their importance or subtlety. Shorey notices the term is derogatory but understates the matter (“slightly disparaging”) because of the distinction drawn between it and ἐρίζειν, as for instance at Prot.337A. The point here is the futility of arguing either position when one lacks knowledge (μή τι ἐλάττονος πλάνης ἔμπλεῳ, C6-7). The same kind of futility vitiated the ἀμφισβητήσεις of 436C8ff, 453A7ff, and 476D8ff.

3151

Punctuate 505D5 thus: τί δὲ τόδε· οὐ φανερόν … . Over against the disagreements (μέν) as to “what” the good is, we all clearly see (δέ) that it is the reality rather than the appearance of good that we want.

3152

δίκαια μὲν καὶ καλά (D5): μέν suggests that the third member of the triad, ἀγαθόν, will be appearing with δέ, and it does: the traditional triad (suppressed a moment ago, A3) is now adduced only to be replaced by a higher interpretation.

3153

Though tempted by M.Dixsaut’s montrer (République Livres VI et VII [Paris1986] ad loc.), I take δοκεῖν to mean νομίζειν. Socrates reaches to make a paradox (τὰ δοκοῦντα δοκεῖν being circular). The paradox is then repeated by the contrapositive circularity of “credibility discredited” (δόξαν ἀτιμάζειν, D8-9).

3154

διώκει (D11) adds vividness to ζητοῦσι (D8), pushes the complacency of δοκοῦντα, δοκεῖν, and δόξα still further into the background.

3155

τούτου (D11): anaphora of the relative (οὗ) by expressing its unexpressed antecedent, as again below at E3. Cf. 357B8 (and Adam ad loc.), 412D5, and Smyth §1252. For the role of καί in such illogic cf. Denniston 295-6.

3156

δή (E8) resumes the δή of D11 after the lengthy intervention of the relative clause in prolepsis.

3157

περὶ τὸ τοιοῦτον καὶ τοσοῦτον οὕτω φῶμεν δεῖν ἐσκοτῶσθαι καὶ ἐκείνους (E4-506A1): Even though we do not know the answer, our guards need to! Again for the sake of the success of the theoretical project, Socrates requires himself and his interlocutor to reach beyond what they might otherwise expect from themselves (cf.504C6-D3 and n.3130): he is here rediscovering a use for the indirect method of the imaginary state, even though it became a ladder to throw away at the end of Book Four.

3158

μαντεύομαι (A6), repeated from 505E1, begins the self-instantiation of the problem of knowing the Good as it affects the present conversation; next will come οἴησις (C4-5) as a second best sort of grasp in the absence of a μόνιμος πίστις (505E2-3).

3159

ἐπισκοπεῖν (B1), a new metaphor for the superintendence and supervision rendered to the city by the guards.

3160

οὗτος ἀνήρ (B5), expressing exasperation with the anarthrous demonstrative (cf. Euthyd. 296A1; Gorg.467B1, 489B7; Prot.310B5; the idiom is essentially comic: cf. Ar.Plut. 439, 926, etc.; and when its “antecedent” is done with an adjective the article is of course needed to nominalize the adjective: cf. τὸ κακόηθες τοῦτο, 401B4). For derogatory second person demonstrative in general cf. 401B4, 407B5; Crito 45A2 and A8; Gorg.452E6, 468E1, 494E3-4; Lach.182D8, 183C8, 195C9; Symp.181E4; compare also adjectival τοιοῦτος, Gorg.450B7, 461C1, 473E4, 494E7, 497B6, 502D6; and adverbial οὕτω, Gorg.461Β3, 503D5. It is quite out of character for Socrates to place his interlocutor into the third person with an expression like this, as if he were glancing around for support from the eavesdroppers to the conversation (for which cf. schol.vet. ad Gorg.489B). The only other time we had a sign his patience was wearing thin was with Glaucon at 472B3-D2. when it was Glaucon's turn to take responsibility for himself. Where Glaucon rose to the occasion Adeimantus is about to fail (cf. Appendix 8). That “The Good” is unknown but, as here formulated, is the one thing a man needs to know so as to “realize” the goodness of the other things that are within his reach, like wealth or strength, is the conundrum Socrates promises, at the end of his defense speech (Apol.37E5-38A7, cf. 29D7-30B3), that he will never to allow the Athenians to forget, and more than half their reason for silencing him (30E1-31A8).

3161

καλῶς ἦσθα καὶ πάλαι καταφανής (B5-6). Cf. καλῶς with δῆλος at Soph.OR 1008, Ar.Lys.919.

3162

ἀποχρήσοι (B6): The relatively rare future optative, along with πάλαι, confronts Adeimantus with the fact that in a previous context he went on record against the prospect of relying on mere opinion. In support of Socrates’s claim we may cite Adeimantus’s readiness to fault men for laziness (ῥᾳθυμία, 504C5, cf.449C2, 425E-6E) and his recent agreement that the present subject must be treated with the greatest possible rigor (504C1-E4); as to methodological eschewals of δόξα per se we can only point to obiter dicta at 499D7-8 and 426D5-6, but we can also include the more substantial objection to δόξα that Adeimantus raised at the beginning of the entire conversation (πάλαι, at 367B5, cf. 367D2, D4), when he insisted on achieving an account of the inherent goodness of justice independent of any profit that might accrue from reputation—a criterion whose relevance to the question of the Good the present argument has rediscovered just above (505D5-10, esp. οὐδενὶ ἔτι ἀρκεῖ τὰ δοκοῦντα κτᾶσθαι), with Adeimantus's strong approval. See next note.

3163

ἔχειν εἰπεῖν (B8): being able, being in the position to, “express” (not criticize or question) other's judgments without expressing one's own. His remark is an attenuated version of the accusation Socrates always provokes, to which Thrasymachus gave full voice in Book One (337A3-7), and in response to which Socrates always has to reiterate his protestation of ignorance.

3164

τοσοῦτον (B9), using the “second person” demonstrative but avoiding the personal pronoun is another Adeimantean finesse. The syntactical antecedent of τοσοῦτον χρόνον περὶ ταῦτα πραγματευόμενον is αὑτοῦ but its semantic antecedent is Socrates, for with this phrase Adeimantus is reiterating the complaint he made at 367D8-E1, the passage Socrates has just reminded him of: διότι πάντα τὸν βίον οὐδὲν ἄλλο σκοπῶν διελήλυθας ἢ τοῦτο (πραγματευόμενος = σκοπῶν διελήλυθας). In asserting he knows Socrates has been “working on” this question a long time he shows us Socrates was right to object above that he had heard the answer a thousand times (504E7-505A1). We find the interlocutors quibbling about whether even their approach to the ἀγαθόν is καλόν (B5, C7, C11) and δίκαιον (B8, C2).

3165

With τις (C2), Socrates continues Adeimantus's conceit not to admit he is talking about Socrates; but what Socrates now impersonally asserts is, by a dramatic sort of irony, a profession of ignorance unique to himself, as the one man who “knows he does not know” – for what he now says is the essence of his famous profession. Because he is ignorant of the good he knows nothing important in the sense of being ignorant of what makes anything else important. On the dramatic level, the exchanges (B2-C5) are devolving into retorts and belligerence in the manner of iambic stichomythy.

3166

With εἶπον (C6) Socrates reminds us he is narrating, as often at exceptionally dramatic junctures (e.g., 416C9, 378E7: cf. n.1211).

3167

νοῦς (C8), the third use of a νοῦς-word in the present context (cf.503B7 and n.3108).

3168

ὀρθῶς (C8): The noblest opinions are the right ones (sc. ὀρθαί), but since the opiner cannot explain why he is right his rightness remains shameful (αἰσχραί); other opinions are less noble since they lack both explanation and rightness. Hence, below they are called crooked (σκολιά, C11).

3169

αἰσχρὰ (θεάσασθαι), τυφλά τε και σκολιά, versus φανά τε καὶ καλά (506C11-D1): the chiastic configuration of opposites is usual. In abbreviating τυφλά τε καὶ σκολιά to φανά (rather than ὀρθά τε καὶ φανά) Socrates stresses the quality of the seeing over the quality of what is seen, which takes us back to the imagery used for distinguishing the objects of philosophers’ and philodoxers’ loves at 475D-480A (e.g. σαφήνεια / ἀσάφεια (478C11); σκοτωδέστερον / φανότερον (478C14 and 479C8-D1), and prepares us for the analogy of φῶς (507E4 et seq.). The experience of luminosity (described below with an analogy, 508B12-D9) is sufficient to give the metaphor of blindness and vision cognitive value; supplementary tracking down of mysteries and revelations is unnecessary.

The images used to persuade Adeimantus before (490-498) were of quite a different order.

3170

ἔξον (C11): This circumstantial participle might be conditional (“assuming you have the chance”) or concessive (“even though you have the chance”). It is not obvious to Glaucon (though it may be to some commentators) that Socrates is referring to some particular sophist -- otherwise he would not have interrupted the way he does.

3171

μὴ πρὸς Δίος ἦ δ’ ὃς ὦ Σώκρατες ὁ Γλαύκων (D2): Fearing the worst, Glaucon takes ἔξον to be conditional and infers that Socrates might just be trying once again to wiggle out of the role of leading the conversation (cf.427C6-E5), so he intervenes. His reaction is a dramatic index of the extreme to which the conversation has been stretched. Socrates as our narrator emphasizes his interruption for us, and the change of interlocutor that it entails, by weaving direct statement (ἦ δὲ ὅς / ὁ Γλαύκων) with indirect (μὴ πρὸς Δίος / Σώκρατες). Adeimantus will now fall silent until he interrupts in Book Eight (548D8-9).

3172

ὥσπερ ἐπὶ τέλει ὢν ἀποστῇς (D2-3): ὥσπερ temporal and objective (“right when you are actually on the verge of perfecting the account”) not causal and subjective (“thinking you are done”). τέλος means not end or limit but goal or perfection as at 502C9; 504C2, D3, D7; 506A9. Compare the related language of ἀκριβεία (503B5, D8; 504B5, E1, E3), ἀπεργασία (504D7) and κόσμος (506A9), and cf. the similar expression at 532A7-B2.

3173

καὶ γὰρ ἐμοί …  ἕταιρε καὶ μάλα ἀρκέσει (D6): His statement of “satisfaction” is emphatic, feigning relief as before (cf. ἀλλὰ μέντοι ἔμοιγε καὶ πάνυ ἐξαρκέσει, 435D8). The vocative expresses his feeling about the turn of the conversation (cf. n.550), not Glaucon as opposed to Adeimantus, whom also he called ἕταιρε, a moment ago (504C9). His true sentiments about the problem are already expressed, at 504B4-6 and 506E1-3.

3174

γέλωτα ὀφλήσω (D8). To worry about being laughed at is of course childish (451A1), but in the aftermath of Adeimantus's surly behavior (esp. 505B11 and n.3148), which has now been brought to an end by Glaucon stepping in, mentioning the fear only bespeaks the seriousness of his resolve.

3175

ὦ μακάριοι (D8), the epithet again expressing his own feeling about how the conversation is going (n.3033), and so here expresses superhuman relief, or more exactly relief at being exonerated of a superhuman task.

3176

τὸ νῦν εἶναι (E1). The dismissal is explained by the remark about ὁρμή. Again (cf. n.523) we would have to give up on following the drama Plato has created for us, and any concern for its verisimilitude, if we chose to wonder whether he is trying to plant a message in the mouths of his characters by which to promise us a fuller “treatment” in some other work.

3177

κατὰ τὴν παροῦσαν ὁρμήν (E2): The account he gives will leave something to be desired (cf. ἐλλιπῆ, 504B6); the measure of possibility is the ὁρμή, the vector of the conversation (consisting of its orientation and momentum). How long will it last?

3178

εἰ καὶ ὑμῖν φίλον (E4): καὶ is correlative; φίλον is the emotion that would reciprocate his willingness (ἐθέλειν).

3179

βουλοίμην ἄν … ἐμέ τε δύνασθαι αὐτὴν ἀποδοῦναι καὶ ὑμᾶς κομίσασθαι (507A1-2): The mercantile metaphor hides whether he doubts they have the ability to absorb it (“take it in”). The word order helps not at all to determine whether κομίσασθαι (507A2) is governed by βουλοίμην or by δύνασθαι with the subject alternating from ἐμέ to ὑμᾶς. Because it makes something easier to understand an image is serviceable both for difficult subjects and for less able students. Cf. the ambiguous ἐρωτᾷς ἐρώτημα δεόμενον ἀποκρίσεως δι’ εἰκόνος λεγομένης (487E4-5 and n.2850).

3180

κίβδηλον ἀποδιδούς (A5), a further comment on the problem of κομίσασθε. If the relation of the image to the “original” is misunderstood it becomes a counterfeit. Socrates warns them not to take the image too “literally.”

3181

ἀλλὰ μόνον λέγε (A6), repeated from 506E6, the request strengthened by μόνον. While it is true that his interlocutors hold his feet to the fire (as esp. in Book Five at 449B6-451B8 and 457D6-458B8, up to the point he turns the tables on Glaucon, 471C2-473B3), it is also true that Socrates, like some surgeons, might wait for his patients to beg (μόνον) him to perform a serious operation on them. Cf. 445B5-C3; 435D6-9; 432C1-6 (μόνον) and 432E8; 427D8-E5; ἐδέοντο, 368C4; and cf.328A9-B1, where μὴ ἄλλως stands in for μόνον.

3182

διομολογησάμενος (A7) of taking the trouble to secure agreement, through question and answer, to what will be used as premises in the ensuing argument cf. 392C2, 527B3, 603A10 and D4; Phdrs.237C3.

3183

φαμεν (B3), of positions Socrates recommends Glaucon to take in response to his solicitations (a reciprocal relation, which they reiterate at 509C3-6). So again at 507B4, B9; 508B12 (imperatival infinitive), E3 (imperative); 509B7 (imperatival infinitive).

3184

αὐτὸ δὴ καλὸν καὶ αὐτὸ ἀγαθόν (B5). In Plato’s continual insistence on a distinction that had never been made, his language of course becomes artificial. Likewise his use of ἕκαστα (e.g., B2), which sometimes is best translated “eaches” (e.g., at 533B2). To subject such straining expressions to rigorous logical or linguistic analysis could easily prove a fool's errand.

3185

Borrowing ἕκαστα from above (B2).

3186

ἃ τότε ὡς πολλὰ ἐτίθεμεν (B6): The phrasing is an adumbration of τοῖς τότε μιμηθεῖσιν, 510B4.

3187

τὰ μὲν ὁρᾶσθαί φαμεν, νοεῖσθαι δ’ οὔ (B9): The distinction was explicitly drawn above at 475E5-6A8, where again Socrates presumed Glaucon would grant it (E6-7); but it was also assumed in all its substantial features in the earlier conversation with Glaucon at 400C7-402C9 as well as in the more recent conversation with Adeimantus at 490A8-B7.

3188

νοεῖσθαι (B9), the fourth use of a νοῦς-word.

3189

παντάπασι (B11), acknowledging the plurality of points being made (cf. n.2058).

3190

ἐννενόηκας (C6) the fifth use.

3191

ὅσῳ πολυτελεστάτην (C7) triply emphatic: (1) the dative of degree of difference (ὅσῳ instead of ὅτι), (2) the comparative prefix πολύ, (3) the superlative degree. One may think of Grand Opera, as the art most extravagant, needing the greatest expenditure on crew, scenes, and performers.

3192

ἢ σύ τινα ἔχεις εἶπειν (D5-6): Glaucon has not recognized (C6) that sight is an exception. In asserting that only sight needs a tertium quid, Socrates (or Plato) does not evince ignorance of the need for sound and hearing to have a “medium,” since (1) light is not here conceived or described as the “medium” of vision (esp.508B6-7); and (2) the “absence” of air, as distinct from the absence of light, is barely thinkable. Shorey’s suave apology (ad loc.) that Plato is writing literature not science is gratuitous.

3193

τὴν δὲ τῆς ὄψεως (D8): We may supply either δύναμιν or αἴσθησιν with τήν, but the more important fact is that Socrates leaves out a noun. In the fuller statement below we see that the best noun to supply for what he here means would have been σύζευξις (508A1). Absence of the noun allows the main point to surface, that the sense faculty and the sense object are being paired, for which the precedent is ἀκοῇ καὶ φωνῇ (507C10) where a common noun was not even suggested.

3194

ἐννοεῖς (D8), sixth use.

3195

παρούσης δὲ χρόας (D12). Color and shape (χρῶμα / σχῆμα) are what is specifically visual (cf. n.1062). χρῶμα here stands in for both.

3196

ἐν αὐτοῖς (D12). αὐτά are things unqualified by color or by being seen. There is no need for an antecedent to the pronoun. Their identity is implied by the symmetrical pairing of ὄψις ἐν ὄμμασιν, χρόα ἐν Χ. That he can express their unqualifiedness with αὐτός is an index of the adjectival power of this word, on which cf. LSJ s.v. αὐτός, init. Once again we do not need to nail down antecedents, but get the sense and move on.

3197

τίνος … τούτου (E3): with the genitive we must presumably supply προσδεῖν (from C10, D5) or προσδεῖται (from D8).

3198

σύ (E4) finally scolds Glaucon for the obtuse impatience he began to exhibit at C5 and C9.

3199

σμικρᾷ ἰδέᾳ (E6), a “qualitative” dative of the degree of difference, with ἰδέα varying γένος above (507E11): the dative answers the question asked by the parallel dative, ὅσῳ (C7).

3200

ὅνπερ καὶ σύ (508A7): Glaucon acknowledges he has been scolded by Socrates, by giving back to him the expression he had used just above (ὃ δὴ σύ καλεῖς, 507E4).

3201

ἡλιοειδέστατον (B3): Though the εἰδ- suffix suggests the similarity of the shape of sun and eye the similarity needs not be restricted to this. There may be a sense that the seeing eye sends a beam as the sun does; and in any event the ears, nose, and tongue have no sense or awareness whether it is day or night. The question has the awkwardness of a proleptic skew (on which cf. n.1591) that will be redeemed by its purpose being met, to set up the relation between γνῶσίς τε καὶ ἀλήθεια and the good: although these are very good they are not the good (508E3-509A5, where n.b. in all strictness the eye is replaced by φῶς τε καὶ ὄψις as the analogon, anyway).

3202

Sight is not the Sun, but (as embodied in the eye) is sunlike, the eye being spherical like the sun (A10-B5); and conversely the Sun is not sight, but (in addition to being its cause) is sight-like—i.e., see-able (B9-10). The presentation of the analogy is paced. The two parts of the first limb (concession of non-identity followed by assertion of similarity) are done piecemeal (with three questions, 508A11-B7), and then the two parts of the converse limb are condensed into one (B9-10), by a usual sort of telescoping or pacing.

3203

φάναι με λέγειν (B12), φάναι an imperatival infinitive, as at 473A8 and 509B6, advocating that a position be adopted. Cf. n.3183 ad 507B3.

3204

ἐν τῷ νοητῷ τόπῳ πρός τε νοῦν καὶ τὰ νοούμενα (C1): uses seven, eight, and nine. The first and third of these three rely semantically on the analogy with sight, the visible realm and the visible things being a springboard for the notions of an intelligible realm (νοητὸς τόπος) and intelligible things (νοούμενα), which are semantic stretches destined to do a lot of heavy lifting in the future “history of philosophy.”

3205

οἶσθ’ ὅτι (C4). Here and elsewhere in this context the dead visual metaphor of the verb is being temporarily resuscitated: contrast νόει below (D4), in connection with the “sight” of the soul.

3206

νυκτερινὰ φέγγη (C6): as for instance the artificial sunlight of a torch and shadowy light it casts.

3207

ἀμβλυώττουσί τε καὶ ἐγγὺς φαίνονται τυφλῶν ὥσπερ οὐκ ἐνούσης καθαρᾶς ὄψεως (C6-7). The first item presents the performance of the eyes and the second an inference one might make from the outside on the basis of (ὥσπερ) that performance.

3208

The point of τοῖς αὐτοῖς (D2) is that whatever contribution the eyes make to the act of seeing, it is present whether light is present or not.

3209

σαφῶς ὁρῶσι, καὶ … ἐνοῦσα φαίνεται (D1-2): Performance and inference again.

3210

νόει (D4), the ninth use.

3211

τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς (D4) is analogous to τὸ τοῦ ὄμματος, i.e., the ὄψις ἐν ὄμμασιν ἐνοῦσα (507D11) or ἐγγιγνομένη (A11). It is νοῦς, a term which just now he avoids using!

3212

ἐνόησέν τε καὶ ἔγνω αὐτὸ καὶ νοῦν ἔχειν φαίνεται (D6)—uses ten and eleven. The precedent for the list is D1-2, σαφῶς ὁρῶσι καὶ τοῖς αὐτοῖς τούτοις ὄμμασιν ἐνοῦσα φαίνεται, which explains the purpose of the last item (which would otherwise be anticlimactic), namely, that this thing in the soul was there all along (cf. τοῖς αὐτοῖς, D2). Note also that in the previous list the direct object of ὁρῶσι goes unstated (it is the unexpressed antecedent of ὧν, D1), whereas in this list the object of ἐνόησέν τε καὶ ἔγνω is made distinctive by αὐτό. The striking “gnomic” aorists (ἐνόησεν and ἔγνω, constituting the apodosis of a present general condition) express the way time seems to stop at the moment of intellection (cf. Gildersleeve, on the force of this aorist as analogous to that of the generic article, Syntax §563 [255,f], and compare the aorists used amidst imperfects to express a similar idea, at 490B3-6). ἐνόησεν (narrowly the analogue to ὁρᾶν or ἰδεῖν), receives exegesis from ἔγνω, which stresses the capturing of the insight.

3213

τὸ γιγνόμενόν τε καὶ ἀπολλύμενον (D7): cf. γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾶς, 485B2-3.

3214

δοξάζει τε καὶ ἀμβλυώττει ἄνω καὶ κάτω τὰς δόξας μεταβάλλον, καὶ ἔοικεν αὖ νοῦν οὐκ ἔχοντι (D8-9), a triad corresponding with the triadic list before: δοξάζει (parallel with ἐνόησεν) expresses the relevant faculty (δόξα) with the narrow and exact term and then receives exegesis (ἀμβλυώττει, etc.: cf. γνῶναι αὐτό); third follows the resulting external judgment (καὶ ἔοικεν ...). ἀμβλυώττει is borrowed from the analogy with seeing (C6) but then itself needs the exegesis ἄνω καὶ κάτω τὰς δόξας μεταβάλλον, according to which the problem is not so much fuzziness of vision but the fluctuating impressions of what is fuzzily seen (“It’s a statue—no, no, it’s a man”: cf. Phlb.38C12-E4) as opposed to the stability the mind enjoys from coming to rest on a secure object (cf. ἀπερείσηται, D5). Cf. πλάνη, 505C7 and n.3149.

3215

νοῦν (D9) usage twelve.

3216

τοίνυν (E1) leads to the imperative φάθι.Since as we have learned sight is not a property of the eye per se nor is intelligence a power that belongs to mind (nor pari passu visibility and intelligibility properties inherent in their respective objects), in both cases the determinant end enabler must be located outside them.

3217

τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέαν (E1-2), reverting to the original expression used for this explicandum at 505A2. The good “is an idea” as all the other characteristics are, and Plato/Socrates emphasizes this just as he is on the verge of saying it is something more than one idea among others, which is the burden of the next sentence.

3218

αἰτίαν δ’ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας (E3-4) is grammatically parallel to αἴτιος δ’ ὢν αὐτῆς at B9, for the sake of the analogy, so that αἰτίαν here is just as adjectival as αἴτιος was, there.

3219

γνώσεως τε καὶ ἀληθείας (E5): They arise simultaneously. Cf. νοῦν τε καὶ ἀλήθειαν (490B5-6) and n.2901.

3220

We may now read γιγνωσκομένην (E3) with Laur.80.19 (Slings). The good, by enabling the mind to know and the knowable to be true (known), also enables itself to be known, just as the sun’s light renders even the sun itself visible (B10) though both are difficult to “look at” directly. Both the μέν clause (E4) and the participle ὄντων (E4) are concessive constructions, even though the latter forces the true content of the δέ clause (ἄλλο καὶ κάλλιον, κτλ) into hyperbaton.

3221

δέ (E4) though placed after οὕτω, should be felt after ἄλλο in ἄλλο καὶ κάλλιον (E5), serving to contrast these predicates with γιγνωσκομένην μέν.

3222

μειζόνως τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἕξιν (509A4-5): I take the construction to be a stately periphrasis for μειζόνως ἔχειν τὸ ἀγαθόν. The good is first κάλλιον (E6) and then μειζόνως ἔχον, or μεῖζον, and these are nothing but the comparatives of the commonplace dyad, καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός.

3223

οὐ γὰρ δήπου σύ γε ἡδονὴν λέγεις (A7-8): Glaucon alludes to the contest between mindfulness and pleasure brought up by Adeimantus. His point is that if Socrates’s remarks here were to be taken as a contribution to this objectively shallow and subjectively ignorant dichotomy (505B5-D3), then saying that “what is good” is greater than knowledge might be taken to imply, by a false conversion, that pleasure is left to be “what is good.” On γε stressing ἡδονήν rather than the word it follows cf. Denniston, 151. Men’s intentionalist habit of asking “whether pleasure of knowledge is the good” blindly narrows goodness to what is good for men, bypassing to wonder what good is done by their own existing.

3224

οὐ γένεσιν (B4): sc. “nor growth nor nourishment.” Terminal truncation of this kind is again an aspect of pacing (cf. n.3202 in particular and n.197 in general), but here it also proleptically sets up the contrast between γένεσις and οὐσία (οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, B8-9).

3225

πῶς γάρ (B5): Glaucon notices the paradox in the juxtaposition, γένεσιν αὐτῶν ὄντα. The cause of becoming can not itself become but must be there before the becoming. This priority will be spelled out below with πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει (B9).

3226

πρεσβείᾳ and δυνάμει (B9) continue the elevated expression of the plain notion of causal priority set out above (508E3-9A5). These datives limit the sense in which ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα does not exist as οὐσία exists (οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος, B8), namely that the οὐσία (essence or nature) of the others is what it is because of the goodness that they should exist and be what they are, whereas the goodness of the good is already its own ground for existing and being as it is. In accordance with the parallelism of the analogy, the truncation of τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν (B7-8) into οὐσίας (B8) is formally parallel to the truncation of τὴν γένεσιν καὶ αὔξην καὶ τροφήν (B3-4) into γένεσιν (B4), but in sense the participle ὄντος, although it plays a similar role in both limbs of the analogy (ὄντα, B4), has a special kinship with the second limb, with the world of being rather than of genesis (508D4-9), a kinship already brought near the surface by Glaucon in his answer, πῶς (see prev. n.).

3227

δαιμονίας ὑπερβολῆς (C1): a genitive of admiration as in an admirative oath. ὑπερβολή is a double entendre, echoing the sense of ὑπερέχοντος but noting the “hyperbole” of adding it to ἐπέκεινα.

3228

ὅσα γε ἐν τῷ πάροντι δυνατόν (C9-10): With this he alludes (a) to his own limitations, (b) to those of the lesser method, and also (c) to the capacity of his interlocutors to take it all in (so, κομίσασθαι, 507A2 and 4 and nn.3179, 3180; as well as τὴν παροῦσαν ὁρμήν, 506E2 and n.3177). But the back and forth also reveals an experience taking place in both interlocutors, of reaching to grasp truth fully (compare οὐκ ἀμβλύνοιτο οὐδ’ ἀπολήγοι τοῦ ἔρωτος … πρὶν ἅψασθαι [490B2-3] and ἅψασθαι [511B7]), an experience shared also by philosophical readers of this passage as witness the huge and loving commentary it has elicited. I will try to limit myself to exegetical remarks. It is no way my purpose or my hope to provide another set of words that could replace this text.

3229

νόησον (D1): thirteen. Socrates to all appearances agrees to reiterate the simile (ὁμοιοτήτα αὖ διεξιών, C6: for διεξιέναι meaning to go through point by point, cf. 508C3), and indeed he does begin where he began before, with the distinction between the world of plural visibles and that of unique intelligibles (D1-4: cf. 507A7-B10). What follows this beginning is however The Line, a very different simile. Presumably we are meant to view the new simile as a parallel or similar simile.

3230

γένους τε καὶ τόπου (D2): τε καί linking the meaning and the metaphor (cf. n.92). The metaphor of a noetic place is borrowed from the context of the visible world of space and time above, at 508C1.

3231

βασιλεύειν (D2) embellishes πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει (B9) which itself expanded upon μειζόνως … τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἕξιν (A4-5), itself based the assertion of causal priority (508B9) and the mythological formulation of the κύριον τῶν ἐν οὐρανῷ θεῶν (508A4-5).

3232

ἵνα μὴ οὐρανοῦ εἰπὼν δοξῶ σοι σοφίζεσθαι περὶ τὸ ὄνομα (D3-4): The omission of the noun in τὸ δ’ αὖ ὁρατοῦ (D2-3) plus the sound play ὁρατοῦ / οὐρανοῦ (cf.Crat.396C1) elicit this remark from Socrates, since the οὐρανός is the τόπος of the ὁρατὸν γένος. The Sun in heaven was said to be the god in charge of making all visible things visible.

3233

διττά (D4), not δύο, stressing parallelism or comparability.

3234

τοίνυν (D6): By repeating τοίνυν (cf. 508B12, D4, E1; 509B1, D1, hic; 510A6) Socrates indicates each new step, keeping the conversation on a short leash and making sure each step is secured before he moves on. Compare his deliberate use of αὖ to underline parallelisms within the analogies (507B6, B9; 508D9, 509D2, 510B2, B6; also αὖθις, 510C1) as well as οὐ μόνον X ἀλλὰ καὶ Y (509B2-4, B6-7) and μέν / δέ (507C11-D2, 508B9-10, 508D4-9, 508E4-5, 509A1-2, A3-4, A6-7, 509D2-3, 509E1-510A6, 510B4-9).

3235

Reading ἄνισα (D6) with almost all mss. (F has ἄν, ἴσα), and with Proclus (in remp. 1.288.18-20[Kroll]) and Plutarch (QP 1001C), against the conjectures of Ast and Stallbaum. Even in antiquity ἴσα seems to have been read, by Archytas and Iambl.(de comm.math.sci.36.15-23, 38.15-28 [Festa]: cf. the long scholium ad loc. in the Leipzig ed. of Hermann [6.350.9-16]).

That this first cut should be unequal is doubly important, not only to illustrate the gradus from the bottom section to the top (whether from larger to smaller or smaller to larger is indifferent), but also because, after the second cut is made by the same ratio (ἀνὰ τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον, D7-8), the second and third of the four sections thereby created will derivatively be equal regardless of the equality or inequality of the first and second and the third and fourth (since A/B = C/D = [A+B]/[C+D] implies that B = C: See Appendix 4), which illustrates the immediate point that the contents of the second and third are “identical,” differing only in the way they are viewed (510B4-5, 510D57, 511A6-7). Plutarch’s treatment (QP 3.1001C-1002E) asks which is larger (which Plato leaves undetermined) and not why they are unequal (which is the only thing Plato says), which gives him an opportunity, under the guise of exegesis, to have Plato say something else that Plato agrees with (i.e., that the upper realm is “greater”), a common confusion among sympathetic interpreters and shared by Proclus who reaches the opposite conclusion by the same sympathetic method (1.289.6-18).

3236

νοουμένου (D8): fourteenth noetic term.

3237

σαφηνείᾳ (D9), reading the dative with ms.A and modern editors, against the nominative of FDM). The term, as a characteristic of things attended to by mind or sense, has neither been defined nor justified, but it is not new. It made its first appearance from out of nowhere at 478C, as the criterion by which δόξα was located, by means of an eliminatio, between knowledge and ignorance. To be beyond knowledge, δόξα would need to have more σαφήνεια; but in fact it is σκοτοδέστερον (although φανότερον than ignorance), so it belongs in the middle. Similar language then reappeared at 506C6-D1, at the beginning of the present ascent toward the higher μάθημα, again to distinguish knowledge from opinion: τυφλαὶ δόξαι versus φανά (blindness being the subjective correlate to objective darkness).

3238

πυκνά τε καὶ λεῖα καὶ φανά (510A2): The list is perhaps metabatic: something must be dense to be smooth, and must be smooth to be shiny.

3239

κατανοεῖς (A3): fifteen (and κατανοῶ in reply [A4] makes sixteen). What we are supposed to grasp (and Glaucon claims just now to have grasped) is that the peculiar surface of the medium provides for reflections appearing “in” or “on” it (πᾶν refers to ὅσα, κτλ). For the constitution and logical rank given to likenesses cf. 402B5-7.

3240

τίθει ᾧ τοῦτο ἔοικεν (A5). The expression is loose but clear. It is not the subsection as such that resembles the other subsection (its only attribute is its length, and in fact in that respect it is unequal and therefore unlike) but rather its contents.

3241

τά τε περὶ ἡμᾶς ζῷα καὶ πᾶν τὸ φυτευτὸν καὶ τὸ σκευαστὸν ὅλον γένος (A5-6), objects we see over against us, real the same way we are. Just maybe he has in mind looking laterally (rather than downward as looking at shadows and reflections in water, or upward as toward the sun: cf.532A3-5). Note the chiasm of πᾶν and ὅλον, for closure (on which cf. 350C10-11 and n.584).

3242

καί (A8) goes with ἀληθείᾳ τε καὶ μή, a second description of the relation embodied in the subdivision alongside σαφηνείᾳ καὶ ἀσαφείᾳ (D9). Its early placement with ἤ and ἐθέλοις ἄν is due to the fact that Socrates wants Glaucon to see that this next point will be added only with his consent, as opposed to being dictated and imposed on him (with another τοίνυν).

3243

ὁμοιωθέν / τὸ ᾧ ὡμοιώθη (A10): By its extreme periphrasis the language forces the mind to infer the notion of the original without giving it a name.

3244

Glaucon’s hearty and personal assent (ἔγωγε … καὶ μάλα, B1) reminds us it was with him that Socrates had used σαφήνεια as an index on the spectrum of δόξα and γνῶσις, at the end of Book Five (cf. n.3237).

3245

νοητοῦ (B2) seventeen. τομήν is now used to distinguish the τμῆμα itself from the τέμνειν it will undergo.

3246

ᾖ (B4). This time the section, identified with its contents, is viewed in the relation between those contents and the soul, and in particular in the effect they have on her.

3247

ψυχή (B5). The idea and the term is new to the context (we have had the senses and the mind): as such it might have deserved an article. ψυχή is often anarthrous (526E2, 529B4, 535E1, Leg.726A3; Phdo.94B5: cf. Smyth §1135) but we would be wrong to assume it is a mere metonym for τις or for ὁ ζητῶν, as we shall see. Meanwhile my paraphrase gives it a predicative shading.

3248

μιμηθεῖσιν (B4), casual variation for the terminology of ὁμοιωθῆναι. Again Socrates avoids giving a categorical name for the “things around us.” The two sections as such have exactly the same content (i.e., if we continue to identify the line segment as nothing but quantities with their contents, B “equals” C [per 509D7-8: cf. Appendix 4]). The text gives no indication whether to take the circumstantial participle χρωμένη as causal or attendant: that is, it does not have to be either.

3249

ζητεῖν … ἐξ ὑποθέσεων (B5) is on the face of it an inference from εἰκόσιν χρωμένη (B4). An hypothesis is the ἀνάλογον of a visible image, i.e., of something seen or thought, in or with a reduced dimensionality. As a shadow or reflection is a two dimensional version of the three dimensional thing it resembles, held (in the world of three dimensions) by the alien (three dimensional) medium in which it is reflected (e.g., a body of water), so is an hypothesis an “opinion” held in the mind without the mind knowing its source or meaning, made thinkable at all by the essentially alien role it will be given as a counter in an argument associating it with other counters according to the rules of inference. The analogy was presented in the lemma that unobtrusively intervened between the description of the lower section of the line and the upper, at 510A8-10: as likeness is to what it likens itself to, so is opinion to knowledge.

3250

οὐκ ἐπ’ ἀρχὴν πορευομένη (B5-6) explains ἀναγκάζεται (what she must do) by excluding what she cannot do.

3251

ἐπ’ ἀρχήν (B5), anarthrous, is essentially adverbial. An hypothesis is laid down to begin but the motion begun cannot go source-ward. We are forced to grope for a meaning of ἀρχή as beginning that distinguishes it from ὑπόθεσις as beginning (to identify the two is the blind spot of all the special studies). Among other things we must notice that hypothesis is plural and source is singular. The insistence that we differentiate them is continued by the coinage ἀνυπόθετον a line below (B7), with no advance in clarification. We have been forced to move backwards, and upwards, several times in the last twenty lines.

3252

Reading the τὸ before ἐπ’ (B6), with all mss., which makes ἐπ ἀρχὴν ἀνυπόθετον an appositive to τὸ δ’ αὖ ἕτερον.

3253

ἐξ ὑποθέσεως (B7): The plural (ὑποθέσεων, B5) is replaced with the singular. The phrase is an exegesis of ἐπ’ ἀρχὴν ἀνυπόθετον: to go in that direction is to leave the arena of what is taken for granted. Cf. the redo of this at 511A5-6, where the plural is kept but ἐκ is dropped: τῶν ὑποθέσεων ἀνωτέρω ἐκβαίνειν (the genitive is primarily comparative).

3254

τῶν περί (B7), the reading of Burnet. His apparatus: ex em. F (ὦν περί pr.) : ὧνπερ AM. The entire phrase (B7-9) is chiastic. From the inside out, εἴδεσι stands in contrast with εἰκόνων; περὶ ἐκεῖνο refers to the medium the εἰκόνες need (A1-3) whereas αὐτοῖς stresses that εἴδη need no medium; and δι’ αὐτῶν denies the use of hypothetical steps (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως ἰοῦσα).

3255

οὐκ ἱκανῶς ἔμαθον (B10): Glaucon got part but missed part. What he understands enables him to know he does not understand enough. Compare his request above, ἔτι δίελθέ μοι, 508C3.

3256

The comment of Slings (Critical Notes, 113) and his emendation, hypothesizing a lacuna and then filling it with words that make the text say what it already said, in order to save Plato from saying something only once (ἀλλ’ αὖθις meaning by itself, “Nay I'll say it again”), is not only characteristic of his edition and its overall contribution, but itself exemplary of the dianoetic method Socrates is describing, to boot.

3257

ῥᾷον γὰρ τούτων προειρημένων (C1). For προειρημένα cf.491C7-9. Socrates claims that Glaucon's partial grasp (οὐχ ἱκανῶς) of a preliminary version (the demonstrative τούτων προειρημένων looks backward, not forward – to point forward he would have used τῶνδε), will enhance his ability to understand the thought. The claim suggests that keeping a goal in sight will help in reaching it, but to the extent that the goal is seen dimly or is mistaken or mis-seen, the method courts circularity—the same circularity courted by the methodology of the large letters (on which cf. 368C7-D7, n.951 [on ἐννόησεν] and n.954; and cf. ῥᾴων καταμαθεῖν, 368E8). Moreover the claim describes, without acknowledging it, the pedagogical technique (as well as the epistemological viability) of the method of analogy that was used just before to illuminate the good through the image of the sun and now to illuminate that analogy with the simile of the line. We return to Glaucon “getting it” (ἔμαθον, B10) at 511B1 (μανθάνω).

3258

οἶμαί σε εἰδέναι (C2): The language announces that his further explanation will consist of adducing an example with which Glaucon is already familiar (cf. 508C4-7, with οἶσθ’ ὅτι). The προειρημένα were the statement of an abstract principle, now to be illustrated by a palpable example. The illustration is made to pose (by the αὖ in αὖθις) as a virtual restatement of the abstract in, as we might say, concrete terms. Compare therefore αὖ at 509C6. The sun might come first so as to provide the basis for moving up to the Good (508C4-D9: n.b. inferential οὕτω, D4), but also the general statement might come first so as to provide the matrix within which to understand the case (508B12-C2, where as here Glaucon “needs more”).

3259

πραγματευόμενοι (C3) in the sense we will come to associate with Aristotle, so used by Plato at Phdo.99D-100B (cf. also πραγματείαν, 528D3). Contrast Adeimantus’s use at 506C1 (cf. n.3164), and contrast the uses at 427A4 and 430D4-5, where it means to “bother with something.”

3260

αὐτά (C6) already calls into question whether these items can stand on their own.

3261

λόγον … ἀξιοῦσι περὶ αὐτῶν διδόναι (C6-D1) The incumbency to answer would require the question to be asked: somebody needs to be asking why, for them to ignore or refuse. Socrates points out that even they do not ask themselves, so who will be asking them? Every encounter we have heard of Socrates having with people is brought to mind with the words διδόναι λόγον (cf. 488B4-8 and n.2859).

3262

ὡς παντὶ φανερῶν (D1) ὠς makes φανερῶν their term. Unwittingly it puts their hypotheses on an etymological par with the φαντάσματα of 510A1.

3263

ἀρχόμενοι (D1): Their self-description with this term evinces their insensitivity to the distinction between a source and a first step.

3264

This is the force of ἤδη (D1).

3265

ἐπὶ τοῦτο οὗ ἂν ἐπὶ σκέψιν ὁρμήσωσι (D2-3): The compact phrasing, “ending whither you set out,” echoes the formulaic conclusion of a geometrical argument, ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι (quod erat demonstrandum), which itself is the clearest indication that the scientific argumentation understands itself to be complete once it has found what it set out to find while maintaining consistency (ὀμολογουμένως, D2). Not far beneath the surface is the absurdity of calling it a σκέψις to look for what you already put there, yourself.

3266

προσχρῶνται (D5), restating χρωμένη (B4), where πρός makes an apparatus of the thing being used. Armed with the example (C2-D3) we now return to the obscure statement (B4-9); therefore we may presume that τοῖς ὁρωμένοις εἴδεσι restates τοῖς τότε μιμηθεῖσιν ὡς εἰκόσιν (B4). The shift in wording is a striking example of Socrates/Plato following the meaning rather than sticking at terminology, since εἶδος is now used for the optical characteristic (in contrast to the intelligible characteristic as above at B8, where αὐτοῖς had made the meaning clear).

3267

αὐτῶν (D6), stronger than τούτων.

3268

διανοούμενοι (D6) Socrates reaches for a term for thinking about one thing while arguing about something else (λόγους ποιοῦνται). Glaucon notices, as we learn when he repeats the term in his restatement at 511C7. Then (D2), he elevates it to the status of a technical term.

3269

ἐκείνων πέρι (D7): Both the choice of pronoun and the anastrophe of πέρι (D7) elevate the forms above the visible cases (τούτων, D6).

3270

αὐτὰ μὲν ταῦτα (E1): αὐτά stresses that their models (the ὁρώμενα εἴδη of D5) are actually objects and that they are using them without reflecting upon this fact (bringing forth C6 from above: cf. 511A6), as the next remark, that they can cast shadows and be reflected, corroborates. Socrates is working up a question he would ask them: in searching for noetic originals do you realize you are borrowing visibles, which are already mere images of noetics, and reusing them as images in a new sense of image? Why not go for the originals? But they would accept no such questions.

3271

γράφουσιν (E2), repeated from E1, was implied by σχήματα above (C4); πλάττουσιν, in a mild use of reverse καί, now adds a sense of arbitrariness involved in all illustrative models that students experience and do not quite understand, early on, in better math classes (cf.n.2811); but also continues the idea that they are objects (three-dimensional).

3272

ὡς εἰκόσιν αὖ (E3): The second subsection of the first section is identical in content to the first subsection of the second section (τοῖς τότε μιμηθεῖσιν ὡς εἰκόσιν, B4, and n.3248), but different because it is being used (χρωμένη) by the mind rather than by sight. αὖ here stresses that this difference in use in effect turns that section back into something like the images it had cast in the visible realm. Thus the entire three tiered construction below serves as a scaffold from the top of which the fourth tier becomes articulable as a second set of originals which these imagized first originals image.

3273

Reading δέ (511A1) with F (and Shorey, Burnet, Stallb. and Ast) against the τε of Burnet's ADM (read by Chambry and Slings and finally Adam) answering the repeated μέν (E1, E3): χρώμενοι looks backward and ζητοῦντες in contrast looks forward. Adam in the end yielded to the unlikelihood of δέ becoming τε and accepted it therefore (conversely ignoring how the τε could have become δέ since it is the minority reading), but his justification, that the contrast is otiose, leaves the absence of δέ after μέν unexplained and fails to recognize that in the first place these “scientists” are themselves confused, as Socrates goes on to say (511A4-9).

3274

οὐκ ἂν ἄλλως ἴδοι τις ἢ τῇ διανοίᾳ (A1) “seeing” the “intelligible” again welcomes metaphor rather than requiring a consistent application of the distinction between vision and intellection on which the simile originally depends.

3275

τοῦτο τοίνυν (A3): With both words Socrates scrupulously acknowledges that Glaucon has grasped the point so that he can now take the next step (cf. n.3234).

3276

ἔλεγον (A3): The imperfect refers back to the paragraph that Glaucon did not “get” (i.e., 510B4-9) and therefore alerts him that he is now restating what he had said there.

3277

νοητόν (A3), eighteen.

3278

ψυχήν (A4) again, notably, anarthrous (cf. 510B5).

3279

αὐτοῖς (A6) again stressing the operationally objective character of these things soul uses though they are only images or paradigms (cf.510E1, 510C6).

3280

τοῖς ὑπὸ τῶν κάτω ἀπεικασθεῖσιν (A6-7) recalls the cumbersome periphrasis by which he avoided, above also (510A10), to give a name to what Aristotle will easily call τάδε even after Timaeus has argued they could never be more than τοιαῦτα (Tim.50B4, vs.50A1-2 and 49E2-3).

3281

ἐνάργεσι (A7). The term is new: it stands in for σαφές from 509D9. The experience in the visible world of the inferiority of images to what they resemble (which lies fully within the grasp of common sense, whence the semantics and tenses of δεδοξασμένοις τε καὶ τετιμημένοις), suggests that the cognition of the specialists is a mere shadow of knowledge undeserving of the honor and praise it expects and enjoys. Again a dialectical question to ask the specialists is being formulated but their discourse gives no place for them to be asked it.

3282

With μανθάνω (B1), Glaucon acknowledges he is getting, in terms at least of the example of the specialist arts, what he failed to get before (510B10). For the dative with ὐπό (B1) cf. 572C1, Symp.205C1, H.Maj.295D4.

3283

τὸ τοίνυν ἕτερον (B3): With τοίνυν Socrates again stays close to his interlocutor and acknowledges that he recognizes that Glaucon now understands what he didn’t before, so that he can now move him on to the second half. The present participle λέγοντα represents an imperfect of citation (n.582).

3284

νοητοῦ (B2): nineteen.

3285

αὐτὸς ὁ λόγος (B4), in contrast to the soul as a whole (510B5, 511A4), which would include the participation of sight. We now see that ψυχή was anarthrous before to stress the predication that it was soul that was being compelled, and that this was part of the problem. True thought is possible, according to the present formulation, only as reason frees itself from soul.

3286

διαλέγεσθαι (B4). The only preparation we have for the appearance of this term is the implicit refusal of it and absence of it in the kind of thinking exemplified by the specialties (cf. 510C5-D1, 510D5-511A2, and 511A7-9 with nn.3261, 3270, 3281). The questioning they had refused (510C6-7) now arrives, to make progress possible. To translate the verb with “dialectic” makes the meaning only more obscure. The important point is the contrast between the power (δυνάμει, B4) of the method and the soul’s powerlessness described above (οὐ δυναμένην, A5).

3287

τῷ ὄντι ὑποθέσεις (B5): Punning (literally [τῷ ὄντι]) on ὑπόθεσις: things “placed beneath” (ὑπό) the feet of thinking as it proceeds along step by step.

3288

ἵνα (B6): quasi-spatial according to its original sense. The purpose clause “personifies” the direction and orientation given by the ὁρμαί (B6); μέχρι indicates the limit-point at which medial (hypothetical) steps reach their upper bound in an unhypothetical step; and ἐπί designates the fixed purpose to proceed beyond all such medial steps so as to find the step before their entire sequence (τοῦ παντός), at which point thought pivots and can now think a consecutive account by merely reading back through them as if it were descending a staircase.

3289

ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ἀρχήν (B6-7) and μέχρι τοῦ ἀνυποθέτου restate (n.b. λέγοντά με) and “unpack” what Socrates had said compendiously with ἐπ’ἀρχὴν ἀνυπόθετον (510B6-7). The point at which a beginning ceases to be arbitrary (ἀνυπόθετον) is at the point beyond which there is no step in thought that is prior (ἡ τοῦ παντὸς [sc. λογισμοῦ vel λόγου] ἀρχή).

3290

οὕτως (B8), strictly redundant (cf. n.953), but creating a berth to deny the contrary manner, αἰσθητῷ παντάπασιν οὐδενὶ προσχρώμενος (C1).

3291

τελευτήν (B8): Just as the starting point is no longer arbitrary, the end is no longer an artificial stopping point that one had been set before oneself from the beginning (cf.510D2-3 and n.3265).

3292

προσχρώμενος (C5): Again, “apparatus” translates what πρός adds to the verb. Cf. 510D5. Conversely the mind's relation to the forms is unmediated (αὐτοῖς δι’ αὐτῶν εἰς αὐτά, C2).

3293

παντάπασιν (C1) is not mere auxesis but refers to the “use” of images, a psychic process in which vision is tied to thinking. In contrast, the thinking now has no connection whatever with sight or any other sense.

3294

The output of “technique” was to reach what it had put there before it started (510D2-3); here on the other hand thought stays with its element and achieves its ultimate purpose, which is a perfection (τελευτᾷ, C2, a subjunctive with ἵνα), i.e., complete understanding. It is this high activity that Glaucon now reacts to as a συχνὸν ἔργον (C3-4).

3295

μέντοι (C4): Glaucon immediately cancels much of the uncertainty he had expressed with ἱκανῶς μὲν οὔ. What begins as a restatement at a distance of Socrates’s intention (βούλει, C4) goes on much longer than Glaucon thought it would, as it seems, and is subject to the same sort of self-interruptions for added specificity that Socrates’s remarks had been subject to. That is, it is a live, dialogical answer that instantiates the kind of thinking that is being contrasted with specialism.

3296

τὸ ὑπὸ τῆς τοῦ διαλέγεσθαι ἐπιστήμης τοῦ ὄντος τε καὶ νοητοῦ (C5-6): dialogue’s portion of the noetic and real realm. The hyperbaton of the genitive (τοῦ ὄντος τε καὶ νοητοῦ, partitive with τό), sets the distinguishing term (τοῦ διαλέγεσθαι) into relief.

3297

σαφέστερον (C4).

3298

καλουμένων (C6) adds a derogatory note, articulating part of what Glaucon has learned.

3299

θεωρεῖσθαι (C6): Glaucon finds a term hitherto unused in this context to articulate the virtually sensory and self-grounding cognition of νοῦς in distinction from the ratiocinative movement of διάνοια plodding through its own creature-images (so also θεᾶσθαι, C8).

3300

νοῦν (D1)—the twentieth νοῦς-word. The translator must resist the temptation to add a magnifying adjective.

3301

καίτοι νοητὸν ὄντων (D2): The construction καίτοι with participle, presented in all mss., has attracted much notice and worry, which we may easily evade by reading καί τοι instead, with τοι continuing (from μέντοι) the confidence and breathlessness of Glaucon’s manner.

3302

νοητῶν ὄντων μετὰ ἀρχῆς (D2): twenty-one. Because μετὰ ἀρχῆς has two meanings (“from the beginning” and “when derived from the principle”), νοητῶν may be given an objective interpretation (as parts of the noetic section of the line, the subject matter is inherently noetic) as well as a subjective one (the items are seen in their noetic truth when understood dialectically: cf. 511B7-C2 with C8-D1). Slings has athetized this wonderful clause because kaitoi seldom is used where he would expect kaiper. But Glaucon is trying to describe Socrates's thought and feels more sympathy than understanding – whence his preference for sincere τοι over merely logical περ. We may say that Socrates, at least, understood and appreciated what he was saying to him (ἱκανώτατα, D6).

3303

ὡς μεταξύ τι (D4) Glaucon’s language of betweenness (that διάνοια should be μεταξύ opinion [δόξα] and intelligence [νοῦς}) recalls his agreement with Socrates at the end of Book Five to locate δόξα “between” ἄγνοια and γνῶσις. To the extent that we can safely associate the δόξα and γνῶσις of Book Five with the visual and noetic sections of the Line in Book Six, we can and should impose a like relation, within the second section of the Line, onto διάνοια and νοῦς, a relation whose meaning is made clearer by the distinction between the lower two subsections, namely, the shadow and the thing casting it (cf. “shadow of knowledge,” n.3281).

3304

νοῦς twice (D4), making twenty three uses.

3305

ἱκανώνατα (D6): Socrates corrects the doubt Glaucon expressed with ἱκανῶς μὲν οὔ (C3) on the basis of his subsequent performance, the superlative acknowledging the complexity of Glaucon's statement (cf. n.2058). Adequacy (τὸ ἱκανόν)—i.e., the raising of all questions and settling them all so as to reach ὁμολογία—always was the criterion of a successful conversation with Socrates. Glaucon’s restatement of Socrates’s presentation is an instance of the power of conversation in action, where the same thing is being said and even developed by similar but also different words. And so, the dialogue instantiates itself (for a detailed analysis cf. Appendix 5). As the employment of conversation has helped him grasp the meaning of νόησις, so has the use of the example of geometry helped him grasp διάνοια. Glaucon himself recognizes that the idea is clothed in exemplary material (B1-2); with καλουμένων (C6) he dismisses the particulars of their methods.

3306

παθήματα ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ (D7), not faculties (as δύναμις [B4]) nor agencies (as designated by constructions with ὑπό [C5, 6]); but closer to ἕξεις (as at D4), the term also used at 533E4 (where n.b. the term μοῖρα is then used in the summary of this passage: 533E7-534A1).

3307

νόησις (D8). Twenty three other uses of νοῦς-words in the last few pages establish a center of meaning that now culminates in the first use of the abstract noun, which therefore, within this argument, has the force of a coinage. Its use is not a matter of Plato forcing an abstract distinction between the action of mind (with the -σις noun) and mind itself (with νοῦς), since νοῦς has already had both these meanings during the argument. The fact that the term νόησις had already appeared by Plato’s time in Diogenes of Apollonia (DK 51B3,4,5) is quite external and unrelated to what has happened, for the first time, within and through these pages.

3308

εἶπον (514A1), stronger than ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, and marking a transition.

3309

φύσιν (A2) = Beschaffenheit (Passow). With ἡμετέραν (i.e., ἀνθρωπίνην) it almost means μοῖρα. Cf. Thuc.3.82.2 for the sense. Ast does not reference this passage s.v. φύσις.

3310

πάθει (A1) and ἡμετέραν φύσιν announces at the start that the account will be phenomenological—true to the flux of human experience—rather than allegorical. We should interpret what is coming more as we would interpret a dream than as we would an allegory full of secret ritual or metaphysical symbolism. Again (as with the correction of the intentionalist approach to the good: 505D5-507A5) the perspective is from beyond man, looking back at him. ἡμετέραν excludes nobody and includes everybody.

3311

καὶ τὰ σκέλη καὶ τὰς αὐχένας (A6), contrasted with αὐτούς as aspects with the whole to which they belong (cf. αὐτοῖς at 507D12). The αὐτούς of all the mss. is to be retained.

3312

τε … τε, (A6-B1): The bonds tying their limbs and neck have the two effects of keeping them in one place and looking forward. The result is then introduced by δέ. δεσμοῦ (B1), singular, is abstract.

3313

φῶς δὲ αὐτοῖς (B2) distinguished from the φῶς onto which the cave opens (A4).

3314

φῶς … καόμενον (B2-3): The image used on the way up to the Line may be allowed to influence our interpretation of the image used on the way back down, so that καόμενον φῶς may be likened to the νυκτερινὰ φέγγη of 508C6.

3315

τῶν ἀνθρώπων (B5), designating not the puppeteers but the spectators they are entertaining. The term suggests generic human limitations embodied by the prisoners haplessly watching their shadows.

3316

οἷον εἰκός (515A2): The carriers make sounds likely to be made, or not made, by the things their puppets represent.

3317

οἵους ἡμῖν (A4): The asyndeton is noteworthy. Part of the force of the following γάρ is to apologize for it. Socrates’s remark directs Glaucon to manage the strangeness of the image through empathy: cf. A1-2 and nn.3310, 3311. Socrates's use of the first plural is significant. One underestimates the power and truth of the passage if he views the cave as the place where somebody else lives (the ἀπαίδευτοι, says Adam ad 514ff and then passim) rather than the place we all begin or began (n.b. πρώτης, 516C4); or if he looks for traces of contempt in the tone (Adam ad 514B5) rather than seeing how much the demeaning and pitiable account applies to oneself.

3318

ἑαυτῶν τε καὶ ἀλλήλων … τι … ἄλλο πλὴν τὰς σκίας (A6-7): the governance of the proleptic genitive extends to τὰς σκίας.

3319

The genitive περιφερομένων (B2) is parallel with ἑαυτῶν τε καὶ ἀλλήλων. There is no need with Stallb. to compare the “genitive of the topic” at Phdo.78D10.

3320

Reading οὐ ταὐτὰ ἡγῇ ἂν τὰ παρόντα αὐτοὺς νομίζειν ὀνομάζειν ἅπερ ὁρῷεν (B4-5) with the majority of mss. To strain for a sense based on mss. is perhaps preferable to importing “readings” from Iamblichus, in whom the passage is quoted entire (514A1-517C5) but merely as one of many edifying sermons (Protrepticus, ch.15 = 78.1-82.4 Pistelli])—especially when his readings are faciliora and they interpret the image philosophically, while the image is already an interpretation of human experience. I therefore attempt to read ταὐτά with AFM (contra ταῦτα D), and παρόντα with all mss. (contra the ὄντα of the editors, and the tempting παριόντα of the recc.), as well as νομίζειν ὀνομάζειν with ADM (and Stallb. and Shorey), contra νομίζειν, F. The prisoners' talking requires names. They would work with an unconscious policy of calling what they actually see (ἅπερ) by the names of things actually present (παρόντα) though invisible to them. For the force of ἅπερ cf. Parm.130D3, Tim.51C1. That they can have those names in their heads having never seen the originals seems a logical impossibility but is a fact of life: cf. Tim.52A5, ὁμώνυμον.

3321

παριοῦσαν (B9): What is really moving is the object casting the shadow. Characterizing the “phenomena” as παριοῦσαν as well as περιφερόμενα above and παριόντων below (D4), is reminiscent of the phenomenological description Socrates uses of the “many's” at 402A9 (περιφερόμενα, cf. n.1627), 476A7 (πανταχοῦ φανταζόμενα, cf. n. 2716), and 479D9 (πλανητόν, cf. n.2780), but also keeps within reach the observation that what one is seeing is in something else rather than καθ’ αὑτό (516B4-6). Cf. also Tim.52A6-7.

3322

παντάπασι (C1) generalizing all sources of knowledge from two, the senses of sight and hearing, a pair commonly used to represent the whole spectrum (352C3-4, 367C7-D1 [after 357C2-3], 477C3-4; cf. Charm.167D4-5; Euthyd.281D1; Leg.961D8; Phlb.51BC; Tht.156C1-2). The fuller list, including touch and smell (Phdo.65B2, 96B6; Phdrs.240D2-3; Tht.156B2-6, 188E5-9A5, 192D5-7), would hardly suit the present image.

3323

Reading λύσιν τε καὶ ἴασιν τῶν δεσμῶν καὶ τὴς ἀφροσύνης (C4-5), with A M (F D τῶν τε Iambl.). The construction is distributive binary (“A and B a’ing and b’ing” meaning that “A a’s and B b’s”: cf. n.774). The addition of the definite article with each member of the second pair already does whatever work τε after τῶν would have done.

3324

φύσει (C5) is salient and therefore must mean what it meant at 514A2. τοιάδε points to a new πάθος they will undergo (cf.τοιούτῳ πάθει, 514A1: συμβαίνοι αὐτοῖς repeats the notion of πάθος). Adam is wrong to argue that φύσει here means they are released to “return to their true nature.” The dramatic pedagogy of Socrates’s argument is only undermined by imagining a pristine status naturalis, and the Plato who is giving him his words is not a gnostic.

3325

τὰς μαρμαρυγάς (C9): again the φέγγη (cf. 514B2-3 and n.; and 508C6).

3326

καθορᾶν (C9), the prefix stressing sight’s ability to see detail, here and in the sequel.

3327

ἐκεῖνα ὧν τότε τὰς σκίας (C9-D1) echoes τοῖς ὑπὸ τῶν κάτω ἀπεικασθεῖσιν (511A6-7), ἐκείνων πέρι οἷς ταῦτα ἔοικε (510D7), τοῖς τότε μιμηθεῖσιν (510B4), and ᾧ τοῦτο ἔοικεν (510A5).

3328

φλυαρίας (D2): perhaps a tactful genitive singular (as at 485B1-2) rather than a broadly derogatory plural in the accusative (for which cf. Gorg.486C7, 490C8, 519A3; H.Maj.304B5).

3329

ὀρθότερον βλέποι (D4): The verb is without object: his sensory faculty has undergone an improvement. The indicative of the original speech is attracted into the optative (contrast ἐώρα above) by the optativity of the entire protasis. We are to imagine the prisoner hearing without fully understanding what is being said, leading soon to his rejection of the whole description (D6-7).

3330

μᾶλλόν τι ἐγγυτέρω τοῦ ὄντος καὶ πρὸς μᾶλλον ὄντα (D2-3): It is the direction that is truer, more than the objects he is now trying to see, and his proximity to more real things rather than their presence, that the guide alleges: “Though you do not understand what is happening to you, I can tell you that you are closer to truth and reality than before.”

3331

ἑκάστων (D4), a term he has used for the ideas, i.e., the distinct, self-identical, and single characteristic exhibited in the plurality (476A6 [cf.A2], 484C7, 490B3, 504A6, 507B2 and B6, 596A6).

3332

ἐρωτῶν ἀποκρίνεσθαι (D5): the use of both verbs indicates dialogue and dialectic (cf. nn.3418 and 3561), and in particular the Socratic elenchus of one’s casual and unexamined beliefs, a conversation operating now on a higher level than the so-called διαλέγεσθαι imagined at 515B4.

3333

ἀπορεῖν τε ... (D6-7), an allusion to the feeling of ἀπορία to which the Socratic elenchus characteristically brings Socrates's interlocutor, such as what Polemarchus came to in Book One.

3334

ἀληθέστερον (D6). He will regress into thinking the real “horse” was the one he saw on the wall, not this three-dimensional object he is now being shown. Its difference (three dimensionality and the fact that it is in its own place) could be the proof it is realer but at this stage difference only means inauthenticity.

3335

σαφέστερα (E4): of optical distinctness, the element that κατὰ in καθορᾶν grasps. He can see the shadow version more clearly because the light is low. Again the residual preference for the doxic dimensionality of experience pre-empts him from profitting from “illumination.” A similar distinction between ἀληθές and σαφές ran through the Line passage.

3336

οὐδ’ ἂν ἕν (516A2): οὐδέν in tmesis for emphasis.

3337

νῦν (A3) refers to 515D1-4, with ἀληθῶν standing for ὄντα.

3338

οὐ γάρ (A4) elliptical (as ἀλλὰ γάρ can be), omitting the reason why he agrees, which he then indirectly supplies with ἐξαίφνης γε.

3339

τῶν ἄλλων (A7) relies for its content on τὰ περὶ ἡμᾶς in the list at 510A5 (to which ἀνθρώπων compendiously refers back), i.e., things we look across to (like animals and trees), not down at (like the surface of a lake) nor up at (like the sun and sky): cf. n.3241.

3340

ἀλλοτρίᾳ ἕδρᾳ (B5): The distinct role and the alien status of the medium, which has been hinted at all along (510A1-3; cf. ἄνευ [510B7] vs. δι’ αὐτῶν [B8] and the “materiality” of the geometer’s paradigms [510E1-3] vs. the liberation from sensory models [511C1-2]) finally becomes explicit, introduced by illative οὐδέ.

3341

οὗτος ὁ τάς τε ὥρας παρέχων ... (B9-10): For the participial periphrasis cf.Smyth §1857. The word order imitates the reversal of perspective, from looking up from below, to looking back down from above (compare πάλιν αὖ at 511B7, and the way the predicate becomes the subject at 508E3-6, 509A4-5, and 509B8-10).

3342

σφεῖς ἑώρων (C1): Given the imperfect referring to duration in the past, I take the reflexive plural σφεῖς (C1) to refer to himself and his erstwhile fellows below (rather than himself and his guide with Shorey, ut vid.), which broaches a hint of fellow feeling for the persons he has left behind that is akin to the empathy Socrates wishes to incite in Glaucon: cf. ἡμετέραν [514A2] and οἵους ἡμῖν [515A5]). The feeling arises in the aftermath of illumination just as ἐκείνων adds some sense of the continuity of the process he looks back over, and is then acknowledged by the present participle, ἀναμιμνῃσκόμενον (C4).

3343

τῆς πρώτης οἰκήσεως καὶ τῆς ἐκεῖ σοφίας καὶ τῶν τότε συνδεσμωτῶν (C4-5): The list swiftly rehearses his original departure, his arrival at the higher perspective, and (with τότε and συν-) a tinge of “survivor’s guilt” in the aftermath.

3344

αὐτοῖς and παρ’ ἀλλήλων (C8-9) indicate a self-contained group, a society living on its own illusions. Again we only ignore Socrates’s purpose when we think instead of Plato and hear into these words him reporting to us his supercilious attitude about the politicians of his day (e.g. Adam ad 516C). Socrates has shown us that it is ourselves en masse that are the greatest sophist (492A5-B3, 493A6-9). We will always find ourselves in a world where we can postpone our better goals to best our neighbors in the meanwhile, and will never have anybody else to blame for doing so.

3345

τὰ παριόντα (C9), the substantivized participle conveniently makes it unnecessary to supply a noun that would say what the moving things are (i.e., that they are in a sense nothing since merely shadows): cf. αὐτοῖς, 507D12.

3346

ἐκεῖνα and ἐκείνως (D7) remind us he is remembering (C4). The amount quoted this time from Homer (cf.386C5-7) is enough to recall the comparison with Hades that ensues, the world below to which the Cave is herewith being likened by a bold inversion of the usual perspective.

3347

Reading σκότους <ἂν> ἀνάπλεως σχοίη (E4-5) with Baiter's added ἄν (though absent from all mss.), rather than Slings's ἂν[α] πλέως, who drops one letter from all mss. instead of adding two, and quotes Cobet and Runken who argue that in other passages ἀνα- adds to πλέως a connotation of pollution, inappropriate in the present context. ἀνα- here is not copulative or emphatic: it indicates the returning man now realizes that his eyes were full of darkness before and thus experiences his return as a re-filling. It is on the force of this observation that he sees his fellows as bound by needless fetters. The paradoxes of full emptiness and empty fullness represent the experience of doxa with phenomenological accuracy.

3348

γνωματεύοντα (E8), a recondite hapax, must be satirical. Cf. ῥωμή and ματαχειρεῖται at 410B7-8 (and n.1789), and εὐπαιδευσίαν, 560E5.

3349

οὐκ ἀξίαν ουδὲ πειρᾶσθαι (517A4) It is the sympathetic οὐδέ that indicates the men are (with Adam ad loc.) assuaging their own conscience for ignoring “their higher promptings.” To try but then fail would be mortifying; the counsel of despair is therefore not even to try. One must then make a life out of the shadows he knows are only half-true (he must, that is, somehow fill himself with their emptiness). It is this charade of reason, this “reading the tea leaves,” that γνωματεύοντα is coined to denote, this canny and sophisticated ability of the “political consultant” to put ictus into doxa, which in the end consists only of saying what hoi polloi already believe (493A6-9).

3350

λύειν τε καὶ ἀνάγειν (A5) recapitulates, with an hendiadys of first and last, the sequence of actions the prisoner underwent (λυθείη … ἁναγκάζοιτο … ἀναγκάζοι … ἕλκοι … ἐξελκύσειεν [515C6-E8]) and now in turn performs. τὸν ἐπιχείροντα is essentially εἰ ἐπιχειροῖ τις, for which cf. τῶν διακρινόντων, 348B2, and n. ad loc. καί alterum (A4) extends the governance of ἄξιον to the infinitive ἀποκτεινύναι ἄν (A6).

3351

εἴ πως … δύναιτο (A5-6): The condition is optative, not irreal. Since it is he that is telling them the truth that frees their bonds, they might be able to return the favor and strangle him. The bearer of good tidings enables the complacent man to see just enough of the truth he is trying to avoid to require himself to be removed, as we saw in the second vote of Socrates's Apology, where more voted for his death than had voted for his conviction.

3352

τὴν … δι’ ὄψεως φαινομένην ἕδραν (B2), a constructio praegnans. That the phenomena are less real for being variable has already been asserted and argued; here we meet a second aspect of their inferiority, first alluded to in respect to the sun a page above: that they do not exist on their own (καθ’ αὑτά:) but require a seat or a medium (cf.516B5: ἐν ἀλλοτρίᾳ ἕδρᾳ), an idea introduced at 510A1-3 that receives full articulation in the Timaeus (the τρίτον γένος, 48E3-52D1, n.b. 52B1). There, in the cosmological context, the ἕδρα is the place in which the entire visible world appears (i.e, space, or the χώρα); here in the social context of opinion, it is the wall of the cave that provides a seat for the shadows (as the surface of water did for the likenesses at 510A1) which together constitute for the prisoners the part of the visible world that adumbrates the relation in which the entire visible world stands with the noetic world it “reflects.”

3353

τῆς γ’ ἐμῆς ἐλπίδος (B6): ἐλπίς used as at 496E2.

3354

ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα (B8-C1), the formal expression again (cf. 508E2-3, 505A2).

3355

ὀρθῶν τε καὶ καλῶν (C2), a reminiscence of 505A2-B3 and 505D5-9, with ὀρθῶν standing in for δικαίων.

3356

ἄρα (C2) acknowledges the new look things take on now that they are seen in connection with the Idea of the Good (cf. μετὰ ἀρχῆς, 511D2 and n.3302).

3357

τεκοῦσα (C3): From the new perspective looking down, the noetic ruler is the parent rather than the visible ruler (i.e., the sun), looking up to its parent, the offspring (ἔκγονον, 508B12-13).

3358

ἢ ἰδίᾳ ἢ δημοσίᾳ (C5), reminding us of the original purpose of the present conversation, the education of the guards, to which he now returns.

3359

ἴθι τοίνυν … καὶ τόδε συνοιήθητι (C7). The Sun image had shown that just as the visible world has the sun, the world of truth has a primum inter pares that rules and causes all. The Line image had established an important difference between two types of mental activity (Glaucon stating the result in his own words at 511C3-D5). Now Socrates supplements his general instruction that Glaucon attach the Cave image to the other two (A8-B1) by specifying (καὶ τόδε) the special purpose he has in mind for this third image.

3360

διατρίβειν (C9) the term Adeimantus used for continuing in the exercises “philosophy” beyond the preliminary stage (487D1: cf. 498B7-8 and χαλεπώτατα 498A3). Cf. 519C2 below.

3361

ἀσχημονεῖ (D5): cf. 506D7.

3362

σκιῶν ἢ ἀγαλμάτων ὧν αἱ σκίαι (D9). ἀγάλματα is essentially approbative but the sequel (ὅπῃ ποτὲ ὑπολαμβάνεται ...) shows its use is ironic, just as γνωματεύοντα was (516E8: cf. nn.3348 and 3349). We capture a similar modality in our terms “opinion-maker” and “pundit” which are approbative ... in the world of opinion; or the way we speak of individual persons as the “poster boy” by which to measure all the other ... shadows. Cf., with Shorey, the εἴδωλα μέγιστα of Polit.303C2 and the εἴδωλα λεγόμενα περὶ πάντων of Soph.234C6.

3363

αὐτὴν δικαιοσύνην (E1-2), allowed to be anarthrous for the economy of the attributive position in which it happens to be placed. From such a passage (as well as 507B5, where αὐτὸ τὸ καλὸν stands in contrast [n.b. δή] with πολλὰ καλά) it is easy to see how Plato’s use of αὐτός came to sound like a technical term (cf. Arist.Met.1040B34 and Bonitz, Index s.v. αὐτός).

3364

καθορᾶν (518A5): compare the use at Phdrs.247D5-6, and cf.515C9 and n. 3326.

3365

φανοτέρου βίου (A6-7) bringing forward the metaphor of luminosity from 508B12-D9 (and 506C11-D1: cf. n.3169). The two states of cognition can now be called βίοι since the image has invented places in which they can dwell.

3366

τοῦ πάθους τε καὶ βίου (B2), tantamount to the πάθος of our φύσις at 514A1-2 and φύσει συμβαίνειν αὐτῷ at 515C5-6.

3367

καταγέλαστος ὁ γέλως (B3). Note that conversely to laugh for joy at escaping from the lower life is not ridiculous: cf.535E3-5.

3368

ἐπαγγελλόμενοι (B7) of the sophist’s ἐπάγγελμα or nostrum (cf. Euthyd.274A3, Gorg.447C2, 449B2, 458D8; Lach.186C4; Prot.319A5-6, and n.3372, infra).

3369

τὸ ὄργανον ᾧ καταμανθάνει ἕκαστος (C5-6). This is the central lesson of the cave image, the most crucial aspect of ἡμετέρα φύσις παιδείας τε περὶ καὶ ἀπαιδευσίας. It is one and the same man, and it is any man, that undergoes the entire experience.

3370

καταμανθάνει (C6): the prefix associates this verb with καθορᾶν (A5) which expressed the same idea metaphorically.

3371

ἀνασχέσθαι θεωμένη (C10) with complete explicitness breaks the metaphor καθορᾶν into its components: κατα- is done with the aoristic aspect of ἀνασχέσθαι and ὁρᾶν is done with θεωμένη.

3372

τέχνη (D3) and διαμηχανήσασθαι (D7): The language satirizes the sophist’s tricks as well as the rhetoric he uses in advertising his product (ῥᾷστά τε καὶ ἀνυσιμώτατα). For this latter pair cf. Socrates’s description of the effect Hippias’s teaching will have on him: ῥᾳδίως ἄρα μαθήσομαι καὶ οὐδείς με ἐξελέγξει ἔτι. (H.Maj.286E7). For superlatives in the ἐπάγγελμα cf. those of Gorgias (Gorg.448A2-3), of Protagoras (Prot.318A7-9), of Euthydemus (Euthyd.273D9), of Hippias (H.Maj.281A6, H.Min. 363D2 [ὅτι ἄν τις, bis], 364A8), and of Ion (Ion 530C7-D3). Socrates has no need for this momentous event to happen easily nor delusions as to its irreversibility or permanence.

3373

θειοτέρου τινός (E2), parallel with the genitive τῶν τοῦ σώματος (D10), is a litotes for soul (Leroux).

3374

διατριβήν (519C2), from 517C9.

3375

διὰ τέλους (C2): Reaching the vision or knowledge of the good is the completion he has in mind, as the next clause proves (cf.τελευταῖον [516B4], and 517C4-5). Short of this they are unqualified (ἱκανῶς … ποτε, C1), but once qualified in this way they will never look back.

3376

ἡμέτερον δὴ ἔργον (C8) The phrase (cf. 374E6 and n. 1111, 378B1-2 and n.1194; cf. also 530E3) formally invokes their joint project to develop the city, and thus programmatically reverts to the task, from which we departed at 503E1ff, namely, the task of educating the guards.

3377

ἰδεῖν τε τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἀναβῆναι ἐκείνην τὴν ἀνάβασιν καὶ ἐπειδὰν ἀναβάντες ἱκανῶς ἴδωσι μὴ ἐπιτρέπειν ... (C9-D2): The ἀνάβασις was described at 515E6-B7. The chiasm suggests that ἐπιτρέπειν will introduce a regressive or downward step. On the relation between ἰδεῖν τὸ ἀγαθόν and ἀναβῆναι ἐκείνην τὴν ἀνάβασιν see next note.

3378

The adequacy (ἱκανῶς) consists not merely of “seeing it” but recognizing in the vision how its goodness is the cause and explanation of all else he saw on the way up (cf.517C1-5, 516B9-C2), a kind of cognition or understanding that was described in the Line passage in terms of the path up to the ἀνυπόθετον and back down (511B6-C2). ἱκανῶς therefore means what ἱκανόν means at Phdo.101E1, where a similar upward path is described.

3379

καταβαίνειν (D5), a metaphor defined entirely by the upward path (and prepared for by the chiasm above, C10-D2), itself a creature of the cave image, though the term had also been used in the Line passage of the path of reasoning from the source and cause “down” to its derivatives and effects (511B8). To feel a reference to the first word of Book One reaches not too far but through too much. The fact that Socrates has taken a path “down” to the Piraeus is less important than the question whether Glaucon (not to mention Adeimantus) will end up taking the path upward that Socrates is here describing.

3380

ἔπειτα (D8), in interrogatione improbationis vel indignationis signficationem habens (Ast, Lex.Plat. s.v. ἔπειτα, comparing Gorg.466C, Tht.196D, .289C).

3381

ἐπελάθου πάλιν (E1): πάλιν refers to that last time Glaucon succeeded at remembering (with Adam ad loc.). He is referring to the exchange at 465E4-466A7, where he had delicately avoided naming Adeimantus (οὐκ οἶδ’ ὅτου, ibid.) as the person whose objection had required him to articulate this principle (Book Four, init.). Thus Socrates is almost saying, “You’ve overlooked what that other person did.”

3382

καὶ αὐτὸς ἐμποιῶν (520A2): adds to the sequence of participles that it was law that in the first place had encouraged the development of such special skills in the citizens that it goes on to combine into an harmonious and happy whole.

3383

οὐδ' (A6): cf. 475C4 and n.2702.

3384

ὥσπερ ἐν σμήνεσιν (B5-6). Xen.Cyrop.5.1.24 recognizes a “natural” king arising as the head bee among the swarm (ἡγεμών, as here and there, is the normal term: cf. Bz.Index Ar. s.v., 313B44-50). Socrates’s habit of borrowing freely from the animal world (375D3-376A10; 451D4-E7) is of a piece with his irony, and helps keep things in perspective, especially for his interlocutors. The gender of the head bee (king or queen) appears still to have been a matter of speculation: Ar.GA 3.10.

3385

ἀμφοτέρων (C1). There is no advocacy here that a ruler should be both practical and theoretical, nor a vision of complementarity or interdependence of the practical and contemplative lives (time within the cave interrupts communing with the forms but not vice-versa) nor any doubt which is the better life. All that is said and meant is that his theoretical ability so hugely enhances his practical ability (cf. μυρίῳ, C3) that it would be hugely ungenerous of him to refuse short periods of service.

3386

ἑωρακέναι (C5): The distinction between shadows and the σκευαστά that cast them, below, is a ladder thrown away once they are both fully understood (whence the perfect tense) from the higher perspective of the Good which alone reveals what they are versions of and what is their potential worth (cf. 516C1-2 where notice the dismissal of the question with τρόπον τινά). Such understanding presumably includes recognizing something of the citizens’ true nature as men with souls, souls with a divine element that could enable them to undergo the change the ruler himself underwent, rather than continuing in the doxic view that their identity consists only in the status and position they hold in the mural of shadows (515A6).

3387

καλῶν τε καὶ δικαίων καὶ ἀγαθῶν πέρι (C5-6): once again the μέγιστα (cf. n.2401).

3388

ὕπαρ … ἀλλ’ οὐκ ὄναρ (C6-7), as a dream come true, echoing Od.19.547-550 (Leroux); but also referring back to the extraordinary metaphor from Book Five according to which persons who see the many without seeing the one behind the many are said to be living a dream (476C2-D3).

3389

ἐν τῷ καθαρῷ (D8): for the substantival use as well as the sentiment cf. Phdo.79D2. The guards’ inner dimension and the purity in which it participates gives positive content to what could still be described only negatively in the last paragraph of Book Three (where compare the term ἀκήρατον, 417A1).

3390

δίκαια γὰρ δὴ δικαίοις ἐπιτάξομεν (E1), expressing agreement by taking the interlocutor’s assertion one step further (after ἀλλὰ δίκαια πρὸς αὐτοὺς ἐροῦμεν, A7-8).

3391

ἐπί τε τὰ δημόσια ἴασιν (521A5) the motive is military or erotic, but certainly unwanted. The sentiment (οἰόμενοι) Socrates imagines them having was explicitly stated by Thrasymachus (343D6-344A6).

3392

Once again (cf. n.3002 ad 496D) the reader must be cautious to watch for any trace of self-aggrandizement in the expression of this sentiment by Socrates, and in the interlocutor’s agreement to it—as well as his own. Proof of Glaucon’s innocence in this respect is the choice he made at 528A4-5. The reader is left to answer to himself, for himself, as usual.

3393

ἐραστὰς τοῦ ἄρχειν (B4) distinct from the poor (A4-8), these desire power for itself whereas those desired power only as a means to acquire the wealth they thought it could bring.

3394

ἀντερασταί (B5): Socrates adds a psychological observation, that a show of desire in one man arouses desire in another—hence the language of the ἐραστής and ἀντεραστής. Still, and again, the theme of envy is just below the surface.

3395

ἐγγενήσονται (C2) referring back to the claim we have made to our guardians at 520B5-6.

3396

ὀστράκου … περιστροφή (C5), an allusion to a children’s game of ὀστρακίνδα: They break into two groups (in one version they stand east and west of a line drawn between); a shell or sherd painted black on one side and white on the other is spun or thrown up in the air; how it lands is announced (νύξ for black, ἡμέρα for white) and this determines which of the groups is to flee and which is to pursue (Plato Comicus f.153 [=1.640 Kock, quoted and elaborated upon in Hermias in Phdrm.Schol.241B (59.16-60.9 Couvreur]; the detail about east and west is added in Schneidewin’s ms.C ad D.6.95 [=Paroim.Gr.1.285]).

The expression is proverbial for sudden reversal (e.g., from offense to defense: cf. Paroim.Gr. 1.285 [D.6.95], 2.84[GCL2.93], 2.570 [Ap.13.3]), so that Socrates may be alluding to the topsy-turvy of politics (a continuation of the theme introduced by ἐρασταί and ἀντερασταί just above (B4-5: n.b., it is in connection with the topsy-turvy of erotic relationships that Socrates uses the proverb in Phdrs.241B3-5); but the designation of the sherd’s colors in terms of night and day, and orientation of the players facing sunrise and sunset, must also be meant to introduce the turning of the soul’s orientation away the “nocturnal day” to the day illuminated by sun and truth, as described in the περιαγωγή with which this περιστροφή is next contrasted.

3397

νυκτερινῆς τινος ἡμέρας (C6), with τις used to apologize for the metaphor, almost turning it into a simile. Day is metonymy for life (βίος, 520E4, 521B1, B9). For the light of day contrasted with shadowy glare of artificial illumination cf. ἡμερινὸν φῶς / νυκτερινὰ φέγγη, 508C5-6.

3398

Reading οὖσαν ἐπάνοδον (C7) with all mss., Iamblichus, Clement and Alcinous. Philosophy is a way of life (see last note), itself an ascent within the day-life of the world above (516A5-B7).

3399

τί τῶν μαθημάτων (C10): The article indicates that Socrates presumes Glaucon is cognizant of some set of subjects that are taught. In the sequel we find only the studies we have taught above, gymnastics and music. The μέθοδοι of the πραγματευόμενοι mentioned at the end of Book Six (510C3,C5) do not come to Glaucon’s mind as quickly as they might to a professional student.

3400

ὁλκόν (D3), the power to drag or draw, which metaphor was used in the cave (ἕλκοι, ἐξελκύσειεν, ἑλκόμενον: 515E6-6A1).

3401

μὴ ἄχρηστον (D11). The litotes evinces that Socrates is straining to make a point. It is not unusual for him to claim something has struck him (370A, 525C, Euthyphr.9C), nor for anyone else to. Such a thing happens commonly in conversation, as when one says, “You know what I was just thinking?” to apologize to the other for introducing an apparently irrelevant comment whose relevance, he trusts, will presently will become clear (here done with asseverative μέντοι). In general, and here, it marks the conversation as a friendly partnership. What is unusual in this case is how long it takes for the relevance to appear and, even when it does, how strained it is: these latter facts can produce a feeling that Socrates is manipulating his interlocutor, a feeling we also had the moment they were finding justice in the thicket (432B7-E7), and so did Glaucon (E8), and may have again when the whole game comes to nothing and he dispenses with the military uses of science (527D2-6 and n. ad loc.).

3402

περὶ γιγνόμενον καὶ ἀπολλύμενον (E3-4) an amplification of τὸ γιγνόμενον (521D4), the dyad first used at 485B2-3. που softens the strong expression; for the perfect (τετεύτακεν) of what is true in the nature and structure of things, cf. n.4782.

3403

ὅσον τὸ πρότερον (522A2), The limitation perhaps remembers and suggests the special sense ἡ Μοῦσα was given in a moment of enthusiasm at 499D4.

3404

Glaucon connects Socrates's argument just above (518D9-519A1) about the imperishability of mind, with very specific moments in the argument at 400C7-401D3 including the very memorable expression, συμφωνίαν τῷ καλῷ λόγῳ (401D2). To continue the parallelism by saying κατὰ τοὺς λόγους εὐλογίαν, repeating a term that was actually used there, does not serve his present purpose of stressing the characterological effect of the training, and so he varies the expression.

3405

ἀληθινώτεροι (A8): The comparative alludes to the language used at 377A5-6.

3406

Reading ἄγον (B1) with Burnet, Chambry, Slings (Eusebius et γρ. D : ἀγ [sic] F : ἀγαθὸν ADM [et legunt Shorey, Leroux]). The expression ἄγειν πρός (A8-B1) substitutes for ἕλκειν.

3407

With ὦ δαιμόνιε Γλαύκων (B3) Socrates notes they have come to an important pass. As we have seen (n.550), Socrates, and almost only he (contra, 365A4) plays with these vocatives. Sometimes a bare adjective is used, in earnest or not: ὠγαθέ: 344E7, 345A5; ἄριστε: 338D5, 381D8; εὔδαιμον: 450C6; ἑταῖρε: 506D6, 520E4 (Socrates only once calls Adeimantus ἑταῖρε, at 562A7); θαυμάσιε: 435C4, 495A10 (usual with imaginary interlocutors, 366D7, 420D1, 526A1); μακάριε: 345B2, 346A3, 354A8, 499D10, 506D8, 557D1, 589C7; φίλε (373E9, 435B9, 455D6, 485C6, 503B3, 504C1, 519E1, 563B4). Sometimes an adjective is added to the proper name: ἀγαθέ: 423D8 (Adeimant.); δαιμόνιε: 344D6 (Thras), 522B3 (Glauc.) σοφώτατε: 338D5 (Thras.); φίλε: 361D4, 416B8, 473D5-6, 518A8, 533A1, 579D5, 608B4, 618B6-7 (Glauc.), 365A4 (Soc.), 376D6, 388D2 (Adeimant.). Three times two adjectives are combined, without a proper name: βαβαῖ ὦ φίλε ἑταῖρε (459B10 [Glaucon]); ὦ φίλε ἑταῖρε (562A7 [Adeimantus], 607E4 [Glaucon]). Combining an adjective with a proper name often adds asseveration (388D2, 423D8, 473D5-6, 533A1, 579D5, 608B4, 618B6-7) or heightens a transition, as here.

3408

ἔδοξαν (B5) refers to 495D7-E2, a moment in Socrates’s conversation with Adeimantus. For βάναυσοι cf. n.2988 ad loc. τε (B4) suggests Socrates was going to say more, and that Glaucon interrupts him, whence Burnet places a dash.

3409

τέχναι τε καὶ διάνοιαι καὶ ἐπιστῆμαι (C1-2): The list elegantly goes from the lowest precedent term (τέχνη) to the highest (ἐπιστήμη, from A5) through διάνοια, which presents the grounds for including them. Cf. n.1522 ad 398A4-5.

3410

φαῦλον (C5) masks with diffidence Socrates’s hardly natural way of characterizing calculation, though as it will turn out it is exactly appropriate for the use he will make of it, namely, the very abstract work of distinguishing the same and the different. Socrates characteristically begins dialectical investigation with disarmingly simple questions (e.g. 475E9; 507B2-7; 596A6-8) which his interlocutors immediately understand.

3411

τέχνη τε καὶ ἐπιστήμη (C8): διάνοια having done its job, the list now goes back to expressing the diapason of studies with a polar doublet consisting of its lowest and highest terms.

3412

πολλὴ ἀνάγκη (C11) of logical necessity, πολεμική by the feminine adjective now being made into an instance of τέχνη or ἐπιστήμη. The highly abstract inference is then filled in with a jocular but concrete example.

3413

ὡς ἔοικεν (D6) This phrase, within the suppositional participial phrase introduced by its own ὡς (ὡς ὄντων … εἰδότος, D5-6), begins to cast doubt on the validity of Palamedes’s behavior, a feeling that is then continued by the imperfect ἠπίστατο, which suggests the foregoing was the apodosis of an irreal condition. καίτοι (D7) then dismisses this suggestion in order to ask that the picture be evaluated on its own merits. Glaucon’s response (D9) reproduces the straddling modality, with an apodosis that has no ἄν followed by an irreal imperfect protasis.

3414

εἰ καὶ ἄνθρωπος ἔσεσθαι (E4). Leg.819D sheds the light we need on this remark—as if man were the “counting animal.” the second εἰ καί (E4) echoes the first (E3).

3415

ἐννόεις (E5). The νοῦς language from the end of Book Six is starting to show up again (cf. 521D4, 522D3).

3416

ἑλκτικῷ ὄντι παντάπασι πρὸς οὐσίαν (523A2-3): the ἄγειν metaphor exchanges duty with the ἕλκειν metaphor (cf. Phdrs.237D6-238C4). οὐσία should be heard as an abstract expression denoting what the participle τὸ ὄν referred to at 521D4. The “misuse” in question (χρῆσθαι δ’ οὐδεὶς αὐτῷ ὀρθῶς) is not a shortcoming of arithmeticians as such but the reason the philosophical value of arithmetic is not obvious in their deployment of it.

3417

γε (A5). Here, as at 506E2-3 (cf.507A1-2), we have Socrates’s expression of diffidence, as if to counsel others not hold him responsible for what might pop into his head to say (Plato is afforded no such immunity, even though he never speaks in his own voice!). The elaborate and usual back and forth by which he suggests they conduct their investigation emphasizes to Glaucon that he desires a “search in common” (so, συνθεατής, A7)—a dialogue—and might, along with the νοῦς-language above, suggest we pay special attention.

3418

οἷον μαντεύομαι (A8): With his characteristic diffidence Socrates warns Glaucon that the point will be abstruse (cf. his use of φαῦλον [522C5], and an expression like εὐηθικῶς [529B3, with n. 3515]); but there is also a methodological purpose in his rather extensive remark. The shared search of dialogue requires the answerer to present his thesis in order to check it and the questioner to ask questions in order to disambiguate it. Cf. 412E, 413B, 429C, 433A1, 450D8, 467D12, 515D5, 528A4-5, 531E4-5 (and n.3561) 577B7-8 (and n.4398), 578C9-D1, 580A1-7, 583C1-2, 595C5; and Crat.428D2; Euthyph.10A; Gorg.451E, 453B, 455A8ff, 463D, 474C1, 489D; Lach.189E-190A; Leg.626DE, 652A4-B1, 653D5-6, 654B9, 664E, 668D, 691B, 714C, 792C5, 835D, 862A1; Lys.216C4-5, 217CD, 218E1-2; Phdo.100A; Phlb.17A, 23E; Polit.297C, 306C; Prot.310A2-7; Tht.166DE; Stallb. ad Leg.630B8. Even stupid questions are appropriate if they will help the answerer clarify his meaning: 397E5-8, 456D8-10; Gorg.450E6ff, 490BC, 511CD; Parm.130E; Phlb.25C5-9, E5-9, 54A7-C5.

3419

δείκνυ’, ἔφη (A9). By a small but significant increment Socrates treats Glaucon as a more truly equal investigator than before. The center of gravity shifts away from Glaucon receiving the benefit of Socrates’s teaching and toward the middle, with Glaucon taking responsibility for his part in providing means to reach truth. His response, by accepting this responsibility, speaks volumes; and Socrates notices (δείκνυμι, εἰ καθορᾷς).

3420

ἱκανῶς (B1) designates subjective adequacy as also it does in dialectic (cf. n.482, Phdo.101E1, Gorg.448B1, Rep.511C3; Ar. de Caelo 279B11-12).

3421

ἱκανῶς … κρινόμενα (B1) is contrasted with οὐδὲν ὑγιές (B3), a slang idiom like our “up to no good:” cf. 496C7-8, 584A9, 589C3, 603B1-2.

3422

οὐ πάνυ … ἔτυχες ὃ λέγω (B7): In dialogue one has the opportunity to interpret what the other is saying and the other in turn to correct the interpretation if it is wrong. Thus the two might be able to stay on the same page.

3423

οὗτοι (C4), second person, after ὧδε (first), suggests Socrates has held up his fingers in front of Glaucon’s face.

3424

With τοίνυν (C8), which is late, Socrates emphasizes the proximity of his fingers to Glaucon’s face, in order to stress that obscurity due to distance is not the obscurity he has in mind (B5-7). The passive (ὁρωμένους, C8) is awkward just as προσπίπτουσα ἐγγύθεν and πόρρωθεν was above, and it sets up the passives he needs in the next step. He is taking pains to distinguish the purely perceptual aspects of experience from the thinking that subsequently reflects on them.

3425

οὐκ ἀναγκάζεται τῶν πολλῶν ἡ ψυχὴ τὴν νόησιν ἐπερέσθαι (D3-4) The implicit conception of the entire soul being affected by sensation and of its thinking faculty being a part or aspect of it is continued from above: cf. 511A4 vs. B4 and 518C4-10.

3426

ὧδε ποιεῖ ἑκάστη αὐτῶν (524A1): Rather than allowing Glaucon to answer whether touch might give contradictory testimony about the fingers as vision would (so at least we have been left to infer from imagining Socrates holding up his fingers), Socrates immediately refocusses the question (524A1-4) onto the general potential for contradictory testimony to inhere in the sense experience, since each sense is assigned to a spectrum of qualities whose termini are themselves opposites.

3427

With αὕτη (A7) soul recognizes that its presumption that the sense faculty giving the contrary reports should be self-identical, is integral to its aporia.

3428

καὶ ἡ (A9) demurs to emphasize that of course the sense of the light (the genitive τοῦ κούφου incorporates the language of τεταχθῆναι ἐπί from above, A2) is the same sense as the sense of the heavy, even though or perhaps exactly because, the point was just made above.

3429

εἴπερ τὸ αὐτὸ καὶ μαλακόν (A8): The very expression of the sense’s testimony goes further than the senses can or do. The senses did not declare that “the same thing” was hard and soft (A3-4, and A8), let alone declare that “the light” is “the heavy,” as soul now (A9-10) formulates the matter (to itself).

3430

λογισμόν τε καὶ νόησιν (B4), a paradigmatic instance of reverse καί (n.440). νόησις has consistently been the precedent term (523A1, B1, D4, D8) but now the aspect of intelligence that counts is what is called for, namely λογισμός, yet it is placed first rather than in the epexegetical second position.

3431

παρακαλοῦσα ἐπισκοπεῖν (B4-5): Soul proposes to itself a solution to the ἀπορία (it is not one and the same thing after all) and calls upon νόησις to test that solution, since it is νόησις that can count things.

3432

κεχωρισμένα νοήσει (B10-C1). The cognition of twoness relies on the event of counting but once it is reached the sense of one which was implicit in the act of counting becomes thinkable as such. Socrates made the same move, with the same language, at 475E9-476A2. The comparative ἑκάτερον adds to ἕν that the oneness of the one relies for its meaning on the single otherness, or alterity, of the other-than-itself. The same thought and language were used even earlier, in the argument in Book Four about non-contradiction, which provided the method needed for distinguishing and counting the parts of the soul (cf. 436A9 and 439B3, and nn.2214 and 2263).

3433

τά γε δύο κεχωρισμένα (B10): the γε is causal with δύο (“being two”). The participle represents the indirect discourse of mental perception.

3434

ἀχώριστά γε (C1): “causal” γε creates a virtual irreal protasis (i.e., εἰ ἀχώριστα ἦν) for the irreal apodosis ἄν … ἐνόει.

3435

μέγα καὶ ὄψις καὶ σμικρὸν ἑώρα (C3), with καί ’s slightly jumbled, perhaps to imitate the garbled testimony of sense. The first καί treats ὄψις as analogous enough with νόησις that it can be compared directly with it. In addition, he had set out the program of going through the senses one by one (ἑκάστη αὐτῶν, A1). Note that this is the first time that sight’s contradictory testimony is inferred explicitly, though it has been assumed ever since Socrates held up his three fingers (523E3-5).

3436

κεχωρισμένον, συγκεχυμένον (C4): The singular participles make the expression phenomenologically accurate at the expense of proper grammar, as will the plural participles below (C7).

3437

διὰ δὲ τὴν τούτου σαφήνειαν (C6): “by dint of the clarity the experience did provide.” There is no need for Shorey’s “final” διά (ad loc.).

3438

The plural διωρισμένα (C7) replaces the singular κεχωρισμένον (C4), shifting the focus from the objective separateness (χωρίς) of the two items that sight failed to see, to the mental act (ὁρισμός) by which νοῦς redresses the error by seeing the distinction (ὁρισμός) that determines their separateness and recognizes them as plural.

3439

τί οὖν ποτ’ ἐστί (C11): mind not only asks but focusses itself on asking (οὖν).

3440

διάνοια (D3) here and at D5 momentarily substitutes for νόησις (used at 523B1, D4, D8; 524B4, C1,C7), as it had once before (523C8).

3441

ἀριθμός τε καὶ τὸ ἕν (D7). I take the hendiadys to mean “the counting of units,” a more sophisticated characterization of ἀριθμητική than an arithmetician would give and also akin to the way he first characterized it (τὸ ἕν τε καὶ τὰ δύο καὶ τὰ τρία διαγιγνώσκειν, 522C5-6).

3442

οὐ συννοῶ (D8): With his νοῦς-word Glaucon is looking in the right place, at least, for the answer! Moreover with συν- he evinces his awareness that what is needed is to bring ideas together.

3443

ἀλλὰ ἐκ τῶν προειρημένων … ἀναλογίζου (D9): ἀλλά is not impatient but insists on the order of the dialectic: “The answer is there for you in what we have already said.” The arithmetical metaphor (ἀναλογίζου) is not accidental: we are thinking by doing arithmetic.

3444

ἱκανῶς (D10) echoes 523B1.

3445

ἀναγκάζοιτο (E4), another exigency the soul faces. The necessity is not logical but empirical, as at 510B5 and 511A4.

3446

ἀνερωτᾶν (E6) of confrontation, as at 454C1 (cf. n.2453).

3447

Reading αὐτό (525A4) with F and Iamblichus (and Stallb., Ast, Burnet, Shorey, Chambry), rather than τὸ αὐτό with AD (and Schmelzer, Adam, J.-C., Slings).

3448

ὡς ἕν τε ὁρῶμεν καὶ ὡς ἄπειρα τὸ πλῆθος (A4-5): Hitherto it had been the duality of the perceptual testimony that was stressed, two opposite attributes that because opposite were felt by the soul to be contradictory and therefore caused it to worry. Glaucon now makes the further empirical point that the testimony of vision is indefinite in general, an observation that will help Socrates make his next point.

3449

σύμπας ἀριθμός (A6): The definiteness common to all numbers as such, as being this or that amount, will always run afoul of the indefinite plurality (ἄπειρα τὸ πλῆθος, A4-5) testified to by sight and the senses.

3450

ὑπερφυῶς (B2): What drives Glaucon to agree that this is exceedingly true is exactly the increment of clarity the conversation has now achieved, for him, in contrast with the abstruseness with which it began.

3451

λογιστικῷ γενέσθαι (B6), playing on the etymon of λογισμός as he will with that of ἀστρονομικός (530A3ff), in order to stress that the technical sense itself patently relies on a deeper reality than the specialist acknowledges. The purpose of this treatment of special sciences is not to purify them but to reach to the pure rationality that is beyond them (cf. n.3443), upon which the sciences themselves in fact rely (cf. καίτοι νοητῶν ὄντων μετὰ ἀρχῆς, 511D2). Socrates is interested in creating a logical philosopher not improving the philosophicality of arithmeticians.

3452

τῶν μεγίστων μεθέξειν (B12-C1) refers strictly to their temporary service (520C1-2).

3453

ἐπὶ λογιστικὴν ἰέναι (C1): ἰέναι ἐπί was the expression used above for pursuing office (521A1, 521B4-5).

3454

ἀνθάπτεσθαι (C1): The prefix turns the usual term ἅπτεσθαι into the opposite of ἰδιωτικῶς (sc. ἅπτεσθαι).

3455

The description (C2-5) of the philosophical use of arithmetic is far more lavish than that of the military use, as it began to be above (B3-6).

3456

κάλλιστα (C7): Glaucon feels the edification of Socrates's remarks.

3457

With σφόδρα (D5) Socrates acknowledges the trouble Glaucon had had grasping his point. “Drama precedes dogma,” in the Dialogues, and here it does so, explicitly. The instantiation of a topic as something arising in the actual give-and-take of viable dialogue provides the surest ground or basis for moving on to treating it per se. In the treatises of Aristotle the topic is blandly hypothesized (ὡς παντὶ φανερόν: cf. 510D1), and dialogical legitimacy is reduced to a shadow of its former self in a manufactured review of predecessors’ opinions. At least the review tends to come first (though sometimes it corroborates findings in the aftermath of their presentation: Phys.A.8; EE H.5; EN A.8-9 [1098B9-1099B8]).

3458

Reading αὖ (D9), Burnet's emendation (δύο AD : punctis notatum A2 : om. F).

3459

τῷ λόγῳ (E1): The purely logical argument is that it is patently ridiculous to argue that the one is many; and if one follows up with some kind of breaking up of the one (by a conceptual κερματίζειν [E2] of the same ilk as the acts of molding and drawing [511E2] or “squaring, stretching, and applying” [527A8-9], which are nothing but efflatus vocis [φθεγγόμενοι, 527A9]), even then the result can be explained away as constituting a plurality of units (A: “Your 'one' has become fifteen parts!” —B: “No, fifteen that are one”). Similarly Socrates is puzzled in the Phaedo how one can become two by opposite processes, splitting up and combining together (97A7-B1).

3460

ὦ θαυμάσιοι (526A1): The epithet, as often, describes the speaker’s attitude about the argument (cf. n.550 and J.-C. ad 527B). It is the usual epithet in conversation with an imaginary interlocutor (cf.366D7, 420D1) since perforce the interest is in the content rather than who is asking or being asked.

3461

ποίων (A2). For lively ποῖος cf. 396C4 and n. The challenge formulated in the ensuing question presumes that if each number is a unit it has the quantitative value one, so that all numbers are equal, while it should have been the very essence of individual numbers to be unequal. The challenge is at best an ignoratio elenchi and can be answered by abstruse language as well as by mental experiments (for a full treatment cf. H.Cherniss, Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy 1 [Baltimore, 1944] App.6: in short, the essence of the numbers is just their location in the series) but Glaucon’s answer is categorical instead.

3462

περὶ τῶν τούτων λέγουσιν ὧν διανοηθῆναι μόνον ἐγχωρεῖ (A6-7): With a single stroke Glaucon, virtually quoting Socrates (cf. ἃ οὐκ ἂν ἄλλως ἴδοι τις ἢ τῇ διανοίᾳ, 511A1), sweeps aside the essentially physical idea that a number is an aggregate of units. The very notion of an aggregate requires spatiality and embodiment, which are wholly foreign to number and only begs the question, anyway, since the aggregated units imagined as constituting a given number cannot even constitute an aggregate unless the number in question is already available as the measure of their count (cf.Phlb.56E2-3, εἰ μὴ μονάδα … θήσει). The nature of numbers, what they are in themselves, is just their position in the counting series and their unity consists in the simplicity of this fact. The point is stunningly abstract (whence σφόδρα, 525D5 and 526B4) and constitutes the first great hurdle by which not only the guardians’ minds but Glaucon’s, as well as the reader’s, are forced or led to experience the movement upward which is the theme of the passage.

3463

φαίνεται (B1) dialectical (as at 525B1 in the same connection).

3464

καὶ μὲν δὴ σφόδρα γε (B4), referring back to 525D5.

3465

He says λογιστικοί (B5) but it also would serve his purpose for us to use the term “mathematician” since this sentence embodies the reason why the study of number ended up being named by the genus, μαθήματα.

3466

μανθάνοντι καὶ μελετῶντι (C1-2) repeating the thought of παιδευθῶσιν καὶ γυμνάσωνται (B7).

3467

This “numbering” of the studies (ἕν, δεύτερον: C8) is not otiose. By alluding to arithmetic suggests how the determination of the curriculum itself embodies the thinking the curriculum is meant to stimulate.

3468

τὸ ἐχόμενον τούτου (C9). ἔχεσθαι has a broad range of meaning from mere spatial adjacency (389E7, Symp.217D6) to the closest and purest logical entailment (Rep.511B8), and everything in between (Q. τί τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο; - A. τί ἄλλο ἢ τὸ ἑξῆς; [484B2-3]). Cf. n.2792. It does have a special sense in the ordering of prerequisites in a curriculum, as we learn from Lach.182BC (ἑξῆς, B6 and n.b. καθηγήσαιτο, C4). But even there the mere claim of consecutiveness is not an argument. Likewise here, Glaucon suggests geometry is what Socrates has in mind (ἢ γεωμετρίαν … λέγεις) without giving a reason and ἐχόμενον designates only a presumptive order (whereas Adam’s recondite argument ad loc., which only reads back what happens later, is an obscurum per obscurius that would have been lost on the interlocutors). That both interlocutors have this subject in mind suggests that there does exist a standard curriculum somehow, which at least resembles the curriculum we have come to call the quadrivium (logistic, geometry, astronomy, harmonics). This quaternion does occur at Tht.145C7-D2 (though in the order GAHL) and at Prot.318E2-3 (LAGH—called there τέχναι and criticized for being such), where Protagoras gives us to believe Hippias specializes in teaching them (E3-4: cf. H.Maj.285B8-D3, H.Min.366C5-8A7). Cf. also Leg.817E6ff (LGA, after music has been treated) and Leg.747A2-5.

3469

Glaucon’s μέν solitarium (D1) shows a little hesitation or uncertainty.

3470

ὅσα δὴ ἄλλα σχηματίζουσι (D3-4): The criterion of the list is expressed by the verb σχηματίζουσι, which makes the argument for the relevance of geometry with its σχήματα. The terms χωρίων and ἐκτάσεις refer to geometry with a slighter strain of language.

3471

αὐταῖς (D4) stresses the practical application of the schematics. For αὐτός added to one item in a list cf. n.3953 ad 556C11.

3472

ἀλλ’ οὖν δή (D7): With dismissive ἀλλ’ οὖν “reinforced” with δή (Denniston, 445) Socrates criticizes Glaucon’s answer as missing the main issue, including even a glance back to arithmetic (γεωμετρίας τε καὶ λογισμῶν μόριον). Next time (527D5-6) he will admonish Glaucon, in an indirect way, for relying on this easy path of answering instead of trying to articulate the ἑλκτικόν.

3473

τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέαν (E1): Again the formal expression (cf. 517B8, 508E2-3, 505A2).

3474

μεταστρέφεσθαι (E3) is middle, the idea being repeated from 525C5, where the ῥᾳστώνη μεταστροφῆς is the soul’s own facility at refocussing its attention. With ῥᾳστώνη there, compare ῥᾷον here (E1).

3475

εὐδαιμονέστατον (E3): The extra enthusiasm is striking (as is καλλιπόλει infra, 527C2) and not hard to understand after the mention of The Good. The philosopher already thought himself to be in the Isles of the Blessed (519C5-6), and recognized the happiness of escaping the Cave (εὐδαιμονίσειεν, 518B1); but in the context of ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα the sense we are to grasp is that this entity and our awareness of it, is what gives all else its worth and gives us our knowledge of its worth, which knowledge, in terms of life, is happiness.

3476

εἰ μὲν οὐσίαν ἀναγκάζει, προσήκει ... (E6-7): With this the “epistemological” value of the study is made both a necessary and a sufficient reason for including it, so that its military application (originally merely illustrative) can be demoted to a πάρεργον (527C3, infra).

3477

γελοίως τε καὶ ἀναγκαίως (527A6). Socrates can now characterize and criticize the mentality of the specialist as an amusing self-contradiction, a mentality he had first described with unmitigated abstraction at 510B4-6, then clarified with the example of the geometers at 510C1-511A1, and then restated abstractly at 511A3-8, with Glaucon’s restatement following at 511C6-D2. It is the repeated use of ἀναγκάζεσθαι in these passages that ἀναγκαίως is here meant to echo (cf. 510B5, 511A4, 511C7). For τε καί used in striking juxtaposition of apparent self-contradictories cf. Leg.732C4 and 881A5, and Euthyphr.6A5, where Euthyphro fails to feel the paradox. For γελοίως used of the self-contradictory, cf.430E11, 505B11; Phdrs.229E5; Parm.128D1-2 (γελοῖα … καὶ ἐναντία αὑτῷ); Prot.340E1-2, 355A6, D1; Tht.154B6-7 (θαυμαστά τε καὶ γελοῖα εὐχερῶς πως ἀναγκαζόμεθα λέγειν), 205B11.

3478

φθεγγόμενοι / γνώσεως ἕνεκα (A9-B1). The point here being made about their behavior from the subjective side, was already made from the objective side at 510B4 and 510D5-511A1. The reader might stop a moment and ask how willing he would be, or has ever been, to stop relying on the terminology and conventions of his special competence in order to pursue truth—to give up the conversation those terms enable or have enabled him to have with fellow professionals and the immunity they give or have given him from criticism by persons coming from other fields or, most importantly, from strangers that come from no field in particular.

3479

διομολογητέον (B3): The prefix introduces the need to work one's way through the steps leading to agreement: cf. 507D7 and n. ad loc.

3480

τοῦ ἀεὶ ὄντος γνώσεως (B5): Adam’s insistence (ad loc. and passim), relying on Aristotle, that according to Aristotle the mathematical objects are for Plato eternal and invariant “but not Ideas,” does not divert Socrates and Glaucon from their present argument.

3481

εὐομολόγητον (B7), an hapax if the text is sound (sic FD et in marg. scr. A : εὐ διομολογητέον A : εὐδιομολόγητον Schneider). Glaucon fashions an enthusiastic response to Socrates’s emphatic διομολογητέον (B3), and adds to his enthusiasm with “assentient” γάρ.

3482

ὦ γενναῖε (B9), expressing his pleasure at Glaucon’s enthusiastic εὐομολόγητον.

3483

ἅ (B10): an adverbial accusative of respect. The ancipital things are exactly the sensory objects that might be left behind by noetic questions they cannot answer, as opposed to being kept in hand by a divided mentality and attention he called διάνοια in Book Six -- the objects, that is, that were there spoken of as belonging to both worlds, creating likenesses in the visible world and themselves likenesses of the intelligible: αὐτὰ μὲν ταῦτα ἃ πλάττουσιν, ὧν καὶ σκίαι ἐν ὕδασιν εἰκόνες εἰσίν, τούτοις μὲν ὡς εἰκόσιν αὖ χρώμενοι ζητοῦντες αὐτὰ ἐκεῖνα ἰδεῖν ... (510E1-511A1).

3484

καλλίπολις (C2), another hapax, used here and never again. It is like a nickname that you give to a pal to make a point; and what incites naming here is the vision of ourselves as the rulers, preoccupied with the noetic exercise of geometry malgré τὰ πολιτικά (compare the meaning of κάλλιστα at 525C7 and n.3456). The vision is a passing fancy and the nickname is not repeated, except by commentators.

3485

ἅ τε δὴ σὺ εἶπες … καὶ δὴ καί ... (C5-6) With proleptic τε Socrates nods in passing to Glaucon's military application, but then answers it, and virtually cancels it, with καὶ δὴ καί which marks a category shift (not just a move from example to generalization as Denniston says [256]). Compare his trumping of Glaucon’s μέν (526D1) with ἀλλ’ οὖν δή (D7). Socrates again suggests, indirectly, that the military application has been superseded by what it helped to introduce.

3486

τῷ ὅλῳ καὶ παντὶ διοίσει (C7): The statement asserts of geometry what had been asserted of mathematics at 526B5-9, in phrasing borrowed from Glaucon’s opening praise of geometry (n.b., διαφέροι, 526D5-6), with the minor difference that there the geometer does better than his ungeometrized self, whereas here he does better than the non-geometer in general.

3487

ἐμοὶ γοῦν (D2): Glaucon accepts it as third not because it is third but because it is acceptable. Again, the presumed acceptability relies on a conventional list of subjects in the background, which, we now begin to see, is providing foil for Socrates’s presentation of a radical and new vision of single purpose for the special studies that is beyond them all. A background list can either reveal the order upon which a given list relies (as the tripartite list goods underlies the lists at 361B4-5, 366D2 432A4-6, 443E3-4; and Lach.195E10-6A1; Leg.696B2-4, 744B7-C2; Lys.15D4-7; Phlb.48E1-9A2; Symp.205D4-5; or the list Sparta/Athens/Persia underlies the list Lycurgus/Solon/Darius at Phdrs.258C1; or the list of a perceptual object’s attributes derives from the list of senses that perceive them at Phdrs.247C6-7); or it may as here have the reverse function of creating a structure of anticipation the author will exploit as foil for a new purpose. Compare the role of the list of the virtues and the list god/hero/man in ordering the treatment of subject-matter of stories in Books Two and Three (cf. nn.1324, 1327, 1328).

3488

περὶ ὥρας … καὶ μηνῶν καὶ ἐνιαυτῶν (D2-3). For the collocation of the three terms cf. Leg. 886A2-4, 899B3-4; Phlb.30C6, and for the dependent genitive cf. Symp.188B5-6 (μήν is omitted in Crat.408E1 and Rep.488D5-7, where, incidentally, the connection with sailing was already noted).

3489

ἡδὺς εἶ (D5). Thrasymachus called Socrates ἥδιστε for thinking he could attribute to him the ἔνδοξον that justice is a virtue and injustice a vice. After all, as Thrasymachus reminds him, he had just argued that injustice profits but justice doesn’t (348C5-10). He thus gives Socrates the warrant to infer his position is the opposite, that justice is a vice—which he then needs to wiggle out of (C11-D2). The playful slur is likewise used against Socrates by Callicles (ὡς ἡδὺς εἶ, Gorg.491E2) when logic and common usage go against his scandalous thesis that a man’s virtue will enable him to dispense with ruling himself, an overstatement that he likewise will regret (Notably, in all three passages a reference to real fools is nearby: εὐήθειαν, Rep.348C12; ἠλιθίους, Gorg.491E2; and εὐηθικῶς here, at 529B3). Finally, it is used by Ctesippus against Euthydemus when the youth evades the sophist’s trap and turns the tables on him (οὕτως ἡδὺς εἶ, 300A6). The sense that fits all the passages is that it criticizes the interlocutor for lacking the cleverness that is requisite for getting along in the world of cynical “grownups.” Glaucon shows a lack of cleverness in worrying about the opinion of hoi polloi. This is a different thing from Socrates’s dumbness at 529B, which consists of the way he appears to the many for insisting on a principle they do not understand or agree with, which he is about to present to Glaucon (527D6-528A3). Likewise, Thrasymachus, right after calling Socrates ἥδιστε, compliments the weak for being fools (εὐήθειαν, 348C12).

3490

ἄχρηστα μαθήματα (D6). This ignorant complaint of the majority was already represented by Adeimantus in his objection at 487BC. The prima facie utility of the studies for the guardian, which had been a springboard for choosing logistic and geometry (but cf.526D7-8 and n.3472), can now be cashiered. It is an instance of stripping away (ἀναιρεῖν, 533C8; cf. 511B4-6 and 510B7-8) an hypothesis to make the very important point that the philosopher must not be deterred by public opinion from pursuing his special cognitive drives. He must realize the public will never understand, and make his choice accordingly. This criterion will eliminate many researchers, including those who would prefer to argue with each other about this very point (ἢ οὐδὲ πρὸς ἑτέρους, A1). Shorey (ad loc.) characteristically converts a remark Socrates makes to Glaucon into an indirect communication from Plato to his reader. Though the reader may do well to be admonished by the remark, its meaning and relevance and motivation is entirely integral to the drama and the decision Socrates will ask Glaucon to make, just below (527E6-528A3).

3491

ἀπολλυμένων καὶ τυφλούμενον (E1): The present participles as well as τῶν ἄλλων ἐπιτηδευμάτων refer to and depict normal daily life.

3492

μυρίων (E2): The “number” is repeated from 520C3.

3493

οἷς μὲν ταῦτα συνδοκεῖ (E3): When there is no room for compromise between the answers the question becomes primary, as at Crito 49D2-5, of which this passage is reminiscent (note ἀρχώμεθα ἐντεῦθεν there [D6] and compare here Socrates’s abrupt αὐτόθεν here [A1], for which cf. Lach.183C3). He has reached another turning point with Glaucon (cf. 473A1-4), and we have reached another stage in the upward path ourselves. In the Crito Crito’s own inability to grasp and accept what Socrates is saying a moment later (οὐκ ἔχω … ἀποκρίνεσθαι, 50A4) requires Socrates by this very principle to complete the conversation with the undialectical but conventionally salutary prosopopoeia of the Laws (50A6ff).

3494

Reading ἢ οὐδὲ πρὸς οὐδετέρους (528A1) with the majority (mss.AD); πρὸς οὐδετέρους (F) is also possible; Cobet’s conjecture (οὐδὲ πρὸς ἑτέρους), accepted by Burnet, is unnecessary; S.R.Slings’s argument that ἢ οὐ never receives a second negative in Plato is circular, and his suggestion to introduce a very different expression on the grounds that it accounts for the discrepancy between the two historical witnesses to the text (Critical Notes on Plato's Politeia [Leiden 2005] ad loc., 128) confuses variants with approximations.

3495

ἐμαυτοῦ ἕνεκα (A4): Glaucon remembers the choice Socrates required him to make at 472B3-473B1 (n.b., καὶ περὶ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν, C9; σὴν χάριν, E7). The power of dialogue or dialectic will not be actualized unless the partners are each sincere: 337C3-6, 346A; and Alc.I 110A; Apol.33A; Charm. 166C7-D6, 173A3-5; Gorg.453C2-3 (and Dodds ad loc.), 495A (cf.500B7); Meno 83D (and Thompson ad loc.); Phdo.64C; Prot.346C6; Soph.246D (and Campbell ad loc.), 265A; Tht.154DE. The audience (and one’s standing in their eyes) must be ignored—a rule here stated in the converse, that one not begrudge them whatever benefit they might get from eavesdropping: Leg.627CD; contrast the attitude of Gorgias at Gorg.457DE, 458BC, 473E-4A and Callicles 482E, 494D; and contrast the role of Critias at Charm.162C and 169CD.

3496

λέγειν τε καὶ ἐρωτᾶν καὶ ἀποκρίνεσθαι (A4-5), a triad in which the first term is specified by an ensuing pair (A/a1/a2: a structure more specific than A/B1/B2, n.2544). Note that in such a triad τε may be placed early and perform the purely formal function of indicating proleptically that a list will ensue (i.e., A τε καὶ B1 καὶ B2, as here and at 411D3-4, 476B4-5, 588A9-10; also Gorg.457D6, 483B6-8; H.Maj.304B2-3; Leg.744B6; Soph.260C8-9; Symp.219D4-5), rather than being placed between the second and third items, in its familiar role indicating that in content they form a doublet (i.e., A καὶ B1 τε καὶ B2: cf. 412B3-4, 431B9-C1; and Leg.950E5-6; Meno 75C8-9; Phdo.85E3-4; Prot.325E1; Symp.213D3-4).

3497

ἄναγε τοίνυν (A6): This time Socrates requires and then gives an explicit argument for the sequence of the studies (contrast 526C8-11 and n.3468). Stereometry comes after Geometry as 3 comes after 2.

3498

οὔπω ηὑρῆσθαι (B4-5). “Reality” has not caught up with the logical sequence Socrates envisions. Just as his use of the background list of studies is purely speculative (cf. n.3487) so also is his criticism of their (unexplained) arrangement. Socrates (and Plato) have no interest in inventing such a field (as Adam agrees [ad 528Eff], after and before criticizing and praising how Socrates’s arguments would harm and help the organized sciences). Instead, the absence of the study provides Socrates an occasion to describe the social circumstances that are prerequisite to a given subject matter being acknowledged, supported and studied. His purpose is not to improve the various studies he passes through but to use them as foil for articulating, in theory and in fact, the dialogical method and its special purpose. Once done with this he will move on to astronomy ὡς ὑπαρχούσης τῆς νῦν παραλειπομένης (E4), i.e., disregarding thereby his own methodological qualm.

3499

οὐκ ἂν πείθοιντο (C1): Turf wars within the modern academy, and even the figure of the Dean, are here anticipated. I am unable to infer that Plato speaks from rueful experience as head of a school of his own. The relentless sublation or ἀναίρεσις of “departments of learning” performed by his hero through these pages speaks against himself settling down into the management of a curriculum unless it were taught as a prelude to the theory of ideas, but the evidence indicates that those who would have been his students there and even his successors (Speusippus, Xenocrates, Aristotle) not only do not ascribe to the theory but reveal no knowledge of it beyond what can be learned from the written works (cf. H.Cherniss, Riddle of the Early Academy [New York 1962], ch.3).

3500

οὐκ ἐχόντων καθ’ ὅτι χρήσιμα (C6): The moral drawn from the non-existence of the field is that the philosopher disregards social recognition and the practical application of his work, an attitude that leaves another division of intellectuals behind. Learned guesswork on Plato’s personal attitudes about solid geometry and geometers (e.g. Adam 2.120-124, passim) require us to ignore the dramatic context and only lose ourselves in irrelevancy. It is Socrates and Glaucon who are conversing, and the critique they are conducting together is tremendously important. Only a professional scholar with the poorest literary sense could imagine Plato sacrificing the verisimilitude of the dialogue for the mere purpose of carrying on a polemic. Plato’s profession was different.

3501

φανῆναι (C8) repeats the metaphor of ἐκφανῆ (C4) with characteristic omission of prefix.

3502

πραγματείαν (D3): cf. 510C3 and n.3259.

3503

ἀνεχώρησας (D6): Glaucon echoes Socrates’s ἄναγε at A6.

3504

σπεύδων … μᾶλλον βραδύνω (D7-8), vel sim. sounds proverbial, like “Haste makes waste.” Shorey compares Polit.277AB, 264B; S.Ant.231; Theognis 335, 401, etc. Compare the immoderate eagerness to skip over moderation and move directly from the second to the fourth virtue, justice, at 430C8-F1.

3505

μέθοδον (D8). Like πραγματεία above, the term derives from the actual pursuit and desire for knowledge (e.g. Tht.187E, Polit.263B) and comes to denote a treatise or a settled field of inquiry with its own set hypotheses (cf. Ar.EN 1.7: μετιέναι δὲ πειρατέον ἑκάστας (sc. τὰς ἀρχὰς) ᾗ πεφύκασιν, 1098B4-5; cf. de An.1.1, 402A11-21, Meteor.338A25).

3506

γελοίως ἔχει (D9): What is laughable is explained at 528AD. It is not the sorry condition of the study (something to regret but not ridicule), but the behavior of which that condition is the result (cf. Shorey ad loc.).

3507

φορτικῶς (E7): more self-deprecating than accurate. Socrates had criticized him for stressing the military value of astronomy rather than the dialectical, saying that such behavior made him look like a person condescending to the tastes of οἱ πολλοί who find dialectics useless (ἔοικας, 527D5). As usual Socrates goes too far in order to make a point the interlocutor has not thought of (372E2-3A4; 420A2-7; 487D6-E5; and in the future, 592A7-B5). Characteristically contrite, docile, and one step behind Socrates, Glaucon accepts the criticism on its face and tries now to say something elevated instead (as his ἐπαινεῖν itself suggested he would), which is an “equal and opposite” error. The joke is, he introduces his sublime and recondite praise with παντὶ γὰρ δοκεῖ δῆλον (529A1).

3508

μετέρχῃ (E7) the verb underlying μέθοδος, here still alive, not yet merely procedural.

3509

αὕτη γε (529A1), with γε (causal or vi termini) alleging that the universal agreement is adequately implied by the nature of the study (αὕτη). The reason is indeed obvious (astronomy’s subject matter is “up”) but also wrong.

3510

παντὶ δῆλον πλὴν ἐμοί (A3): Socrates remembers Glaucon’s remark at 398C7-8 and gives it back to him. Besides drawing out the joke about the “vulgar sublimity” of what Glaucon alleges in praise of the study, Socrates’s response applies the rule of dialogue and dialectic that majority opinion and even unanimity have, as such, no standing at all (contrast political “discussion” as well as the use of “we” for unassailable assertions in standard science, as depicted at 510D1). Cf. Crito 47A2-C4.

3511

μεταχειρίζονται (A6) a term that already means what terms like μετιέναι and πραγματεύεσθαι will come to mean. Cf. its use at 497D8, where it has to cover both parts of the comparison at 497E9-498C4; and at 410B8 where it criticizes sophistication of technique (cf. n.1789).

3512

οἱ εἰς φιλοσοφίαν ἀνάγοντες (A6-7). It is important to remember that no Greek outside this dialogue thinks “philosophy” is a pursuit of the Platonic Ideas culminating in a vision of the Good. The term is therefore a suspicious misnomer here, referring to the sort of people that find astronomy edifying (and elevate it: αὐτὴν goes with ἀνάγοντες, too) because of the remote permanence of the stars, an error no less elementary than Glaucon’s error that the senses are poor witnesses because the object is far away (523B5-6).

3513

οὐκ ἀγεννῶς (A9). Socrates uses the litotes of Callicles’s παρρησία, at Gorg.492D1. Cf. also γενναῖον, 414B9. With παρὰ σαυτῷ (A10) he is referring back to σεαυτοῦ ἕνεκα at 528A2, acknowledging Glaucon’s sincerity, though he happens to disagree. Making room for “honest disagreement” is another feature of the dialectical method of joint search.

3514

ἀνακύπτων (B1) The reference to posture stresses that it is the somatic eyes that are doing the looking. The sequence of postures smacks of comedy and may (with Adam) refer to the depiction of Socrates philosophizing in Aristophanes’s Clouds (e.g., 171-4, 218-26), a description of which Socrates knew his accusers and the general Athenian public to be aware (Ap.19C).

3515

εὐηθικῶς (B3): Socrates-watchers always take care when he apologizes for his simplicity, as for instance at Phdo.100Cff, where the tone is very similar. It is because he is ignorant of the most important things that Socrates’s ignorance is so important (cf. n.3165, supra). How many men, for how long, could so easily dismiss the heavenly bodies’ stately claim to permanence? Even the study of Greek can play the idol for an imperfect love of truth, by virtue of its temporal remoteness and exemption from the flux of fashion (the converse passion is exhibited at Parm.130C5-D5). Socrates’s unhesitating clarity on the issue draws us back into the dispositional tension between the lover of spectacles and the lover of the “spectacle of truth” (475E4). The sentimental confusion of heaven with upward climes returns at Tim.91D where Timaeus imagines that lovers of such heavenly things come back in the next life as birds!

3516

Note τε … καί (B5): To unite the true with the invisible is not a dogma with which Socrates tries to refute Glaucon’s visible astronomy, but rather something in his simplicity he is unable to disbelieve, which he then corroborates anew by revealing that spatial elevation is relative, not absolute.

3517

ἀλλὰ κάτω αὐτοῦ βλέπειν τὴν ψυχήν (C1-2). The long-serviceable metaphor of a path upward as toward the sun, must now be cashiered. From the heights it has taken us to we have learned that space is merely relative. Lying supine and looking forward, one is looking upward at highest members of the inferior visible world.

3518

ποικίλματα (C7) concedes the visible beauty of the night sky but then πεποίκιλται (C8) insists it is only visible beauty. We verge back toward the distinction between the φιλοθεάμων and the φιλόσοφος (475Dff).

3519

κάλλιστα μέν … τῶν δὲ ἀληθινῶν πολὺ ἐνδεῖν (C8-D2). With this distinction between beauty and truth he leaves behind another great band of the souls that had still remained. To fuse beauty and truth (reality) is one of the first and most powerful enthusiasms. Of course it is not a question whether truth, the subject matter of philosophy, is beautiful. It will be beautiful if it is good for it to be beautiful, as it most likely is; but the good—the reason things are as they are (509B7-10)—is the ultimate subject matter Socrates has in mind throughout. His dialogue with Glaucon is running the gauntlet of the perennial distractions from true mental work.

3520

ἅς (D2). The mss. are unanimous throughout this difficult passage (D2-4). The gender of the relative alone requires us to supply φοραί, the anticipated subject matter of astronomy (indeed the reason it had to be postponed after stereometry), which then appears in the accusative into which it has attracted the relative, perhaps from the dative, by a kind of incorporation.

3521

φοράς (D3), here an internal accusative that gives place to the expressions πρὸς ἄλληλα φέρεται καὶ τὰ ἐνόντα φέρει, the typical language for describing the subject matter of astronomy (περὶ τὴν τῶν ἄστρων φορὰν καὶ ἡλίου καὶ σελήνης πῶς πρὸς ἄλληλα τάχους ἔχει, Gorg.451C8-9; περὶ ἡλίου … καὶ σελήνης καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἄστρων τάχους τε πέρι πρὸς ἄλληλα καὶ τρόπων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων παθημάτων, Phdo.98A2-3). For φέρειν active and passive cf. Polit.270B7-8: τὸ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς φορὰν τότε μὲν ἐφ’ ἃ νῦν κυκλεῖται φέρεσθαι, τότε δ᾿ ἐπὶ τἀναντία. The meaning is simply that the purely mathematical truth underlying the bodies’ actual motions (such as we always see them presented in the astronomer’s simplified, I.e., idealized, drawings) is the truth our guardians are interested in replacing their phenomenal experience with. The point is (a) put with almost indecipherable abstruseness (here), and then (b) explained with a palpable example (529D8-530A1), and then (c) restated on its own ground (530A3-B4). The same three-step method was used to elucidate the penultimate cut of the Line (510B4-9 = 1; 510C1-511A1 = 2; 511A3-8 = 3).

3522

ἐκεῖνα (D8), the true versions are ἐκεῖ with respect to space and time. Getting “beyond” the heavens has special conceptual difficulties. Besides the heavens’ upwardness and apparent permanence, it is hard to imagine a “beyond” of them, and also there is only one “heavens.” Many of the categorical attributes we had reserved for the forms apply also to the heavens—because the terms are ambiguous. All that matters is that the distinctions are real, and that we recognize them.

3523

ὑπὸ Δαιδάλου ἤ τινος ἄλλου δημιουργοῦ ἢ γραφέως διαφερόντως γεγραμμένοις καὶ ἐκπεπονημένοις διαγράμμασιν (E1-2): The list goes from the proper name of a person famous for lifelike rendering (Daedalus's métier happens to be sculpture) up to the arts in general (δημιουργοῦ), and then back down to drawing (γραφέως), the most pertinent specific category of art since the application of the metaphor is to σχήματα and number.

3524

μέν (E4) is not just answered but trumped by μήν (which has ousted δέ).

3525

ἐπισκοπεῖν αὐτά (E1): ἐπί is an index of the seriousness and αὐτά an index of their primary importance, used exactly as it was during the first attempt to articulate this problem (510E1).

3526

ληψόμενον (E5) accusative, preferring the less personal construction with the dependent infinitive.

3527

νομιεῖν (530A4), varying ἡγεῖσθαι (529C8) here in order to etymologize ἀστρονομικόν (as τῷ ὄντι warns us). Socrates is not interested in dictating how “true” astronomers would do astronomy (neither is Plato) but how astronomy can be used as a propaedeutic for the guards (as well as how he can use it as foil for the method and operation of dialectic in the present conversation with Glaucon). The man of dialectical bent will accept the normal conventional symbolism of the stars as “heavenly bodies” but will find strange a fundamentalistic belief (νομίζοντα, B2) in their ability to embody a truth beyond body and change.

3528

αὐτόν τε καὶ τὰ ἐν αὐτῷ (A6-7): cf. πρός τε ταῦτα καὶ πρὸς ἄλληλα (B1) and πρὸς ἄλληλα φέρεται καὶ τὰ ἐνόντα φέρει (529D3-4). The order reaches every part but also orders the whole. What is here by conventional language called the demiurge is just the Idea of the Good; and the suggestion is not only that each thing is, and is as it is, because it is good for it to be and for it to be that way (509B6-10); but also that the same principle orders the entire field of being or reality, so that reality is a cosmos. It is understanding this second aspect of the truth about the good that ultimately will be designated as synoptic understanding (537C7). The idea had been adumbrated early with the term συλλογίζεσθαι (517C1) and will be more fully articulated when we reach dialectic itself on the next page (τὴν ἀλλήλων κοινωνίαν ἀφίκηται καὶ συγγένειαν, καὶ συλλογισθῇ ταῦτα ᾗ ἐστὶν ἀλλήλοις οἰκεῖα, 531D1-3).

3529

With γοῦν (B5) Glaucon acknowledges he and Socrates are exploring new territory. To worry with Adam about the beliefs of the old men in the Laws (821Bff) again forgets who is talking and why.

3530

προβλήμασιν χρώμενοι (B6) immediately echoes παραδείγμασι χρηστέον (529D7-8), though the term πρόβλημα (again below, 531C2) is new to the argument. Geometry, mentioned in exegesis, was the prime example of a study that deals with perceived objects in pursuit of a truth that is “beyond” them (more exactly, a truth they are unable to embody: cf. 510C3-D3 and D5-511A1). The language of “use” was used there also (χρώμενοι, B6: cf. 510B4, D5, and 511A4). Plato elsewhere uses πρόβλημα without apology for a suggestive beginning point (Charm.162B5, H.Maj.293D2, Leg.820C6, Phlb.65D7, Tht.180C5; cf. also Leg.755C-6A where It means “nominate” and Rep.536D7 where the verb merely means to expose someone to something). A search for guidance from outside the text for a more specialized meaning of the term is ill-advised, while to translate it “problems” is unmeaning. It means what had been expressed before with ἐπιβάσεις τε καὶ ὁρμάς (511B6). Socrates suggests the guards use the objects visible in the heavens as vehicles for a study that he still calls “astronomy” although the purpose, content, and goal are no longer astronomical. It is again unlikely that anybody outside the text would argue this way about either astronomy or geometry (let alone the idiosyncratic description of number that elicited the reaction, ὦ θαυμάσιοι, περὶ ποίων ἀριθμῶν διαλέγεσθε; [526A1-2], a description that Aristotle never understood [cf. Cherniss ACPA 1 App.6]).

3531

τὰ δ ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ ἐάσομεν (B7): The commentators who express worry about Plato’s piety or extremism at this point, reveal just how closely they have been listening to and how well understanding and how seriously taking, the dialogue. Socrates prepared us with the admonition that a basic decision underlies the quest for reality (527D7-E6). Presently he merely keeps to the decision.

3532

χρήσιμον τὸ φύσει φρόνιμον (B8-C1): The old saw that philosophy is of no practical use, is now trumped. A mind that obdurately stays within the coordinates of the perceptual world, to the extent that it is still a mind, is a useless mind; only by reaching beyond, to a knowledge of the Idea of the Good, can any knowing faculty become useful (505A6-B3).

3533

πολλαπλάσιον … τὸ ἔργον (C2): cf. συχνὸν ἔργον (511C3-4), δαιμόνιον … πρᾶγμα (531C5), and πάμπολυ ἔργον (531D5) in response to this same methodological suggestion.

3534

ἀλλὰ γάρ (C5-6), returning after digression (Denniston, 103).

3535

οὐκ ἔχω … νῦν γε οὑτωσί (C7). It is possible that they had been relying on a conventional triad of studies and there is no fourth for him to mention (so Shorey ad 526C citing Isoc.Bus.23[226]; cf. schol. ad 514A [246 Greene] and e.g., Euthyd.290C1, H.Min. 366C5-8A7), and that the addition of harmonics goes beyond it; or else that the radical analysis of conventional study has allowed Glaucon to forget harmony as a traditional fourth (for which cf. n.3948). In either event, the only reason Socrates introduces a fourth field is for further practice and corroboration, and he does so with what might as well be an absolutely novel analogy between visual and audible motion, which is designed to give Glaucon the clue he needs to draw a parallelism between vigilant watching of the astronomer and the vigilant listening of the acoustician. I believe with ἀλλὰ γάρ (C5-6) he is affording Glaucon an opportunity to apply this analogy before offering it himself. To see in the sequel Plato indulging his desire to advertise his views on acoustics, is again to ignore the dialectical movement and drama of the discussion and to play at guesswork and learned irrelevancies instead. It is exactly this kind of wheel-spinning that Socrates will presently enjoin us to be on guard against (E3 et seq.).

3536

Socrates’s οὐ μήν (C8) is strong and abrupt (cf. μήν at 529E4). The move from stereometry to astronomy came with the addition of motion. The next step might be to look for a study that takes that new item a step further.

3537

τούτῳ (D4), i.e., the φορὰ βάθους of astronomy (528E1, cf. ἐν περιφορᾷ … στερεόν, 528A9).

3538

πέπηγεν (D6): perhaps it has the metaphorical sense it has at 605A (the eyes are framed, so to speak, for a certain activity); but perhaps it denotes attention already and involuntarily fixed on and coalescing with the object (for this metaphor cf. συμπαγές, Tim.45C4). Mind must free itself from the eye’s involvement with and inadvertent reliance upon the physical world, and so also from the ear’s (contrast ὦτα τοῦ νοῦ προστησάμενοι [531B1]).

3539

ὡς οἵ τε Πυθαγόρειοί φασιν καὶ ἡμεῖς … συγχωροῦμεν (D8-9). The mild anacoluthon avoids wordiness and is virtually idiomatic (cf. 424C6, Prot.316A4-5, Symp.186E2-3).

3540

ἐκείνων (E1), refers to the body of experts alluded to at D1, not the Pythagoreans who were only brought in to corroborate the novel way that Socrates has paired astronomy with harmonics. πευσόμεθα (E1) already begins to dismiss their expertise as irrelevant, in this strictly dialogical context (cf. 328E2, 358D3, 476E5 and n.46). πολὺ τὸ ἔργον is ironic in the context of Glaucon’s continual protests that the dialectical approach takes the work far beyond the usual range of the specialists (πολλαπλάσιον … τὸ ἔργον, C2; οὔπω ηὑρῆσθαι, 528B4-5; συχνὸν ἔργον, 511C3-4; and cf. 531C5, δαιμόνιον πρᾶγμα, on the horizon). Adam’s long notes nevertheless persist (e.g., ad 531A1 and in vocem πυκνώματα, 531A4). The expertise is mere foil for τὸ ἡμέτερον.

3541

φυλάξομεν τὸ ἡμέτερον (E3). The expression is vague, and includes the job we are to pay attention to (as elsewhere: n.3376) while the wise men are teaching, and “our interest”—i.e., the young men whom we must at all times protect. The first meaning is picked up by the ethical dative ἡμῖν at E5 and the second by the change of subject there (ἐπιχειρῶσιν).

3542

οὐκ ἐξῆκον (E6) explains ἀτελές (E5) by restating it. A subject is ἀτελές if it fails to reach the final point, which as we have learned all serious study must reach in order to be useful, that is, the vision of the Good upon which the value of all else and of the knowledge of all else depends. Conversely a pursuit that fails to break out of its specialist orbit becomes ἀτελές (or ἀνήνυτον, 531A3, if we are to follow mss.AD over the ἀνόνητα of F [a reading that is given some credibility by 531D4]) in the other sense: endless because of its circularity (cf. τελευτῶσιν ὁμολογουμένως ἐπὶ τοῦτο οὗ ἂν ἐπὶ σκέψιν ὁρμήσωσι, 510D2-3). In the present cases (astronomy and harmonics), the endlessness consists of the essentially asymptotic fate of any attempt to find exact truth by comparing one sensible with another (visible or auditory): νοῦς supplies the criterion that measurement and remeasurement (ἀναμετρεῖν, 531A2) of material embodiments against each other (ἀλλήλοις) can only approach, although it governs the search all along.

3543

αὖ (531A2).

3544

πυκνώματ’ ἄττα ὀνομάζοντες καὶ παραβάλλοντες τὰ ὦτα (A4-5): Glaucon succeeds to provide specifics that exemplify Socrates’s general criticism (531A1-3), and then to isolate the basic error (ὦτα τοῦ νοῦ προστησάμενοι, B1), proving he has learned the lesson Socrates just taught him in the case of astronomy (529A9-C3) including his imitation Socrates’s depiction of comic postures (531A5-6). But Socrates is not talking about an instrumentalist:. he is talking about music theorists; and has a different point to make, logically closer to the case of the astronomers, so that Glaucon’s comments are strictly impertinent! Glaucon is again one step behind, and just keeping up; what keeps him on board is nothing but dialectic—i.e., the give and take of conversation. Socrates’s σὺ μέν (B2), like his οὐκ ἀγεννῶς (529A9) acknowledges Glaucon’s point rather than dismissing it, so as to engage in conversation where (again) there is room for different outlooks.

3545

ἔτι κατακούειν (A6). The phenomenon he describes is real, as people know who have tuned, or witnessed the tuning of, a stringed instrument that has twenty or thirty strings, like the classical Indian sarod. By the time the tuning is complete everybody is staring. So much attention and focus has been commanded by the tuning that one’s consciousness is “emptied.” The music starts, deliciously, from almost nothing, establishing first the notes of the scale and with them the gestures of the raga, with melody appearing much later. Viewed through the other end of the telescope the whole affair would seem massively stupid.

3546

ἀμφισβητοῦντες (A8): Glaucon hardly realizes how his choice of the term reveals that dialogue or investigative conversation has for these instrumentalists devolved into a he-said she-said about what the ears “said,” a point he nevertheless articulates explicitly (B1).

3547

χρηστούς (B2) ironic: cf. 479A1. Socrates’s subsequent elaboration in praeteritio (B2-6) satirizes them not for their physical postures (which evince their immersion in the sensory world, a critique Glaucon [with παραβάλλοντες, A5] had copied from Socrates’s criticism of the astronomers [529B1-C3]) but for their incompetence, as if they were masters who have fallen into argument with their slaves rather than employing them for their own higher purpose (so, the language of βασανίζοντας, and στρεβλοῦντας, and the use of force to get the answer they want [B2-6]).

3548

τε (B5) after πλήκτρῳ anticipates καί. When καί arrives it introduces a genitive rather than a dative. At first the genitive appears to be constructed with πέρι in anastrophe, but χορδῶν at the end reveals that the entire phrase was a parallelism of πληγῶν and χορδῶν governed by πέρι, in which the one genitive is modified with the instrumental dative (πλήκτρῳ) and the other with a series of objective genitives (κατηγορίας καὶ ἐξαρνήσεως καὶ ἀλαζονείας). The simile is about striking the strings and the strings’ responses. As I take it, the strings either agree with and correspond to the master’s anticipation (κατηγορία) or they disagree (ἐξάρνησις) or they embellish the tone the master expects (ἀλαζονεία).

3549

σύμφωνοι ἀριθμοί (C3) might be a Platonic term (so Adam ad loc., relying on Theon 72-5, though n.b. the term does not appear in Tim. nor elsewhere in the corpus), but in the context Socrates retains the musical metaphor only to press beyond it toward something inaudible (cf. the rhetoric of Phdrs.230A3-6, σκοπῶ οὐ ταῦτα ἀλλ’ ἐμαυτόν, εἴτε τι θήριον ὂν τυγχάνω, κτλ). The expression illustrates the ἀναίρεσις of the ὑποθέσεις, and embodies the ἄνοδος εἰς προβλήματα. Socrates’s argument (pace Shorey) does not presume there is a set of apriori harmonic relations separate from the audible harmony but only that empirical tones are empirically harmonious because the ratios of their frequencies (or wavelengths) are integral. It is the mathematical relation (recognized by mind) that accounts for the harmonic effect (recognized by the ears). A tone with half the wavelength as another will sound an octave above it regardless whether the first tone is a C, D, E, or F. One has to imagine the person who discovers, say with the aid of an oscilloscope, that this is true of the relation between middle C and the C above it, and then wants to see whether it is also true of D and A, or of F below and middle C, or of upper C and upper G. Socrates’s student will more likely ask what is the relation between middle C and the G below it, and thereby discover the ratio of the octave.

3550

δαιμόνιον γὰρ πρᾶγμα (C5). Again the traditional study is being transmogrified into something quite unknown (cf.530C2), moving Glaucon to use the term πρᾶγμα rather than μάθημα. He finds himself increasingly impressed by, but at the same time not quite equal to (530B5, 530C7, 531D5-6) Socrates’s remarks, culminating in his confession at 532D2-E3.

3551

τὴν τοῦ καλοῦ τε καὶ ἀγαθοῦ ζήτησιν (C6-7): The expression does not mean to suggest “the identity of the beautiful and the good” (J.-C. ad loc., 343)—such an interpretation commits the very sort of error this whole passage is trying to leave behind—but is a typically pleonastic expression for value (in particular, τὸ χρήσιμον). So also he says καλόν … καὶ ἀγαθόν (505B3) right at the moment he is insisting on the separateness of “good” from derivative values (505A3-B3, and 505D5-9, where n.b. καλά D5).

3552

μεταδιωκόμενον (C7) in place of ζητούμενον, suggests a wild goose chase, as παντὶ τρόπῳ did at 530B4.

3553

ἄχρηστον (C7): Again the question of usefulness is trumped by being reoriented to a higher sense (cf.530B8-C1).

3554

οἶμαι δέ γε (C9) as at 530C4.

3555

μέθοδος (D1): A path that leaves the special subject matters behind by discovering their grounds and the originals of which they study mere projections, is quite a different thing from those studies and their ways. Shorey is therefore wrong to see this term, and the term πραγματεία below (see next note) to be merging with their later meanings (as μέθοδος did above, 528D8). It seems more likely that the meaning Aristotle gives them (according to which for instance a given μέθοδος has its own principles that separate it from others and the treatment of a subject as such constitutes a πραγματεία, might already exist, and that Socrates is at pains to satirize the μέθοδος as a path that goes in a circle and the πραγματεία as not worth the πράγματα.

3556

μαντεύομαι (D5) gives the sense that Glaucon is agape trying to conceive what Socrates is saying.

3557

προοίμιά ἐστιν (D8): Either preambles (to the law itself) or prelude (to the main melody). In either case what we must recall is the use of προοίμιον and ἀπηλλάχθαι at the beginning of Book Two (357A1-2). It is now Glaucon whose stamina is in question rather than Socrates's (cf. 533A2), and Socrates that is requiring Glaucon to keep going rather than Glaucon Socrates. Socrates’s (and Plato’s) common practice of dramatizing the teaching before extracting the moral, of making “drama precede dogma,” here becomes nearly explicit on the programmatic level, which is rare (cf. 525D5 and n.3457). It is after all dialogue and its dialectic that has brought us to this as well as through the other studies.

3558

τοῦ νόμου (D8): The use of musical beauty as a metaphor for truth (cf. σύμφωνοι above, C3 and n.3549) continues. Socrates is referring to a beauty in living λόγοι that not all men feel, whence he elsewhere calls himself an ἀνὴρ φιλόλογος (Phdrs.236E4-5). On the other hand νόμος might mean law and προοίμιον preamble: I cannot eliminate either, but the ambiguity leaves his meaning inchoate.

3559

δεινοί (D9) suggests the specialism of τέχνη (cf.525D9), as such detachable from the larger world and liable to be a μία δύναμις τῶν ἐναντίων. Socrates is illustrating the notion of synopticality (D1-3, supra) by contrasting it with all the several sciences he has reviewed. It is not a criticism of the “mathematician’s ability to reason” (sic Adam, J.-C., Shorey), but (what might come to the same thing) the incompleteness of the special studies that though they might reach the forms that govern their subject matter, have not yet focussed on the Idea of the Good as the primum inter paria that is the reason the objects they study exist and are what they are as well as the principle that shows the relations of any one study to all the others. The meaning is exactly the same as that at Euthyd.290C1-C6, where the dialectician’s ἐπιστήμη τοῦ χρῆσθαι (C3, C5) is based on his knowledge of τὸ χρήσιμον, i.e., τὸ ἀγαθόν.

3560

διαλεκτικοί (D9): The adjective is new and must be referring back to δύναμις διαλέγεσθαι that suddenly appeared at 511B4 (repeated by Glaucon at C5), to represent the ability to use the phenomena in the study of truth beyond them, or, as he now says, to use them as προβλήματα. The conversation of course has already been an exercise in and an illustration of the very science he purports to be introducing. We should not be surprised to find that he has already illustrated in action most or all of what he would have to say about it in theory, nor for that matter be too sorely disappointed if he leaves off theorizing it.

3561

Reading μὴ δυνατοί τινες ὄντες δοῦναί τε καὶ ἀποδέξασθαι λόγον (E4-5), with mss. A2FDM (οἱ μὴ δυνατοί τινες ὄντες A : μὴ δυνατοὶ οἵτινες scripsit Burnet). The phrase is an exegetical description of the δύναμις διαλέγεσθαι alluded to above, and is found as often and in as many places as anything else is to be found in the Platonic corpus. Cf. 534B4-5, Alc.I 106B7; Charm.165B3-C1, 166D8-9; Crat.390C10-11; Gorg.461E4-5; Phdo.78D1-2, 95D; Polit.286A4-5; Prot.336B9-C2, 338D1-2; Soph.230A5, Tht.175B9-D2, 202C2-3. The question/answer process can be expressed in terms of its results, with the questioning as λαβεῖν or δέχεσθαι λόγον and the answering as δοῦναι, παρέχειν, or ὑπέχειν λόγον: cf. Thompson ad Meno 75D and cf.Gorg.501A2-3; Rep.337E2-3, 489E3 (and my n. ad loc.); Soph.246C5; Tht.148D2. This is the reason that a thesis can be called an ἀπόκρισις (Meno 76C8; Rep.337D1, Charm.162C6; Leg.655B7-8; Phdo.100D9, E2, 101C9) and why ἀποκρίνεσθαι or ἐνδείξασθαι δι’ ἐρωτήσεων can mean “discuss” (Parm.137B6-8; Soph.217C4); and it underlies the fanciful etymology at Crat.398D. Cf. also 515D5 and n.3332.

3562

περαίνει (532A2) make a way through to the end, used also of performing a piece of music (cf. πορείαν below, B4, which shares its etymon).

3563

Reading ὁρμᾶν (A7), from Clement: the ὁρμᾷ of all the mss. is impossible. The verb echoes ἐπιβάσεις τε καὶ ὁρμάς (511B6), and recalls the criticism of the level on which the discussion was operating at 506E2 (τὴν παροῦσαν ὁρμήν). J.-C. retains both subjunctives by taking οὕτω (A5) as the complement of ἐπιχειρῇ but it is a conjunction correlative to ὥσπερ (B2); it is preferable to read ἐπιχειρῇ … ὁρμᾶν rather than ἐπιχειρῶν … ὁρμᾷ as more closely parallel to ἐπιχειρεῖν ἀποβλέπειν (A4).

3564

αὐτὸ ὃ ἔστιν ἀγαθὸν αὐτῇ νοήσει λάβῃ (B1). The expression recalls not only 511B3-C2, but also the description of the philosophical life that suddenly appeared at 490A8-B7, including a statement we could style as an adaequatio of the subject (mentis) to the object (ad rem): cf. γεννήσας νοῦν τε καὶ ἀλήθειαν (490B5-6) and n.2901. αὐτὸ ὃ ἔστιν ἕκαστον (A7) is the usual formula for the true nature of things in themselves: ἕκαστον does not depict a persistent specificity finally overcome when one “reach the good” (the idea and stately subjunctive are J.-C.’s): despite its special status it is truer to say the good is a primum inter paria.

3565

μὴ ἀποστῇ … ἐπ’ αὐτῷ γίγνεται τῷ τοῦ νοητοῦ τέλει (A7-B2). Cf. μή … ἐπὶ τέλει ὢν ἀποστῇς (506D2-3), and n.3172. The sense of τέλος here, illustrates what ἄτελες meant at 530E5.

3566

τότε (B2) referring to 516B4-7.

3567

Reading Iamblichus’s ἔτι ἀδυναμία (B9) instead of the readings of the mss. (ἐπ’ ἀδυναμίᾳ ADM : ἀδυναμία F).

3568

θεῖα (C1). To the pairs of indices of the two worlds, visible/intelligible, opined/known, changing/being, a new pair is now added: human/divine.

3569

Finally and for the first time, the particular significance of the stage or grade of truth and reality represented by the puppets and the light of the fire (514B8-515A2) is revealed, by the μέν / δέ construction, as an adumbration of what was to come. The progressus in the darkness below, from shadows thought to be absolute to the originals that by being seen immediately relativize them even in the darkling light of the fire, was there experienced as alienating (515D1-7), but now is recalled and employed as a method for progressing within world of truth. Analogously, the discovery of one’s error by logical reduction in the first phase of the encounter with Socrates makes logical analysis at first hateful, but at the same time provides a sample of the method that will be employed in the second (constructive or probatory) phase of the encounter.

3570

δι’ ἑτέρου τοιούτου φωτός (C2): derogatory ἕτερον (n.1224).

3571

τὴν τοῦ ἀρίστου θέαν (C6), i.e., the vision whose object is ἡ αὐτοῦ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα (505A2).

3572

ὥσπερ τότε τοῦ σαφεστάτου ἐν σώματι πρὸς τὴν τοῦ φανοτάτου (C6-7): The σαφέστατον perceives visually the φανότατον just as the βέλτιστον perceives mentally the ἄριστον. Perhaps τὸ σαφές is the acuity of the seeing (or knowing: e.g. 509D9 and 511C4) and τὸ φανόν is the vividness of the seen (or known, e.g. 506D1).

3573

The tension of knowledge and ignorance Glaucon here describes (D2-4) corresponds very closely to Socrates’s original problematic of the good (e.g.505D11-506A2), revealing how far he has come along. At the same time the repetition of the idea places the entire treatment into a perspective that points beyond itself.

3574

ταῦτα θέντες (D6): Even though each step he has just taken in the criticism of the special studies has been upward and backward, Glaucon now fails to recognize that in asking Socrates to move forward and downward from an hypothesis, posited as if they really understood it (θέντες ἔχειν ὡς νῦν λέγεται, D6) the soul would only be able to move downward (510C1-511A1). With this he does a perfect job of failing to persist, according to the way or path that Socrates has just described to be necessary (καὶ μὴ ἀποστῇ ..., A7-B2). Is his eagerness (cf. σπεύδων μᾶλλον βραδύνω, 528D7-8) a failure of memory? Of intelligence? Of desire? Of nerve?

3575

ὁδοῦ ἀνάπαυλα (E3). Glaucon speaks of the point in the journey where one can rest from travelling but then (with τέλος τῆς πορείας) hopes to assimilate stopping with completing the journey of which Socrates has been speaking (τελευταῖον, 516B4; τελευταία, 517B8; ἱκανῶς ἴδωσι [not just ἀφικέσθαι], 519C9-D2; τἀληθῆ ἑωρακέναι [note perfect], 520C5; τελευταῖον, 532A5; μὴ ἀποστῇ πρίν, A7; τέλει, B2).

3576

ἀκολουθεῖν (533A1): Follow him he truly has, always one step behind. To proceed further he will have to leave off following behind. Socrates had warned him at the beginning of this entire section that the momentum or drive (ὁρμή) of the current discussion seemed insufficient for an ideal treatment (506D6-E5); his present demurral points back to that passage and thus announces the close of the section. Glaucon has been shown, through dialogue, all the rules of dialogue he craves, playfully applied in practice. An explicit statement of them, even if Socrates were capable of it, he might not able to take in (κομίσασθαι [507A2: cf. n.3179]).

3577

φίλε (533A1): Again, the adjective is added to the proper name as an epithet, designating an important turn in the conversation: cf. 522B3 and n.3407.

3578

τό γ’ ἐμόν (A2) answers ἐγὼ μέν (532D2). With οὐδὲν προθυμίας ἀπολίποι compare Socrates's προθυμούμενος at 506D6-8 and contrast Glaucon's hankering for an ἀνάπαυλα here (532E3).

3579

οὐδ’ εἰκόνα … ἀλλ’ αὐτὸ τὸ ἀληθές (A2-3) reproduces the contrast between the ἔκγονος (506E3) and αὐτὸ μὲν τί ποτ’ ἐστὶ τἀγαθόν (506D8-E1).

3580

Reading μὲν δή (A5) with all mss. (rather than δεῖ μέν of the recc.). Socrates’s reply is as halting as Glaucon’s request was (D2-6ff). The two uses of ἰδεῖν (A3, A5) are in tension with each other and convey his feeling that the real account cannot rely on illustrative material such as the traditional curriculum by means of which they have exhibited dialectic in action.

3581

ἡ τοῦ διαλέγεσθαι δύναμις μόνη ἂν φήνειεν ἐμπείρῳ ὄντι ὧν νυνδὴ διήλθομεν (A8-9): This is perhaps the most important instance of self-instantiation, or “drama preceding dogma,” in all of Plato (cf. n.253). Socrates explains to Glaucon by instancing the limits of his own thought why a further treatment is impossible. Compare the way that the review of studies at Phlb.55Cff culminates in the striking remark at 57E-58A, ἡμᾶς … ἀναίνοιτ’ ἂν ἡ τοῦ διαλέγεσθαι δύναμις εἴ τινα πρὸ αὐτῆς ἄλλην κρίναιμεν and its followup, δῆλον ὁτιὴ πᾶς ἂν τήν γε νῦν λεγομένην γνοίη.

3582

οὐδεὶς ἀμφισβητήσει (B1). Nobody, that is, has a stake in arrogating to their chosen method the job of solving the problem that concerns us—to find the simple truth of things. They have other fish to fry.

3583

αὐτοῦ γε ἑκάστου πέρι ὃ ἔστιν ἕκαστον (B2). Cf. n.3184 ad 507B5.

3584

πρὸς γενέσεις τε καὶ συνθέσεις (B5): the more usual list for designating the physical world is, for example, τά τε περὶ ἡμᾶς ζῷα καὶ πᾶν τὸ φυτευτὸν καὶ τὸ σκευαστὸν γένος (510A5-6: cf. n. 1249). The special purpose here is to distinguish τὸ ὄν, the subject matter of true knowledge, as ἀγένητον (vs. γένεσις) and ἕν (vs. σύνθεσις).

3585

τετράφαται (B6): the perfect used of givens in the “structure of reality:” cf. n.4782.

3586

ἑπομένας (B8) referring to the logical sequence Socrates playfully required the studies to follow (τὸ ἑξῆς, 528A6-B3).

3587

ὀνειρώττουσι μὲν περὶ τὸ ὄν, ὕπαρ δὲ ἀδύνατον αὐταῖς ἰδεῖν (B8-C1): The metaphor of sleeping and waking is brought forward from 476C2-D4. As in a dream, the likeness is taken for the real. The metaphor will have little cognitive value to the reader until he has actually experienced the inadequacy of the scientific way. The sleepwalkers will always disagree with what Socrates says since they dream they are awake. This is his strongest in an escalating series of criticisms and satires of the special studies: cf. γελοίως τε καὶ ἀναγκαίως, 527A6 and n.3477.

3588

μὴ δυνάμενοι λόγον διδόναι αὐτῶν (C2-3): Socrates, still one step ahead, reminds Glaucon of the thing he had just forgotten (532D6-7).

3589

τὴν τοιαύτην ὁμολογίαν (C5) a direct reference to ὁμολογουμένως (510D2), which governs its meaning here. It is consistency not dialectical assent, though τοιαύτην might allude to dialectical assent: “If this agreement among their statements is the only kind of agreement they can produce.” Shorey is wrong to think Plato is likening geometric proof to dialectic, though Socrates may be measuring it by dialectic.

3590

πορεύεται (C8): cf. πορείαν (532B4) and περαίνει (532A2). Socrates is to some extent singing the song of dialectic after all!

3591

ἀναιροῦσα (C8) is a metaphor contrary to the metaphor ἀκινήτους ἐῶσι above (C2). The step consists merely in asking why the statement in the hypothesis is true. It is called εἰς προβλήματα ἀνιέναι at 531C2-3 and then exemplified, in the case of astronomy, as ἐπισκοπεῖν τίνες σύμφωναι ἀριθμοί καὶ τίνες οὔ, καὶ διὰ τί ἑκατέρου (C3-4). If the metaphor is violent it is only due to the obduracy of the specialist in the face of having his “foundations” questioned (ἐπισκοπεῖν), as if we should ask a Latinist why his language has six cases instead of eleven, say; or a physicist how it can be that a neutron is colorless; or a psychologist what a soul, or even a psyche, is.

3592

ἠρέμα ἕλκει (D2). There is nothing explicit in the text to justify the adverb. The prisoner was abruptly forced to turn (515C6) and then was forced to continue βίᾳ (515E1, E6-516A3), but the force was never depicted as gentle. The only proof we have is the gentle treatment Glaucon has just undergone from Socrates, and the climbing (ἀνάγει ἄνω, 533D2-3) he has encouraged him to continue, but more veridical proof comes from our experience as participants in that movement.

3593

τῷ ὄντι ἐν βορβόρῳ βαρβαρικῷ τινι τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ὄμμα κατορωρυγμένον (D1-2), a strengthened description of the mind being confined within a soul stuck in a body sunk in a cave, relying on Orphic imagery. τῷ ὄντι refers to a state of affairs of which the mind becomes aware only after being freed (cf. ἀνάπλεως, 516E5, and n.3347).

3594

ἐναργέστερον (D5) used at 511A7, as a synonym for σαφέστερον, to draw an analogy between the superiority of visible objects over their correlated shadows and reflections, and that of pure mental objects over the correlated visible objects in which they are “reflected.”

3595

ἀμυδροτέρου (D6). ἀμυδρός, though not used so far, is the opposite of σαφές at Soph.250E8, and of both ἐναργές and σαφές at Tim.72B8-C1, which have both been used above. The sentence, as he next says, restates what Glaucon said at 511D4-5, according to which διάνοια lies between δόξα and νοῦς.

3596

ὡρισάμεθα (D7): It was Glaucon who teased it out as a technical term (511D2-3).

3597

In the same spirit I pass over the cruxes at E4-5 and simply accept Burnet: the meaning is not at stake. With his comment on ὀνόματα Socrates adduces still another rule or guideline of dialectical procedure. Cf. 437B4-5; and Charm.163D3-7; Crito 47E8,f; Euthyd.285A5-6, 277; Gorg.489B7-C1; Leg. 633A8-9, 644A6, 693C1-5, 864A8-B4, 872E1; Phdo.100D6-7; Phlb.26E6-8; Polit.259C2-4, 261E1-7; Soph.220D4, 259C3-5; Symp.218A4; Tht.177D5-E5, 184D3, 199A4-5.

3598

μοῖρα (E8) adding, to the epistemological distinction among states of consciousness, the quality of life available to them (i.e., ἡμετέρα φύσις παιδείας τε πέρι καὶ ἀπαιδευσίας [514A2], which had received synoptic description at 517B1-6). For the use cf. 472D1.

3599

τὴν ἐφ’ οἷς ταῦτα ἀναλογίαν (534A4-5): ἐφ’ οἷς ταῦτα is an indirect question placed in attributive position (352D6, Leg.880D9-E1; Gildersleeve §579): “the analogy as to what these are correlated to as their proper objects.” For ἐπί cf. the precedent passage, 511D8-E4.

3600

ἐῶμεν (A7), dismissing further elaboration. The purpose of the Line was to illustrate the difference between διάνοια (so called) and νοήσις. The peculiar proportionality of the cuts and sub-cuts (in particular the continuous proportion) implied nothing but the fact that the realm of visible objects was “equal” in length to the thought-objects of διάνοια. Since their length was the line-segments’ only property, their equality represented the identity or inseparability of physical models and thought in “dianoetic” thinking. The intervening review of special studies has exhibited the manner of this confusion in many forms and the ways to resolve it, over and over again, so that now the sameness that enabled us to recognize the difference becomes obsolete, a ladder to throw away or an hypothesis to oust. The distinction between the four types of mentality, however, remains important.

3601

λαμβάνοντα (B3) conative present. λόγον λαβεῖν designates the goal of dialogue (cf. n.3561).

3602

καθ’ ὅσον ἂν μὴ ἔχῃ λόγον αὑτῷ τε καὶ ἄλλῳ διδόναι (B4-5): The inserted protasis affords the opportunity to make performance in dialogue serve right alongside attempting to grasp a λόγος τῆς οὐσίας for each thing, as equal or joint criteria for being a dialectician. By a common technique of exposition Riddell called binary structure (Digest §205A and 207-212), Socrates (or Plato) next elaborates these criteria (534B8-C3) at the same time that he moves to the target case (τὸ ἀγαθόν). By agreeing with the last (πῶς γὰρ ἂν φαίην, B7) Glaucon agrees with both.

3603

λόγον αὑτῷ τε καὶ ἄλλῳ διδόναι (B4-5) recalls λόγον οὔτε αὑτοῖς οὔτε ἄλλοις … διδόναι (510C7) which again recalls Glaucon’s failure at 532D4-7, at the same time that νοῦν … οὐ φήσεις ἔχειν (B5-6) recalls his successful articulation of the failure of διάνοια at 511D1-2 (νοῦν οὐκ ἴσχειν). αὑτῷ includes unobtrusively the idea that dialogue can just as well take place within one person, a question that becomes thematic elsewhere (Tht.189-90; Soph.263E, Phlb.39C; cf. M.Dixsaut “Qu’appele-t-on penser,” in Platon et la question de la pensée [Vrin 2000] 53).

3604

καὶ περὶ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ (B8): Having reminded his tiring student of the Cave Image (532AC) and the Line Simile (533B-534A), he now moves back to the question of the Good which led to and called for them (505B-509C).

3605

μὴ ἔχει … ἰδέαν (B8-C1) elaborates λόγον … οὐσίας (B3-4).

3606

ὥσπερ … διαπορεύηται (C1-3) elaborates the several aspects of λόγον … διδόναι (B4-5): the vigorous back and forth of question and answer (μαχή), the zealousness of the activity (προθυμούμενος), the goal being truth rather than victory before an audience (μὴ κατὰ δόξαν), and the adequacy of an answer as criterion (ἀπτῶτι τῷ λόγῳ). Each and all of these attributes came into play in the review and critique of the conventional curriculum. With Socrates’s help Glaucon kept on his feet until the end—and so did we!

3607

οὔτε αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθόν … οὔτε ἄλλο ἀγαθὸν οὐδέν (C4-5). He refers back to the argument that introduced The Good as the primary object of knowledge (505A2-B3), according to which nothing would be worthwhile without The Good, nor would knowledge of it be worthwhile without knowledge of The Good (the summary remark οὔτε ἄλλο ἀγαθὸν οὐδέν [C4-5] is broad enough to include both ideas).

3608

εἰδώλου (C5). The term was introduced at 532B7 (cf. C7) as a designation of the “puppets” in the cave, where discovering they cast the shadows provided the pilgrim with a model for adapting his vision to the bright world above, namely, first to contemplate their εἴδωλα in water. The examples of the sciences are likewise the hinge between the two worlds, either the upper limit of truth from which all else can only be deduced, or else the springboards (προβλήματα) that can give mind an opportunity to move upward in search of the questions to which they provide the answers.

3609

τούς γε σαυτοῦ παῖδας (D3), in place of the much more usual first plural, is strikingly personal, as if to excite paternal feelings in Glaucon. Socrates refers back to the resolution he had reached with Adeimantus at 505E4-506A7 where he referred to them as ἐκείνους τοὺς βελτίστους οἷς πάντα ἐγχειριοῦμεν.

3610

ἀλόγους … ὥσπερ γραμμάς (D5): This deconstruction of the technical application of the term ἄλογον in mathematics (as of the diagonal of the square, inexpressible [“irrational”] as a ratio of “integers” [e.g., Arist.L.I.,968B18]) gives an opportunity to drive home once again the main point, which is to immunize the guardians’ reason from the laughably irrational confinement to cases (527A6) and to overcome the inability or refusal to διδόναι λόγον (533C2-3) that provides the foundation for all specialization.

3611

μετά γε σοῦ (E1): Glaucon expresses his feeling of taking things on faith that began with his plea at 532D6 (ταῦτα θέντες). With μετά he places himself into a relation with Socrates analogous to that of the relation between the hypotheses of the sciences and the ἀνυπόθετον (καίτοι νοητῶν ὄντων μετὰ ἀρχῆς, 511D2).

3612

The θριγκός (534E2) is the topping course of plaster that makes the top of the wall smooth instead of being an uneven sequence of stones. If Plato had been a Roman he might have used the metaphor of a arch and its keystone; instead we have the course which when complete, like the ἀνυπόθετον, neither has nor needs anything above it (οὐκέτ’ ἄλλο … ἀνωτέρω ὀρθῶς ἂν ἐπιτίθεσθαι). All along we have seen dialectic in action and now that Socrates has demurred to treat it separately it will be allowed to merge with and disappear into what has taken place.

3613

τὴν προτέραν ἐκλογήν (535A6): Socrates refers to the sub-selection of the ἄρχοντες τῶν φυλάκων he carried out with Glaucon at 412Bff. The qualities (compare τοιούτους [412D9] with οἵους here [535A6]) were age, then ability (specifically guardliness), and then mindfulness, competence and solicitousness (C2-D8); but subsequently they were tested for their guardly ability per se, to keep solid grasp of the dogma about how things should be in the city despite suffering vicissitudes (412E5-414A7).

3614

εὐειδεστάτους (A11): Good looks, something that appears to be entirely somatic, was entirely absent in the selection at 412Bff, to which alone he at first seems to be referring (προτέραν [A6] being singular); but as in previous summaries there is a looseness that prefers to give the overall picture, so we may imagine he is referring to the eugenic provisions of Book Five. Adding the term skews the previous selection in the direction of the body, so as to appropriate the virtues of strength to a new sphere, the noetic ability that will be needed, given our intervening discovery that our guards will have to be philosophers.

3615

μὴ μόνον γενναίους τε καὶ βλοσυροὺς τὰ ἤθη (B1-2), in restating A10-B1, continues the skewing toward the body, or at least away from the noetic center of the soul, with the merely dispositional term ἤθη (for which compare the use of the corresponding habituative term ἔθη, lately [522A4-7], in the rejection of the paideia in music as helping νοῦς in its ascent).

3616

μὴ μόνον … τὰ ἤθη ἀλλὰ καὶ ἅ ... (B1-3). The word order suggests that it is τὰ ἤθη that goes with μὴ μόνον, leaving ἅ to be construed, at least at first, as an accusative of respect parallel with it, so as to continue the reappropriation of strength to nous. At the end ἑκτέον αὐτοῖς is added unnecessarily in a mild anacoluthon for the sake of closure.

3617

δριμύτητα (B5), the term he has so far reserved for the ethically important formidable acumen of evil men (519A2, supra: cf.564D, infra) he now uses for the dialectician.

3618

ἄρρατον (C1) an hapax in all Greek (except for Crat.407D2-3, which glosses it with σκληρόν τε καὶ ἀμετάστροφον), and therefore striking. Passow gives ῥήγνυμι as the etymon. Alongside μνήμων it recalls the development of the notion of ἀνδρεία with the analogy of dying wool (429B7-430B5).

3619

πάντῃ φιλόπονον (C1): Because of the intervening remark that reappropriates the term πόνος to mental work (B6-9), this expression generalizes the set of attributes δριμύτης, μὴ χαλεπῶς μανθάνειν, μνήμων, and ἄρρατος as expressions of φιλοπονία, the opposite of ἀποδειλιᾶν (B7).

3620

ἢ τίνι τρόπῳ (C2): The question is meant to acknowledge his generalization of φιλόπονον with πάντῃ and justify it, by adding together bodily work and mental.

3621

ἐπιτελεῖν (C3) brings forward and combines the metaphor of ἐπτίθεσθαι and the notion of τέλος, from 534E2-535A1.

3622

Glaucon’s παντάπασί γε (C4) answers Socrates’s πάντῃ.

3623

γοῦν (C6) of “part-proof” (Denniston).

3624

ὃ καὶ πρότερον εἴπομεν (C6): at 495Cff.

3625

φιλήκοος (D5): cf. ἐπήκοοι, 499A5.

3626

τὸ δ’ ἀκούσιον … προσδέχηται (E3), a constructio praegnans: to accept learning that a belief you have is “unintentionally false” as opposed to being a lie you are telling. The ensuing metaphor then depicts the self-deprecation felt by the noble soul when it becomes disabused of its ignorance.

3627

πάντῃ (536A5) means sound in all limbs (vs. χωλός).

3628

ἀλλοίους (B4) in litotes as at 499E1 and 500A3. Compare the similar idiom of ἕτερος (n.1224).

3629

The paragraph (A9-B6) has a nicer and nicer construction. First the anaphora of ἀρτι- in the mind-body doublet (ἀρτιμελεῖς τε καὶ ἀρτίφρονας, B1), followed by anaphora of τοσαύτην and homoioteleuton of the corresponding modifiers (μάθησιν / ἄσκησιν, B2), placed in chiastic order; then the unannounced shift into the apodosis with a pair of clauses presented as if closely parallel because linked by τε … τε (B2-4) but actually quite different from each other (justice [personified] chastising us / we will save the city); then the elaboration by a statement of the converse with a corresponding pair of clauses, linked by καί (with the second καί in hyperbaton [καὶ πράξομεν]) and placed in chiastic order (we will have the opposite effect / philosophy [personified] will be scorned), this last pair of clauses exhibiting both rhyme and isocolia (ἐπὶ ταῦτα τἀναντία πάντα καὶ πράξομεν / ἔτι πλείω γέλωτα καταντλήσομεν).

3630

ἐντεινάμενος (C2), referring primarily to the high-strung rhetoric of last paragraph, which culminates in the indignant reiteration of the harsh metaphors of disability and illegitimate birth. It began with the reference to slop at 535E3-5. His rising indignation resembles that of Adeimantus at 424D7-E2 and 426A1-D6.

3631

σπουδαιότερον εἰπεῖν (C4) standing in contrast with ἐπαίζομεν (C1).

3632

πρεσβύτας (C8): Indeed this was the first criterion (412C2-3).

3633

Solon's famous and marvelously ambiguous saw, γηράσκω δ’αἰεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος (18 West).

3634

ἔφαμεν (537A5): The reference is to 466E4-7E7, but the analogy with τοὺς σκύλακας is new.

3635

εἰς ἀριθμόν τινα (A10-11), the addition of τινα suggests we will now be hearing more about this group. And indeed the sequence of parings down constitutes the rest of the argument to the end of Book Seven.

3636

ἄλλο (B4) presumes the soul’s activities are the complement of the body’s.

3637

ἅμα μία καὶ αὕτη (B5): gymnastics will help you test their mettle as the early education did (A1-2).

3638

By φύσις (C3), another instance of the word not listed in Ast's Lex.Plat. (cf.514A2 and n. ad loc.). It means the relation between the highest study’s object (τὸ ὄν), and the lesser studies that imply the higher study, lead to it, and call for it to solve the questions they raise—all of which was represented in the image by locating the cave below and the world above.

3639

Plato’s only use of συνοπτικός (C7), extending the semantics of σύνοψιν (C2) and relying on 531D1-4.

3640

μόνιμοι δ’ ἐν πολέμῳ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις νομίμοις (D2): He is looking back to the stage of development reached before, where the guardians at the end of Book Three were not only stalwart at war but also steady in the δόγμα of protecting what was best for the city (412D9-E8).

3641

τῇ τοῦ διαλέγεσθαι δυνάμει (D5). For the triumphant first appearance of this periphrasis see 511B4. Whether it is a dative of agent (by what means to test them) or of respect (by what attribute of theirs to choose them) is indifferent since the give-and-take of dialogue make these one and the same. Truly, one great power of dialogue is its ability to raise both participants, as Socrates likes to say by quoting the remark of Diomedes asking Agamemnon for a partner on a night raid Il.10.224-5: σύν τε δύ’ ἐρχομένῳ, καί τε πρὸ ὃ τοῦ ἐνόησεν | ὅππως κέρδος ἔῃ (Symp.174D, Prot.348C; and cf. its applications at Rep.432C1-2 and 595C10-596A11 with n.4750).

3642

μετ’ ἀληθείας ἰέναι (D6-7), alluding to the path of questioning that the stimulating (ὁλκόν, 521D3; ἑλκτικῷ, 523A2) or problematic (προβλήματα, 530B6) phenomena drive the mind to require answers for (ἐπερέσθαι, 523D4), as a pursuit after truth—a test beginning, we may imagine, with the questions we have seen the specialists fail to ask themselves (533B6-D4): Why they won’t test their hypotheses? Why do they think consistency constitutes knowledge? Why do they stay in the mire of visible cases when all along they are thinking about ideas, since their concrete cases are after all only images of ideas?

3643

πολλῆς φυλακῆς ἔργον, ὦ ἑταῖρε (D7-8). Here, and indeed and ever since 504C6-D3, the work of the guards has more or less explicitly been identified with the work of the interlocutors. Compare 505E4-6B1(and n.3157) with 506B2-7.

3644

παρανομίας που ἐμπίμπλανται (E4), with A2M (rather than ἐμπίπλαται AFD). The plural is suggested by the notion that the taking up dialectic, viz. by the young, should be carefully supervised. Glaucon immediately recognizes who Socrates is referring to (as we learn below: τοὺς ἁπτομένους, 538C5) and what he is saying about them, while we halt over the nominative plural and have no idea what the παρανομία could be. Shorey, always ready to suavely proclaim that Plato has Socrates confuse his interlocutor in order to make a transition to his own new point, is silent about the deployment of the technique here, where it is we that are confused.

3645

πάσχειν (E6). Their παρανομία (E4) turns out to be an affliction, as the passive ἐμπίμπλανται had already suggested; but it is just this that surprises Glaucon (πῇ μάλιστα;).

3646

Anarthrous ἐκείνου (538C2) is derogatory.

3647

πάτρια (D4): for the political sense without the metaphor, cf. 427C2.

3648

ἐλθὸν ἐρώτημα ἔρηται (D6) and ἐξελέγχῃ ὁ λόγος (D8): The impersonal constructions are striking. They represent the youth’s feeling that he is being assaulted. As often, Shorey suavely suffocates the dramatic interest by telling us it is a habit of our Author (“The question is here personified, as the logos so often is,” citing passages).

3649

καταβάλῃ (D9) with mss. Fm and Burnet (καταβάλλῃ D : καταλάβῃ AM). From its primary usage as the take-down in wrestling (H.Min.374A4, Prot.344C8) the verb is used of verbal “take-downs” (Euthyd.277D1, and cf. Democritus DK68B125 and Protagoras’s title καταβάλλοντες λόγοι [S.E.AM 6.60]). Plato is interested in the mental aftermath of the καταβολή, which is always negative (ἀπ’ ἐλπίδος, Euthyphr.15E5; εἰς ἀπορίαν, H.Maj.286C5, Phlb.15E4; εἰς ἀπιστίαν, Phdo.88C4). εἰς δόξαν is likewise negative here, regardless what the δόξα is that he has been cast into believing.

3650

οὐδὲν μᾶλλον (D9): cf.340B4, 487C3, and nn.353, 2839.

3651

οὐδὲν μᾶλλον καλὸν ἢ αἰσχρόν, καὶ περὶ δικαίου ὡσαύτως καὶ ἀγαθοῦ καὶ ἃ μάλιστα ἦγεν ἐν τιμῇ (D9-E2): Again, the most important things (τὰ μέγιστα). Cf. καλῶν τε καὶ ἀγαθῶν καὶ δικαίων νομίμων πέρι (451A7), where νομίμων (cf. n.2401) adds what τιμῇ adds here, with respect to which passage we now understand Socrates’s reluctance to waken the sleeping dog (450C6-451B1), especially in response to a challenge stirred up by a Polemarchus.

3652

αὐτά (E3), rather than ἐκεῖνα as they had already been called (D4), stresses that they did not change, though he did.

3653

οἰκεῖα (E5) straddles, in order to weld the analogy with the orphan’s family. There is no need with Shorey to reach back to 433E and 443D nor to adduce affinities with Stoic οἰκείωσις.

3654

παράνομος δή (539A3) now reveals Socrates's reason for using the paradoxical term παρανομία above (537E4), by now being juxtaposed with the non-paradoxical use of νομίμοις at D3, above.

3655

καὶ ἐλέου γε (A7). Socrates's εἰκών Glaucon quickly grasps (contrast 537D8). In the shadow of the sustained exercise in dialectic, the shift to an image comes home to him by reminding him of the existential uncertainties and their effects on conscience that he and his brother had confessed at the beginning of Book Two. It is noteworthy that (1) Glaucon is more forgiving than his brother, Adeimantus; that (2) the demoralization of the young man for which Socrates here gives a psychological explanation pertains to his brother Adeimantus and the blame he places on his elders in Book Two rather than to the brother with whom Socrates is speaking, and (3) that Socrates's attitude of sympathy (συγγνώνμης ἄξιον, 539A6) though initially surprising to Glaucon, was something Adeimantus expected, and perhaps felt entitled to, all along (πολλήν που συγγώμην ἔχει, 366C5-6).

3656

ἁπτέον (A9) has the young men as subject accusative (unexpressed) and Glaucon as the person upon whom the necessity impinges, in the dative. Below, a personal construction will replace the accusatives: the subjects of the act will be nominative but the person on whom it is incumbent to that act will again be expressed in the dative (539E2-540A2). Cf. n.3116 ad 503E3.

3657

μιμούμενοι τοὺς ἐξελέγχοντας αὐτοὶ ἄλλους ἐλέγχουσι (B4-5): The process is described without reference to the content of the logos. Instead of an uncertainty whether something is beautiful or ugly (538D8-E3) there is the uncertainty whether the outcome will be personal victory or defeat. We see the young man imitating such an argument in Adeimantus’s speech at the beginning of Book Two (365A4-366B2: for νέους ὄντας here [B1-2] cf.νέων ψυχάς, 365A6). The absence of Adeimantus is beginning to be felt.

3658

πολλοὺς μὲν αὐτοὶ ἐλέγξωσιν (B9). Proleptic πολλούς leaves us in the dark whether to supply ἄλλους or λόγους with it, and thereby again brings home the point that the emphasis has shifted from the student’s initial encounter with impersonal logos (538D6-9) to the attitude he later adopts that what is at stake is the personal victory and defeat of the arguer.

3659

διαβέβληνται (C3): That is, they become vulnerable to the charge of being “ἀλλόκοτοι” in the eyes of “everyone else” (τοὺς ἄλλους, C3): cf. 487D2 and Appendix 2. That such a slander should have been brought by Adeimantus (487BD), the very person who proved vulnerable to the disillusionment Socrates describes, is both verisimilar and psychologically astute. The passionate escalation is eloquently represented at Phlb.15D8-16A2, and the contagious aspect (cf. αὐτοὶ ἄλλους [B5] and ἐλέγξωσιν / ἐλεγχθῶσι [B9-C1]) is recounted at Ap.23C.

3660

μιμήσεται (C7) For the comparison and choice between good imitation and bad (B4, supra) cf. 500B1-C7.

3661

αὐτός τε μετριώτερος … καὶ τὸ ἐπιτήδευμα τιμιώτερον (C8-D1), echoing, for the sake of the contrast, the construction αὐτοί τε καὶ τὸ ὅλον, from 539C2-3: τε καί is here an abbreviated way of doing what μέν / δέ does.

3662

ἔρχεται ἐπ’ αὐτό (D6). In contrast with a supervisor choosing who gets to join in (μεταδώσει τις) these operate sua sponte and their motive is that of the wooer (for ἰέναι ἐπί τι cf.525C1 and n.3453), 521B4-5, 521A1, 495C3, 489D4).

3663

ἓξ ἢ τέτταρα λέγεις; (E1): Glaucon doubles (διπλάσια, D10) the “two or three” years of 537B3 readily accepting the greater.

3664

ἵνα μηδ’ ἐμπειρίᾳ ὑστερῶσι τῶν ἄλλων (E4-5). We have secured their learning and what is left is their ἐμπειρία. The litotes recalls the first mention of ἐμπειρία at 484D6-7. Later, just before Adeimantus’s interruption, that concept was recast as παιδεία τε καὶ ἡλικία (487A8). After the interruption was dealt with, the formulation with the doublet was redone (502C10-D2: μαθήματά τε καὶ ἐπιτηδεύματα, D1; ἡλικίας, D2). The age qualification naturally coalesces with the experience qualification, and so by a natural evolution of emphasis, ἡλικία at the end is replaced with ἐμπειρία, which was the original term.

3665

καὶ ἔτι καί (E5), recalling the important opportunity to watch them at their studies, like καὶ ἅμα καί (537B5) and thus ἵνα καὶ μᾶλλον (537A1).

3666

πρὸς τέλος ἤδη (540A6). τέλος is notably anarthrous, again pregnant for the Idea of the Good. Cf. 532B2, 530E5.

3667

κοσμεῖν (B1) the climactic term for what the philosopher-king’s ruling consists of.

3668

καὶ πόλιν καὶ ἰδιώτας καὶ ἑαυτούς (A9-B1): The Idea of the Good reveals the good of each, the good of the relations of the eaches, and the good of the whole: cf. 530A6-7 and n.3528.

3669

διατρίβοντας (B2): cf. διατρίβειν at 519C2.

3670

ἐπιταλαιπωροῦντας (B3). Akin to the term Glaucon had used in mincing overstatement about the men who had no tables and chairs (372D8), here used with warranted emphasis!

3671

καλόν τι (B4) connotes admiration and therefore almost means enviable. Socrates alludes to the desideratum that the rulers admire something else more than they admire ruling (520E4-521B10).

3672

εἰς μακάρων νήσους ἀπιόντας οἰκεῖν (B6-7). Again (as with διατρίβειν) we meet the language and imagery of 519C5-6 (compare also διατρίβοντες, B2, with 519C2). Elevation is achieved in this envoi to the philosopher kings by the way the governing verbs (ἀποβλέψαι [A8] and κοσμεῖν [B1], but especially οἰκεῖν [B7] which ends up being otiose after all that) are postponed by the unremitting and scrupulous qualifications and stipulations done with the participles (ten in number). This will become the predominant style in Book Eight (cf. Appendix 7 for a continuous account of the style and syntax of that amazing Book).

3673

The erecting of monuments and a reference to the auspices of the Delphic Oracle again serve as the crowning act in the formation of the City. Cf. 414A, 427BC, 461E.

3674

ὡς δαίμοσιν, εἰ δὲ μή, ὡς εὐδαίμοσί τε καὶ θείοις (C1-2): He etymologizes εὐδαιμονία!

3675

ὥσπερ ἀνδριαντοποιὸς ἀπείργασαι (C3-4) Glaucon returns the compliment Socrates gave him at 361D4-6 when all of this began.

3676

Reading ξυγχωρεῖτε (D1) with A2FM (ξυγχωρεῖν τε AD). Socrates addresses both Glaucon and Adeimantus. His request for agreement indeed looks as far back as the original challenge of Polemarchus (εὐχάς [D2] referring back to 450D1) and then to Glaucon’s accepting his reply to the challenge (Book Five) and, only later, to Adeimantus’s (Book Six). The verb he uses, συγχωρεῖν, is appropriate to the resistance he had had to face from each of them, separately (whence μή, D2: cf. Smyth §2725). As always, looking farther back introduces a larger closure, and lays a suggestion that we will be reverting to the question raised just before the interruption of Polemarchus, namely, how from the high vantage point of the virtue derived from the ordered city (ἀπὸ σκοπιᾶς, 445C4) we could evaluate viciousness through the prism of the disorderly or inferior orders of lesser cities.

3677

ὅταν … καταφρονήσωσιν (D3ff): The subjunctive with ἄν, instead of an ideal optative, beginning here and dominating the entire passage, has the force of an ultimatum. In the end the vision of the philosopher kings, though an “ideal,” is finally presented with a future more vivid condition (εὐδαιμονήσειν, ὀνήσειν: 541A6-7)!

3678

πῶς; (E4): Glaucon interrupts before Socrates can supply an apodosis to these subjunctives. His interest was piqued by διασκευωρήσωνται (E3), an extremely rare word (n.b., the active does appear in Ep.3.316A5). For other interruptions in mid-sentence after which Socrates continues with his construction, as he does here with his subjunctives, cf. 549C7 and 561B6. In the wake of the huge notions they have reached the description of the instauration is vivid, concrete, and unvarnished (540E5-541A4) whereas before the idea of the good was reached, the description (the διαγραφή of 501A2-B7) had been only conceptual and metaphorical. The common complaint that “Plato” is ready to “wipe the slate clean” with a genocide in the style of the Twentieth Century is an over-interpretation of a metaphor (501A3-7), as the concrete life-preserving measures of the present passage reveal.

3679

οὕτω (541A4) brings forward οὐκ ἄλλῃ ἢ εἴρηται (from D3 above), and with it the main construction, ξυγχωρεῖτε, which now will govern the future infinitives. For αὐτήν τε … καὶ τὸ ἔθνος, cf.539C8-D1 and n.3661.

3680

καὶ ὡς ἂν γένοιτο εἴπερ ποτε γίγνοιτο (A8): With his optatives Glaucon backs off from the vivid to the conceptual modality. It is an index of how deeply he believes what the logos has led him to. It would be premature to compare and contrast his mood at the end of Book Nine (592A5-B6).

3681

ἅδην (B2), in all its other instances in Plato includes a note of satiety (341C4, Charm.153D2; Euthyphr.11E2) and therefore a reason for moving on to something else: Socrates has noticed how even Glaucon’s conviction wanes (prev. n.). The “man” Socrates refers to (ἀνδρός, B3) is not the dialectical guardian whose education he has just fashioned, but the man whose personal justice was derived from that of the just city according to the thought-experiment proposed by Socrates at 368C7-369B4. With this back reference Socrates points to the other side of the same moment in the conversation as he had with his summary of the agreements they had reached (540D1-E3). This one points to what ended Book Four and the other one points to what began Book Five and occupied us until now, namely, the challenge of Polemarchus which could only be answered by requiring a higher (philosophical) commitment from the interlocutors (first Glaucon and then Adeimantus, with Glaucon coming back to the rescue at 506D and himself reaching his limit at 532D): it is for the sake of these two, after all, the entire conversation is taking place.

3682

καὶ ὅπερ ἐρωτᾷς … δοκεῖ μοι τέλος ἔχειν (B5) The formality is not otiose, but represents dialectical or dialogical agreement. There are no more questions to ask and no more questions to answer.

3683

506C11-D5: cf. n. ad loc.

3684

Cf. Parmenides, frg. 1.1 (=28 B1 DK): ἵπποι ταί με φέρουσιν ὅσον τ’ ἐπὶ θυμὸς ἱκάνοι.

3685

Often the brothers remind me of the more easily edified Simmias and the less easily convinced Cebes of the Phaedo.

3686

Socrates has taken on the task of helping Ariston’s sons because they confessed (Adeimantus more candidly than Glaucon) that their father had failed them (362E5)—to do any less than come to their aid would be impious (368A5-C3); Cephalus’s son is not a party in that task (this is why he needed to ask Adeimantus, with whom Socrates was not talking, to interrupt Socrates and Glaucon, at the beginning of Book Five), even though his father also failed him, and did so right before our eyes. Cephalus asked Socrates to come down more often to chat with himself before he died and only mentioned any benefit to his son in passing and anonymously (328C6-D6: n.b. τοῖσδέ τε τοῖς νεανίσκοις σύνισθι); and even himself forwent to converse with Socrates as soon as he had to begin thinking about things in a new way (331D6-7). At this point he passed the burden of the logos to his son since after all he would be inheriting everything else that was his (D8-9).

Every son suffers just such a mixed legacy from a father who is less instead of more self-aware: it was painful to watch this happen to Polemarchus for the umpteenth time. Once Cephalus leaves we see how well he can acquit himself (331E-336A). Though he fails at defending a conventional argument he had accepted on authority, he succeeds in recognizing that the question is more important than his inability to answer it (334A9, 334B7-9, 334D7-8, 335B13-C6), in disowning the putative authority-figure when his argument turns out to all appearances to be the argument of a tyrant (335C7-10), and in becoming Socrates’s ally in the fight against their argument and then against Thrasymachus, who lies in wait for just such young men as him (340A1-C2).

3687

ξυγχωρεῖτε (540D1), plural.

3688

By naming him in the address, ὦ Γλαύκων (543A1).

3689

ὡμολόγηται (A1): the perfect places the previous argument into a past that treats it as completed and presumed (although of course any agreement may be amended if one of the parties to it sees fit to), and adds thereby to the sense that a new phase is now being begun.

3690

ἄκρως οἰκεῖν (A2): Socrates appropriated the colloquial expression (ἄκρως) for positive use at 459B11 (cf.459E1): earlier it had been used in doxic praise (405A8, 366E6, 360E7).

3691

τάδε (B1): With the “first person” demonstrative Socrates takes particular responsibility for the following more particular things he chooses to recall, from the end of Book Three (for ἄγοντες cf. ἡγουμένων, 415D8), namely the controversial asceticism of the guards’ daily life, which had immediately elicited an interruption and criticism from Adeimantus at the beginning of Book Four, itself a recrudescence of the fateful objection Glaucon had made in Book Two (372C).

3692

οἰκήσεις (B3) Socrates selects this detail to recall the very dramatic moment at 415E4-416A1 (cf. nn.), where his description of the living accommodations of the guards (εὐνάς, E4) recalled his description of the simple life of the original city at 372AB to which Glaucon had reacted so strongly; and how Glaucon in a sense corrected his use of the term εὐναί by saying οἰκήσεις δοκεῖς μοι λέγειν, E8, eliciting from Socrates a distinction between what a soldier needs and what a businessman gets (στρατιωτικάς γε [sc. οἰκήσεις] ἀλλ’ οὐ χρηματιστικάς, E9), which he then explained with his powerful image of sheep and wolves (416A). Glaucon’s acquiescence in the conclusion (πάνυ γε, 417B9) after the resistance he had shown at 372ff, marked one of the more dramatic moments in the evening so far, and served as an index of the progress that had been made.

3693

Recalling the very beautiful page with which Book Three ends, 416D3-417B8.

3694

ἴδιον μὲν οὐδὲν οὐδενὶ ἐχούσας, κοινὰς δὲ πᾶσι (B3-5) refers in particular to the prohibition of private areas within one’s quarters and the hoarding of a ταμιεῖον (416D6-7).

3695

κτήσεις (B5) recalls the discussion about the evil effect of possessions (416E4-417B6), which in particular aroused the interruption of Adeimantus.

3696

οἱ ἄλλοι (B8): the others in the city (cf. τῶν ἄλλων below at C2), not the rulers of other cities or “rulers in the real world” (Slings) else τῶν ἄλλων would be. Glaucon is recalling Adeimantus’s invidious objection to Socrates’s rule against possessions, 419A5 (cf. nn. ad 419A5-420A1 and n.1982 ad 420A3).

3697

ἀθλητάς (B8): the metaphor was first used at 404A10, then repeated at 422C8, and then recalled at 521D5.

3698

ἐπεὶ τοῦτ’ ἀπετελέσαμεν (C4-5): the antecedent is the construction of the best city which has just been completed once again, in the sense of completing the guardians' ἐπιστήμη to round out their φύσις and μελέτη (cf. n.1838 ad 412B2-3).

3699

τιθείης (C9) optative governed by λέγων, itself in secondary sequence after τοὺς λόγους ἐποιοῦ. The present optative represents an imperfect of citation (cf.350C7 and n.582). With καὶ ἄνδρα τὸν ἐκείνῃ ὅμοιον Glaucon is “remembering” Socrates’s words at the very beginning of Book Five (449A1-5), ἀγαθὴν μὲν τοίνυν τοιαύτην πόλιν ... καλῶ καὶ ἄνδρα τὸν τοιοῦτον... .

3700

ἀλλ’ οὖν δή (544A1) resumes the leading construction after the self-interruption. It corresponds to the δέ at 449A2, in the way it answers the foregoing μέν (543C9, cf.449A1). The intervening proviso alludes to the entire discussion of Books Five through Seven only to dismiss it, despite its stunning content. All of that is after all strictly irrelevant to the original and still-outstanding task of the discussion.

3701

For ὀρθή (A2) and the implication that others, as other, are eo ipso ἡμαρτημένας, cf. 449A3.

3702

τέτταρα εἴδη (A3): The ways of error are indefinite in number but four were worth singling out (ἄξιον, 445C6-7), though no criterion was given, and none will be.

3703

ἐμοῦ ἐρομένου (A8): He had asked, ποίας δὲ ταύτας; (449A6).

3704

Socrates’s ἀναλαβεῖν (B2) corresponds to Polemarchus and Adeimantus’s ὑπολαβεῖν (B1).

3705

λαβήν (B5), of a wrestling hold resumed when the match resumes after an interruption. The metaphor (cf. Phdrs.236B, Phlb.13D, Leg.682C) became almost inevitable after ἀναλαβών (B2) had called it out of its hiding place in ὑπέλαβε (B1).

3706

καὶ μήν … γε (B9) again specifies just where he wants Socrates to start.

3707

οὐ χαλεπῶς ... ἀκούσῃ (C1), echoes Glaucon’s οὐ χαλεπόν (from 543C7) but more importantly responds to ἐπιθυμῶ (B9), in which (pace Adam) there is no “rescinding of a polemical tone” suggested by the wrestling metaphor, but a frank confession of desire. We have the usual back and forth that announces and also inaugurates a new phase of the conversation, as follows: A: “Please tell me”—B: “I will try”—A: “I desire it so much even a try would be very welcome”—B. “That makes things much easier for me.” Such passages as these (367E6-368C3, 372E2-8, 427D1-E6, 435C4-D9, 449B6-451B9, 471C2-473B3, 506B2-E7) announce the modality of the conversation, that what is being said is being said in sincerity, candor, and reciprocal partnership (including χάρις) in the face of ignorance and uncertainty, and thereby indicate how the conversation should be taken by the eavesdropping reader. Such indications are universally ignored by Aristotle (as witness his criticism of this argument in Politics Book Five, 1316A1-B27), and typically ignored by the commentators that came after.

3708

καὶ ὀνόματα ἔχουσιν (C2). ὄνομα ranges semantically from the very name (545B6) to the reputation true or false (here). Socrates’s point is that Glaucon will recognize the forms he has in mind, as the modifier ὑπὸ τῶν πολλῶν ἐπαινουμένη next stresses. Cf. also the distinction ἐπαινουμένη / καλουμένη below (C4).

3709

τε after ἡ (C2) indicates there are others to come.

3710

τῶν πολλῶν (C2) is ambiguous as to value, suggesting either a positive (most) or a negative (hoi polloi) credential for this form of πολιτεία.

3711

δευτέρως ἐπαινουμένη (C4): Second best praise hardly comports with the description sandwiched in as if by a second voice (συχνῶν γέμουσα κακῶν πολιτεία), a participial phrase both jaunty and weighty. It is given a berth by the hyperbaton of πολιτεία.

3712

τε (C5) virtually an ordinal, again. The dative ταύτῃ with διάφορος frees it from having its valuative connotation, which is reserved for the ironic climax, πασῶν τούτων διαφέρουσα (see below). Its meaning here relies entirely on the dative. Though we can decide from the subsequent context how best to translate it, the main point is to see that at this moment its meaning is unclear.

3713

ἐφεξῆς γιγνομένη (C5-6), suggesting not just subsequent occurrence in a list, but an evolutionary succession of constitutions, an idea already mildly suggested but not insisted upon by διάφορος (as connoting a “parting of ways” or a “point of departure”). Socrates similarly presumed, without apology or explanation, that there is a μετάβασις from one to the next, the first time he suggested the subject (ἐξ ἀλλήλων μεταβαίνειν, 449B1 and n. 2372), where the interruption of Polemarchus mooted—or as we can now say, postponed—the question why.

3714

On infixed δή (C6) announcing the final item of a list cf. n.34 ad 328B4-8.

3715

Reading διαφέρουσα (C7), with Stobaeus. The unanimous reading of AFDM (διαφεύγουσα) seems impossible. Ficinus's ab his omnibus differens corroborates Stobaeus (cf. his quae ab hic differt for διάφορος above). The etymological figure with διάφορος (“different”), and with πασῶν τούτων moves into the role of a capping or climactic term for ending the list; and yet with γενναία and the genitive of superiority, the approbative denotation of the verb (“surpassing”) is also courted – and so it is a pun.

3716

ἔσχατον πόλεως νόσημα (C7): The evaluative participial phrase that was slipped into the identification of the second constitution (συχνῶν γέμουσα κακῶν, C4-5) is here outdone by an appositive similarly sententious and metaphorical for the last constitution. ἔσχατον (C7) not only indicates that the list is a genetic sequence and that this is its final stage, but also, dispelling all irony, that the sequence is a devolution. The entire list is animated by a sardonic attitude that nevertheless refuses to acknowledge itself.

3717

To include the δυναστεῖαι (D1) among the types of state (if we understand this type to be characterized by the provision of hereditary rule, by which in part Aristotle distinguishes it from others, Pol.1292A4-7) would in fact work at cross-purposes with the special use Socrates will be making of the father-son relationship in his description of how the corresponding men evolve.

3718

μεταξύ τι τούτων πού εἰσιν (D2) is perfect nonsense, as τι and που perhaps admit. The two new types raise an entirely new issue (how to manage succession) with a doublet of alternatives (succession by birth and by purchase). Between which of the narrated four types could these two, or this issue, possibly be placed? The reduction of many institutional forms to four was likewise finessed at the end of Book Four with a swift and imperious construction in μέν / δέ / δέ: ἓν μὲν εἶναι εἶδος τῆς ἀρετῆς, ἄπειρα δὲ τῆς κακίας, τέτταρα δ’ ἐν αὐτοῖς ἄττα ὧν καὶ ἄξιον λόγου (445C6-7).

3719

εὗροι δ’ ἄν τις (D3-4): The purpose of the remark is to dismiss a far-flung and tedious collection of constitutions in the manner of an Herodotean περίπλους. Again Socrates makes a weak argument. He wants these four and that’s that.

3720

We may take the genitive ἀνθρώπων (D6) to be in prolepsis and governed by τρόπον, or we may take it more loosely as a genitive of the sphere (as Phdo. τί δὲ τῶν καλῶν, 78D10).

3721

ἐκ δρυός ποθεν ἢ ἐκ πέτρας (D7-8): The phrase is proverbial since Homer (cf.Paroim.Gr.2.158 [=M.III.40] and n. ad loc.). Its function is to dismiss irrelevancy, often the humble details of mere humanity, in order to get down to business or to end things before they drag on too long (Hes.Theog.35). For the undefended “axiom” that society and its ways are essentially human compare 435E1-436A4, where the inverse is dismissed as laughable (435E3). The postulate is another creature of Plato/Socrates’s strategy to present a subjective psychological content in objective political or historical form. Though Adam accepts this distinction (cf. his note ad ἐφεξῆς, 544C5), he goes too far by alleging (here, and again ad 543Aff) that Plato has a Philosophy of History that rests on psychology. ποθεν, like τι and που above, indicates Socrates is speaking loosely.

3722

κατασκευαί (E5), repeated from 449A4 where it stood toward ψυχαί as διοικήσεις stood toward πόλεις.

3723

ἀριστοκρατία (E7); the term is brought forward from the end of Book Four (445D6).

3724

With ἀγαθόν τε καὶ δίκαιον (E8) Socrates refers back to the man whose soul is ordered according to the conclusion reached in Book Four, δίκαιον being the attribute that reaches the other three virtues while ἀγαθόν represents all the others, whether alongside it or as superintended by it. Superlatives are notably absent: the man is just good. Cf. 549C3.

3725

ἑστῶτα (545A3) replaces the metaphor κατασκευή (544E5) with the metaphor κατάστασις.

3726

τὴν Λακωνικὴν (A3): With the proper adjective he once again he skirts using a term for this species of πολιτεία (and only this type: cf.544C2-7), though he does begin to characterize it by characterizing the source of whatever characteristic it has, namely, the personality corresponding to it (ὁ φιλόνικός τε καὶ φιλότιμος, A2-3).

3727

Reading τόν (A4), with mss. ADM and modern editors (om. F). The reappearance of the article (after its omission with ὀλιγαρχικόν [mitigated by αὖ] and δημοκρατικόν) is climactic (as was δή at C6 above) and sets up this last term as the sole antecedent to τὸν ἀδικώτατον (A5). Riddell’s assertion (§237) that the appearance or absence of the article in such a series is “completely” irregular is an overstatement.

3728

τὸν ἀδικώτατον (A5): That tyranny is the worst and the most unjust regime is assumed without argument, revealing that the purpose here is not to find which is worst but to hate it. The reference to Thrasymachus refers specifically to his remarks at 344A3-7, where he attempts to scandalize and thrill his audience by praising τυραννίς as ἀδικία τελεωτάτη.

3729

τῷ νῦν προφαινομένῳ λόγῳ (B1), dialectical φαίνεσθαι (334A10 and n.205) compounded with προ-. For the compound cf. Charm.173A3.

3730

πρότερον (B3): Though according to the order of genesis the cities derive from the personality types (γίγνεσθαι, 544D8), the order of the inquiry will proceed in the opposite direction, from state to man. The vicious circle is accepted without cavil, as it was in Book Two (368D5 and n.954). Cf. Appendix 7.

3731

ἐναργέστερον (B4), expressing in one word what had been recommended at 368C-369A3.

3732

ἄλλο (B6), adverbial: it does not assert that φιλότιμος is the only current term he knows, but that apart from this term he has nothing to call it by that would recommend itself by virtue of being current. The theoretical validity of the term he uses has nevertheless been shown (A2-3 and n.3726).

3733

ἤ (primum, B6): The abrupt asyndeton indicates that the choice between -κρατία and -αρχία is merely a matter of terminology. He suggests we imitate either of the terms used for the other πολιτεῖαι, whether ἀριστοκρατία (544E7) or ὀλιγαρχία (544C4). The τιμ- element comes from φιλότιμος (B5), itself an abbreviation of φιλόνικόν τε καὶ φιλότιμον at A2-3.

3734

κριταί (C5) recalls the words of the challenge and instruction (here referred to with προυθέμεθα) that Glaucon placed before Socrates at 361D3 viz., κρίνονται ὁπότερος αὐτοῖν εὐδαιμονέστερος (cf. also κρίσιν, 361D5). The theme is picked up with great emphasis below (576D7 and n.4378).

3735

κατὰ λόγον γέ τοι (C6), a rare combination of particles. Glaucon acknowledges the logic of the proposal (γε) with a compliant and supportive tone (τοι). After all, Socrates’s proposal resembles his own (at 360Eff) in all salient points. Compare τὸν ἀδικώτατον ἰδόντες ἀντιθῶμεν τῷ δικαιοτάτῳ (A5) with διαστησόμεθα τόν τε δικαιότατον καὶ τὸν ἀδικώτατον (360E2) // ἄκρατος (A7) with τέλεον (360E5) // ἱκανοὶ κριταὶ γενέσθαι (B5) with οἷοί τε ἐσόμεθα κρῖναι ὀρθῶς (360E2-3).

3736

τε … καί (C6).

3737

γένοιτ’ ἄν (C9): A “genealogical” approach that assumes one state evolves from another is now formally adopted without methodological justification or objection, despite the fact that the order of genesis was above said to be from personality to state. The assumption has been suggested above but never formally proposed (cf. μεταβάλλοι ἐξ ἀλλήλων, 449B1; διάφορος καὶ ἐφεξῆς γιγνομένη, 544C5-6 [with n.3713]; and ἔσχατον, 544C7, [with n.3716]). Has the notion been adopted merely as for the sake of having a program? Cf. 545E1 and n.3745.

3738

μέν (C9) is solitarium.

3739

μεταβάλλει (D1) begins to configure the becoming as a shift from one stable form over to (μετα-) another stable form: this was the formulation initially used in Book Five (449B1).

3740

αὐτοῦ (D1), as again at D2.

3741

κινηθῆναι (D3) in the sense of political disturbance, not the κίνησις (or γένεσις) of Ionian φυσιολογία. Having posited the steps along the path of change Socrates now broaches the mechanism of change. The assertion that “faction” begins as dissension within the ruling group is true by definition: cf. 465B.

3742

ἡμῖν (D5) the ethical dative of theoretical involvement (cf.371A8 and n.1004), moving from the consideration of political change in general to the question presently before us, the shift of our πολιτεία from aristocracy to timocracy.

3743

οἱ ἐπίκουροι καὶ οἱ ἄρχοντες (D6): This terminology, distinguishing between the rulers among the guards and the guards who support them, was adopted at 414B1-6.

3744

πρὸς ἀλλήλους τε καὶ πρὸς ἑαυτούς (D7): We may guess the meaning is that two kinds of faction could take place within the ruling group given the special structure of the ruling class: a faction either between the two sub-classes or within that of the rulers themselves.

3745

πρῶτον (E1): That the first event (merely the initium) should also be the ἀρχή (the principle cause of all that ensues)—i.e., that things are what they are because of where they came from—is one of the presuppositions of the mythological mode and will forever maintain a place in heaven for the work of the traditional Muses. Socrates and Plato revert to the old way here. A justification for the genealogical method Socrates has adopted is not forthcoming, though his extraordinary characterization of the Muses as haughty and playful (E1-3) immediately evinces Plato’s sensitivity to the problem (we may compare the tone of Soph.242C). Socrates and Plato have in fact told us that the true Music is philosophy (499D4). It will be entirely in Plato’s manner to supply us with the means to adjudicate between the relative virtues of myth and logos before too long (cf. ἀληθινὴ Μοῦσα, 548B8; and λόγου μουσικὴ κεκραμένου, 549B6). Meanwhile the heavy style of the Muses continues to give the problem a prominent mask.

3746

ὥσπερ Ὅμηρος (D7-8) refers to the sort of thing we see at Iliad 16.113 (ὅππως δὴ πρῶτον πῦρ ἔμπεσε νηυσὶν Ἀχαιῶν) and 1.6 (ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε) where note στάσις is done with διαστήτην. But the transition is so characteristic of epic that we need not search for any specific passage or closest parallel.

3747

δέ in οὐδέ (546A2) is illative, as often.

3748

To characterize the aristocracy as a σύστασις (A3; cf. συστᾶσαν, A1), as opposed to a κατάστασις for instance, in itself makes it vulnerable to λύσις.

3749

ἥδε (A4). The programmatic direction is declamatory in tone, more so than Socrates’s was (A1). Cf. Hdt.1.1.

3750

οὐ μόνον (A4): As at the start (χαλεπὸν μέν, A1), the movement of A4-7ff is from gnomic foil (οὐ μόνον ...) to the case at hand (plants / animals—animals / γένος ὑμέτερον).

3751

The accumulation of four antitheses (A4-7: ἐγγείοις / ἐπιγείοις – φορά / ἀφορία – ψυχῆς / σωμάτων – βραχυβίοις / ἐναντίοις) is relieved, if relief it can be called, by a lapidary phrase consisting of a nominative, a dative, a genitive and an accusative, all anarthrous, and all tied together by the verb that follows them in hyperbaton: περιτροπαὶ ἑκάστοις κύκλων περιφορὰς συνάπτωσι (A6). This is the σεμνότης of the gods declaiming truth to mere mortals (cf. 617D6-E5 and n.).

3752

θείῳ μέν / ἀνθρωπείῳ δέ (B3-4), a third move from foil (θεῖον) to focus or cap (ἀνθρώπειον).

3753

The ensuing description of the nuptial number makes no attempt to be clear; on the question how it should be clarified cf. N.Bloessner (Abh.Geist.Sozial.Akad.Wiss.Lit. [1997.1] Stuttgart, 1997). Perhaps it would suffice to say that it describes what the gods see when they look through their end of the telescope; but that what we must try to see, looking through our end, is why our προθυμία might fail, as Glaucon’s did at 532D2-E3.

3754

ἅς (D1): Connection done by the relative in order to make the declaration as longwinded as possible. Cf. C1 above and D3 below.

3755

οὐκ εὐφυεῖς οὐδ’ εὐτυχεῖς (D2). It seems the Muses have been listening to Gorgias: the rhyme proves it’s true.

3756

ἀμουσότεροι (D7): Music is first in the paideia and gymnastic second, but their balance is crucial to the value of each, and this is what ἀμουσότεροι infers: there is no “want of point” (Jowett ad loc.). Madvig’s conj. τε is therefore needless, and Jowett’s criticism that Spartans and Cretans (his paradigm of timocracy) were not negligent of gymnastics not only presumes Socrates is attempting to be historical, but also wrongly identifies this early stage in the process with the final result of the change, which is reached below, at 547B8ff.

3757

οὐ πάνυ φυλακικοί (D8), in speaking of a degree of “guardliness” alludes to the argument made with Glaucon at 412C7-10 (γεωργικώτατοι: cf. n.1843). That music as the “guardian” was reached with Adeimantus at 423D8-E6 (and will be, again: 549B6 and n.3804).

3758

χρυσοῦν τε καὶ ἀργυροῦν καὶ χαλκοῦν καὶ σιδηροῦν (547A1): In the original version of the myth (414D1-5C7) there were four metals for three classes; only now does their fourness become operant, as providing an even match of crossbreeding, two against two: hence the duals below (B2-7).

3759

ἀνομοιότης ἐγγενήσεται καὶ ἀνωμαλία ἀνάρμοστος (A3): ruination, all brought on because the fit between the elements (ἁρμονία) is imperfect, is here underscored by the series of privative ἀν- prefixes arranged in an alliterative chiasm.

3760

ταύτης τοι γενεῆς (A4-5) a first hemistich of a dactylic hexameter, sententious and satirical, not necessarily borrowed from Il.6.211 or 20.241.

3761

Μούσας γε οὔσας (A7): Socrates makes a joke based on their high-sounding rhetoric (545E1-3). Even the fundamentalist cannot rely on the veracity of the Muses. Everybody knows what they said the first time a mortal heard them speak: ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα, | ἴδμεν δ’εὖτ’ ἐθέλοιμεν ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι (Hes.Theog.27-8).

3762

εἱλκέτην (B2): The dual resumes the high and stately tone of the Muses. The speculative question, How will the ideal state be shaken? (κινηθήσεται, 545D5) was immediately replaced with a request that the Muses tell us how the process began (ἔμπεσε, 545E1), a shift to the epic “epistemology” that tells why things are as they are by telling where they came from (cf.545E1 and n.3745). Hence the imperfects εἱλκέτην and ἡγέτην (547B2, 7).

3763

ἐπὶ χρηματισμὸν γῆς τε κτῆσιν καὶ οἰκίας χρυσίου τε καὶ ἀργύρου (B3-4). The list presents the cause (χρηματισμός) and its effect (κτῆσις) linked by τε (primum) and elaborated in a sub-list of objective genitives done with two pairs notably configured as A1 καὶ A2 B1 τε (alterum) καὶ B2.

It is not gainful occupation that they desire but its result (just as at Symp.205C4-χρηματισμός is listed as the desire for external goods alongside φιλογυμναστία and φιλοσοφία as the desires for somatic and psychic goods). They will not become businessmen (D5-6) but feudal lords (C2-3). Specifying wealth with the pair “land and house” recalls the first items listed in Adeimantus’s objection at 419A5-6, a list that itself looks back at 416D4-417A5. Both those lists ended with gold and silver (416E4ff; 419A8-10), and so that pair is not out of place in this passage, but are its primary motive. This was suggested by τε after χρύσιον replacing καί before it, so as to set up a comparison with the same pair of “metals” as they inhere in the souls of the better guards (cf. 416E5-6).

This infixed τε is not the resumptive τε of 412B3-4, 430A6-B2; Crit.107C3-4; Leg.931B5-C1; nor the τε that appends exegesis (cf. Denniston, 502) as at 361B2, 495A7-8; Leg.633C1, 848A4-6; Soph.219D5-6; Symp.186A3-7; nor the merely redundant τε (doubled by καί) that reinforces the relatedness of two items, as at 357C5-7 (cf. n. ad loc.), 407B8-C1, 431B9-C1, 519B2, 611B2-3; Crat.407E6-8A1; Leg.733E1-2; Meno 75C8-9; Symp.206D3-5; Tht.149D1-3, 156B2-6, 176C3-4; Tim.28B7-8, 31B4; nor is it the τε that slows the pace just before closure as at 370D9-10; Leg.665C2-3, 735B1-2, 738C6-7, 842E1-3, 896C9-D1; Polit.288B2-4; Tim.24A7-8, 43B2-4, 92C8. The true parallels are Crit.114E10-5A1; Leg.733D8, 896D5-7, 899B3-4, 956E1-7(bis); Tim.42E8-9, 46D2-3, 80A3-4, 87D1-2—where almost always it introduces a new category of items. καί is varied with τε at Tim.42E8-9 and at Leg.880D6-7 (if indeed the καί after ταξίαρχοι is to be omitted: cf. Engl. ad loc.), merely to prevent ugly sing-song.

3764

χρυσίου τε καὶ ἀργύρου (B4) is echoed by τὸ χρυσοῦν τε καὶ ἀργυροῦν (B5). This is the first instance of a figure I call “astigmatism” employed several times in the sequel, a figure that embodies the way the outlying range of the words’ meanings needs to be redrawn when the wrong ideas begin to take over. Cf. φυλακῆς (C4) and ἁπλοῦς / ἁπλουστέρους (E2-3) and nn.3772 and 3781. My optical metaphor is inspired by Riddell’s metaphor of “binocular vision” by which he describes binary structure (§204).

3765

φύσει ὄντε πλουσίω (B5-6). The Muses have been listening to Socrates: 416E4-6.

3766

ἀρχαίαν (B6) blends the respectability of age with the prestigious notion of the source, in a way that continues to illustrate the Muses’ antique and untheoretical way of thinking.

3767

ὡμολόγησαν (B8): punctual aorist marking the definitive moment in a process so far described with imperfect indicatives and present participles. The new state once reached can then be described with presents and perfects (547D4-C2) using the present throughout except for the two perfects at the end [C1-2]).

3768

εἰς μέσον (B8) is idiomatic for compromise (e.g. Prot.338A1), but also emphasizes what has already been suggested (B2-7), that the timocratic regime is unstably poised between the regime of the λογιστικόν (aristocracy) and the regime of the ἐπιθυμητικόν (oligarchy, already presumed to be epithumetic just below: 548A5-6), a suggestion corroborated by the expression ἐν μέσῳ τις (C6 and D2), and by his choice to describe it by its relation to them. The corollary implication, that this halfway regime belongs to the part of the soul between those two, namely the θυμοειδές, is included at E3 in the narration of the regime’s ἴδια and then becomes explicit and thematic at 550B6. It is the character of the φιλότιμος to honor the good more than he loves it because what he loves is to honor things. Thus he can easily allow the honor he accrues from others who believe him to be good, to substitute for actually being good regardless of their opinion. Because they can love belief over reality in this way, those who love honor tend to have more to hide than to praise. Compare also the way, in the case of Leontius (439E7-440A3), the θυμός is given the last word, but that word comes too late, for it is after the struggle between ἐπιθυμία and λόγος has been decided, and decided the wrong way.

3769

κατανειμαμένους (B8): the prefix suggests invasion. It is the houses established by the workers that they come to own and occupy, whence the unstated corollary that their previous owners become their slaves. This is Adeimantus’s vision at the beginning of Book Four coming true.

3770

ὡς (C2) expresses the subjective reasoning and motivation of the φυλαττόμενοι.

3771

περιοίκους τε καὶ οἰκέτας (C3), the etymon of both terms evincing how the rulers’ appropriation of the homes (οἶκος) becomes the definitive index of all political identity and life.

3772

φύλακες (C4) now “astigmatically” (cf. n.3764 above) takes on a sensum inimicum in its domestic connection, as Adam notes, because those who were friends have now become slaves.

3773

μεταβᾶσα δε πῶς οἰκήσει; (C9): The process once begun does not continue but stops at another “stable state” (cf. μεταβάλλει, 545D1 and n.3739). Since the genealogical method here adopted has been introduced without explanation or justification it becomes incumbent upon us to keep track of how it works: (1) the disposition of the rulers (their impurity due to mistimed births) causes a stasis or faction to arise within a state, particularly amongst themselves; (2) this faction constitutes a conflict (here the balanced tugging in opposite directions due to their different goals); (3) the conflict is resolved (here by a new ὁμολογία among these persons) by the adopting of a policy; (4) this policy results in a new state of affairs whose nature we do not yet know but must look at to see what it is, as if empirically (in this case guided by the very abstract and logically analytic expectation that the regime is somewhere in between aristocracy and oligarchy and should resemble both but also have some qualities peculiar to itself). The στάσις is not the movement but its cause, and the resolution of the στάσις is not the new state of affairs but its cause. See Appendix 7 for a fuller treatment of both the method and methodology of the Book.

3774

μιμήσεται (D1): the verb is always potentially derogatory and here includes a strong warning. They may have the same policies but having them for different reasons or in different ways suggests that the resemblance is misleading.

3775

τὰ μέν, τὰ δέ, τὸ δέ (D1-2): At the same time that the triad of possibilities is logically exhaustive it also begins to embody the ἀνομοιότης and the ἀνωμαλία ἀνάρμοστος mentioned above (A2-3).

3776

ἀπέχεσθαι (D5): This provision does not assimilate the timocratic regime to the Spartan (Adam, citing Xen.Rep.Lac.7.1-2), but to the “ideal” state (as Socrates says: τὴν προτέραν μιμήσεται, D8). The list represents with two terms the “four or five” occupations needed for the simplest polis (369D6-12), and then characterizes them all as the money-makers in order to contrast them with the προπολεμοῦν element whose living expenses come from their profits (cf. the very similar three-part list at 551E6-2A1), but at the same time it reminds us that moneymaking suits the dominant element in their souls -- i.e., the epithumetic (434A9-B1 and C7-8). As we depart from the state we contrived, we would do well to keep in mind and remember how full and subtle was its harmony.

3777

δέ (D6) notably substitutes for καί (D4).

3778

γυμναστικῆς τε καὶ τῆς τοῦ πολέμου ἀγωνίας ἐπιμελεῖσθαι (D7): Music and gymnastic, the original pair of ἀντίστροφοι (411E4-412A7, recalled by Glaucon at 522A3), are now replaced with gymnastic and military contest, which on the face of it look like something and more of the same something. For the expression πολέμου ἀγωνία, cf. 374B1. To juxtapose ἀγωνία with ἐπιμελεῖσθαι is almost oxymoronic. The imitation indeed falls short of the original.

3779

οὐκέτι κεκτημένην (E2): both words stress that wise men had been present in the city not merely by happenstance but as an asset that accrued to it by the careful work of the theoreticians that constructed it.

3780

ἁπλοῦς τε καὶ ἀτενεῖς (E3). Notably this is not a criticism: the city’s prejudice against the “wise” is justified, recalling the skepticism of the conventional mind against interloping φιλόσοφοι as ἀλλόκοτοι (487D2).

3781

The re-use of ἁπλους (ἁπλουστέρους, E3) is striking (not feeble, as Jowett says), another indication that something is wrong (cf. the “astigmatism” in the use of φύλακες above, C4). The paradoxical effect gotten by such lexical juxtaposition will be used continually below to embody the ἀνωμαλία ἀνάρμοστος of which we were warned above (A3), in the description of mock versions of the old values as things decline into imitations of what once was. ἁπλῶς above denoted, with ἀτενεῖς, purity and undivided loyalty (vs. μεικτούς) but here it is a mere synonym for θυμοειδές (note τε καί) and takes on a completely new meaning: simple, direct, uncomplicated (next stop: stupid). That it stands in the comparative only adds insult to injury; and that these simpler types honor δόλοι τε καὶ μηχαναί evinces how, in their minds, means and ends are losing track of each other.

3782

Taking ταῦτα (548A1) to refer to the “latter” (πρὸς εἰρήνην): their reliance on reason (as used in diplomacy) itself shrinks down to the very power to deceive for which they distrusted it (E1-2).

3783

καὶ πολεμοῦσα … διάγειν (A2): The syntactically subordinate participle does all the work of generalizing what came before, while the syntactical order is completed by διάγειν, a semantic blank, the first of many instances in the next thirty pages.

3784

ἐπιθυμηταὶ δέ γε (A5): In the previous two paragraphs extenuated participial constructions were closed by an indicative (μιμήσεται, 547D8; ἕξει, 548A3); in the present case the governing indicative appears, chiastically, at the beginning (ἔσονται) and the participles continue on and on through a long paragraph (A5-C2) that even continues across an interruption by Glaucon (B2).

3785

οἱ ἐν τοῖς ὀλιγαρχίαις (A6): It is here, in respect to the ἴδια of timocracy, that a comparison with Sparta is finally apt (for which cf. Adam, 212-6), the timocratic regime being the one in which rule by the θυμοειδές is written large (as he will say below, C5-7), namely, the force within the soul that is distinct from the λογιστικόν but also will not allow itself to be confused with the ἐπιθυμητικόν (this being the dispositional evidence by which τὸ θυμοειδές had been proved to be distinct from τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν, as illustrated in the story of Leontius, 439E2-440A4).

3786

ἀγρίως ὑπὸ σκότου (A6-7): The juxtaposition again embodies the unstable ἀνωμαλία ἀνάρμοστος prophesied at 547A3. This, along with the ensuing juxtapositions (φειδωλοί ~ φιλαναλωταί // ὑπὸ πειθοῦς ~ ὑπὸ βίας (a dubious alternative when connected with πεπαιδευμένοι) // ἠμεληκέναι ~ τετιμηκέναι [B4-C2]), will elicit to Glaucon’s remark. παντάπασιν μεμειγμένην ἐκ κακοῦ τε καὶ ἀγαθοῦ (C3-4). τιμῶντες (A6) is, moreover, not otiose.

3787

ταμιεῖα (A7) comments on ταμιεῖον at 416D6 and οἰκείους θησαυρούς (A8) specifies it, again marking the new role of οἰκίαι in the guards’ lives (cf. n.3771 ad 547C3).

3788

γυναιξί (B1): The reference to wives (not courtesans) continues the new role that the οἶκος plays for the timocrat (547C3, 550D12). Courtesans will come onto the stage later.

3789

ὑπὸ βίας πεπαιδευμένοι (B7-8): an oxymoronic juxtaposition. Contrast 536D7-E4.

3790

ἐπιθυμηταί (A5) / φειδωλοί (B4): Whereas the two previous statements (547D4- 548B2) retailed elements shared with aristocracy (D4-8), and retailed departures from it as being the regime’s peculiarities (E1-548A3), the elements shared with the “next” regime, oligarchy (A5-C2) are now characterized with two countervailing forces, cupidity and stinginess (they want to have their cake and eat it too). This compound of an internally discrepant set of elements is then characterized by Glaucon as a mixture (μεμειγμένην [C3], with μέμεικται [C5] acknowledging the remark). Contrast the stabilizing effect of blending mentioned below (κεκραμένου, 549B6).

3791

διαφανέστατον (C5) repeats the metaphor of εἶδος διαφανές (544C8) and alongside μέμεικται invokes an Anaxagorean conception of a dominant element determining the character of an object despite the mixture πάντα ὁμοῦ (cf. DK 59 B12 [2.39.5-7]), as Shorey noted. Plato or Socrates often mine the φυσιολογία for illustrative metaphors (cf. 380E3-4 and n.1240).

3792

φιλονικίαι καὶ φιλοτιμίαι (C6-7), with mss. ADM, against the singulars of ms. F. The plurals are as acceptable as those at 547D4-5, but here would have the supplemental force of asserting that these attitudes permeate the regime.

3793

πῶς τε γενόμενος ποῖός τέ τις ὤν (D6-7): The account of the regime is to consist of an account of the movement leading to it and then an account of what it is like once it has arisen (547C9), and the account of the corresponding man will follow the same order. The force of the aorist (γενόμενος) is sequential—along with sequential τε … τε, for which cf. 553A3-4—and not absolute: Adam’s argument that the historical “vesture” of the account requires the aorist participle would likewise require ὤν to be πεφυκός. The important fact is that Socrates here avoids a finite form and therefore any tense (as again at 550B5 [ἦλθε]: see n.3826, another characteristic of the discourse we will be seeing often, in the sequel. Cf. Appendix 7.

3794

τουτουί (D9): The anarthrous demonstrative with its deictic iota is rude. Adeimantus’s interruption finally comes, as if he could not resist an opportunity to put down his brother! His allegation of φιλονικία is, characteristically, more indicative of his own feelings than anyone else’s (compare how he projects shame onto the guardians for cutting themselves a bad deal at 419A1-420A1 [cf. nn. on ἑαυτούς, A3; and ἄλλοι, A5]), and cf. n.3659). To adduce corroboration from Xenophon (Mem.3.6, cit. Stallb., Jowett) that this rivalrous allegation is in fact true about Glaucon, and to rely on that text despite the present dramatic context, places more reliance on a remote and inferior source than the “source” we have before us: throughout the dialogue it is Adeimantus that has been animated by pride, worry about his self-image, and the like – and never Glaucon. The pot is calling the kettle black.

3795

αὐθαδέστερόν τε δεῖ αὐτόν (E4): We had begun to presume Socrates would treat the genesis of the timocratic man and then his (resultant) nature (548D6-7); but Adeimantus’s interruption disrupts that order by requiring Socrates to correct—or at least supplement—his own remark about Glaucon. Thus the genesis is dealt with second (549C2ff), though no methodological query, objection or justification is voiced by anybody. The treatment has an order at the same time that Socrates does not insist on the order being followed.

3796

The balancing adjectives (E4-5 et seq.) portray the man as being ἐν μέσῳ like the regime (547B8).

3797

Reading μέν τις (549A1) with A2M (μάντις ἂν F | μέν τισιν D | μέν τις** A | μέν τις ἂν recc. and edd. | μὲν ἄν τις scripsit Slings). ἄν is dropped in conversation by dint of the close parallelism, here that of the balanced adjectives as emphasized by μέν / δέ (cf. n.1306 ad 382D11). In this man’s disposition, his love of what is honorable per se entails hatred of the ignoble per se.

3798

ἄγριος / ἥμερος (A1-3): The two dispositions and their juxtaposition are reminiscent of the two opposite emotions that are reconciled within the dog, though the language is different (πρᾷος / χαλεπός, 375D10-6A8).

3799

οὐκ ἀπὸ τοῦ λέγειν … οὐδ’ ἀπὸ τοιούτου οὐδενός (A4-5), insouciantly dismissive. We have come some ways down from the heights of 473A1-3 and the ascent to the Good which it initiated.

3800

The two pairs of terms, τῶν τε πολεμικῶν καὶ τῶν περὶ τὰ πολεμικά (A5-6) and φιλογυμναστής τέ τις ὢν καὶ φιλόθηρος (A6-7) are metabatic, moving backward from civic activities (ἔργα πολεμικά) to analogous personal ones (φιλογυμαστής / φιλόθηρος). The transitional step is supplied by τὰ περὶ τὰ πολεμικά which invites us to imagine the “paramilitary” character of the gymnastics and hunting. The balance of music and gymnastic is being replaced (cf.548B7-C2) with a spectrum of gymnastic activities whose termini are wartime and peacetime activities (cf.547D7).

3801

εἰλικρινὴς πρὸς ἀρετήν (B3) recalls the strong term ἀκήρατον at 416E6-417A1.

3802

ὁ Ἀδείμαντος (B5): Socrates adds his name to indicate to us that he has formally become his interlocutor. Cf.376D and n.1148.

3803

κεκραμένου (B6) suggests the moderating effect of water on wine.

3804

Adeimantus’s response, καλῶς λέγεις (B8), combines reason (λέγεις) with music (τὸ καλόν) so as to recall not only the wonderful vision Socrates reached with Glaucon at 401B-2A (n.b.καλῷ λόγῳ) but also that Adeimantus himself had reached this conclusion with him, at 423D8-424D (compare φυλάττωσι [423E1], φυλακτήριον, [424D1] with φύλαξ here [549B4]). There, Socrates had emphasized the importance of education by fatefully saying that as long as the guardian’s education was intact, other matters of public policy could be decided by the general principle κοινὰ τὰ φίλων (fateful because it gave Polemarchus his basis for stopping the argument a half hour later).

3805

νεανίας (B10) has the same referent as ἀνήρ (550B7, infra), and so the term cannot refer to the young age of the person described but his willful temper (cf. Soph.239D5 and LSJ s.v. §I.2) which if deprived of music may obstruct him from growing up. Perhaps Socrates for purposes of closure is pointing back at the age of Glaucon, in likening whom to the φιλοτίμος Adeimantus had required him to describe the type before the genesis, which is Socrates’s next topic.

3806

δέ γε (C2) marks the transition within the treatment from “the type to the origin”, as Shorey notes ad loc. (2.256, note b). But with uncharacteristic inaccuracy he adds as parallels 547E, 553B, 556B, 557B, 560D, 561E, 563B, 566E to argue that Ritter’s stylometric inferences of relatively frequent use of the collocation are invalidated by a consistency in its use in transitions. However (if A is the evolution of the state and B its resultant character, and A’ is the evolution of the individual and B’ his character) the uses of δέ γε that Shorey then cites are located as follows: 547E2 is within B; 549C2 is between B’ and A’ (the order uncharacteristically reversed); 553B7 is within A’; 556B6 is within A; 557B8 is arguably between A and B (though the formal transition comes at 557A6-9); 560D8 is within A’; 561E2 is within B’; 563B4 is within A; 566E6 is within B (answering μέν, D8). Moreover, (1) there are other instances of δέ γε he does not cite (562D6, 564D4, 566C8); while (2) the points of explicit transition, other than this one, whether from character to evolution or evolution to character, or state to man or man to state, do not employ δέ γε (namely 550C1-6, 551B7-8, 553A12-7, 553E2-4, 555A8-B6, 557A6-B2, 558C3-9, 561AA6ff, 562A1-5, 566C10-D6, 569C6-571A3, 573C11-12).

3807

ἐνίοτε (C2) introduces a new “Once upon a time” modality into the discourse. It is the modality of empirical verisimilitude (cf. ἔνια, Lach.185E8), supported by such words as τοιαῦτα (549C4, D4, E1) and ἀεί (D4) and ἄλλα δὴ ὅσα καὶ οἷα (D7-E1) and tending to adopt the point of view of the characters without warning (φιλοπραγμοσύνη [C5], for instance, is a “specious genus” [cf.n.2810 ad 485C8] depicting the husband’s feeling; the parallelism of ἑαυτῷ and ἑαυτήν [D4-5] depicts the wife’s odious comparison; cf. also their different uses of ἐλαττοῦσθαι, C5 and C9, and n.3809).

3808

πατρὸς ἀγαθοῦ (C2-3): Again the positive grade suffices (as it did above, 544E8).

3809

ἐθέλοντος ἐλαττοῦσθαι (C5): the use of the term in its rarer sense, of the attitude of the ἐπεικής as opposed to the ἀκριβοδίκαιος (Arist. EN 1137B35-8A3, MM 1198B26-32), highlights the father’s singular indifference to how the general public sees him (δόξα, τιμή: a sketch of such a man was given to Glaucon at 404AC). Note the sharp contrast with the wife’s commonsense use of the term just below (C9), peeved to see him bested by somebody else’s husband, another instance of astigmatic semantic juxtaposition. For Socrates or Plato to blame the “original sin” on the female is nothing new: her sequestered social position (cf. 579B8) requires her, after all, to rely on her husband’s character for her own good name. What is more important in the present formulation is the all too human blind-spot about the double meaning of a term like ἐλαττοῦσθαι (as of its converse, πλεονεξία: cf. n. ad 373D). The objection (common from Adam on) that “Plato” is violating his own “program” by imagining the aristocratic man living in something other than the aristocratic regime presupposes a provision never mentioned or adopted. To adopt it would only weaken the illuminative power of the analogy between the political and personal realms, and in particular would distract us from the profound importance of the father-son relation which is inherently apolitical (except perhaps in connection with δυναστεῖαι [cf. n.3717 ad 544D1], which is a form not exploited in the decline).

3810

ὅταν … πρῶτον μὲν τῆς μητρός (C8): Socrates had continued the genitive participial constructions (dependent on ὢν νέος ὑός, C3) in order to describe the young man’s father (C3-5: φεύγοντος / ἐθέλοντος) but Adeimantus interrupts, in effect to ask him to give a finite verb to the son, so as to show his change (γίγνεται, C7, vs. ὤν, C3), as if perhaps he found Socrates’s admiration of the father a bit tedious, or excitingly reminiscent. After all it is Ariston the ἀγαθός (cf.368A1-4) that Adeimantus must be hearing Socrates describe, just as surely as it was Ariston that Adeimantus had in mind when he criticized parental guidance at 362E4ff. The reply he then gets, however, only re-postpones such a verb, for Socrates now turns to the mother and begins a second extended series of genitive participles (C8-E1).

3811

ἰδίᾳ τε ἐν δικαστηρίοις καὶ δημοσίᾳ (D3): The word order directs us to take the symmetrical datives with the phrase between them. The choice between a public charge and a private one, a δίκη (ἰδίᾳ) or a γραφή (δημοσίᾳ), is a merely tactical decision within the overall strategy of making scandal for one’s enemy (λοιδορεῖν).

3812

ῥᾳθύμως (D3) is derogatory, as at 504C5: the description reproduces the wife’s attitude, not the husband’s. φέροντα indicates that λοιδορούμενον is passive, as Stallb. notes: ‘He won’t defend himself!’ she thinks (whence ἄνανδρος, infra). Adam’s reference to 500B3 proves only that the form can be middle (as it must be in that passage since it is reflexive). Here, it is passive.

3813

ἐξ ἁπάντων τούτων (D6): The anacoluthon is mild and temporary: the construction gets back on track with the genitive participle ἀχθομένης. Compare καθεύδῃ at 572A5 and the slip from subjunctive to indicative below, 550A2. Adam notices the peculiar style without describing it, and wonders if Plato is being too free. The anacoluthon is however a feature of the special “ecphrastic” style that Socrates has been adopting, which tries to postpone or avoid indicatives and to avoid or postpone moving from subordinate to ordinate constructions. Cf. Appendix 7 for a fuller description of the style.

3814

ἄνανδρος (D6): To depict the “Oedipal” effect of the mother’s remark on the adolescent son is the entire purpose of this paragraph, and is again the reason Adeimantus, always quick to criticize others, interrupts when he does. Again he finds the description “close to home;” his exposure to women outside his home would not be extensive enough to warrant the asseveration.

3815

ὑμνεῖν (E1): cf. 329B2.

3816

ἐνίοτε (E4), continuing the “once-upon-a-time” mode, asserts the verisimilitude of what is truly a simile and does not need to be true.

3817

καὶ ἐξίων (550A1): Socrates’s account fills out the rest of the young man’s home life and then moves to the outer world. That the powerless slaves should criticize his father for being weak (549E3-550A1) has a particularly corrosive effect on the adolescent, distinct from the effect of his mother’s charge of ἀνανδρία.

3818

λάθρᾳ (549E4) is subversive, so the participle δοκοῦντες has the sense it will have at 555E3: the slaves are the ones that take the trouble to appear to care.

3819

ἀνὴρ μᾶλλον ἔσται τοῦ πατρός (550A1): To imagine the scene will give the sensitive reader some pause; he will be relieved to remember that the father’s generation would not have listened to the slaves in the first place: 549A2.

3820

ἕτερα τοιαῦτα (A1-2): the ἕτερα of mild aposiopesis (cf. n.1224).

3821

τοὺς δὲ μὴ τὰ αὑτῶν (A4) a paradoxical litotes for τοὺς τὰ μὴ αὑτῶν, busy-bodies.

3822

τιμωμένους (A4), passive. He notices not their personal merits but only how they are “merited.”

3823

τότε (A4), marking the definitive moment in the genesis or evolution, which is what Adeimantus asked for at 549C7 above. It corresponds to the punctual aorist used by the Muses (547B8): but they after all were speaking of the past whereas we are speaking of a generic present. The young man is said to “see,” calling into question whether he understands what he sees (ὁρᾷ 550A2, governing participles: cf. 487C6 and n.2840, and 488A7 and n.2854).

3824

ἐγγύθεν (A7) betokens the personal image and admiration a son holds within himself for his father, and also the observation at 441A2-3, that θυμός is by nature the assistant of reason unless it is corrupted, as here, by its exposure to the masses. I believe Socrates is describing the psychology of Adeimantus, teetering between the alternatives we saw at 368A7-B3.

3825

κεχρῆσθαι (B4), the perfect stressing the cumulative effect.

3826

ἦλθε (B5) / παρέδωκε (B6) / ἐγένετο (B7): The aorists are not required by what came before, but Adam’s argument that they are proper only tries to explain them away. The narrative has hitherto been done in the present system (e.g. subjunctives, not optatives: ἀκούῃ, 549C8; αἰσθάνηται, D5; ἴδωσιν, E5; present indicatives: λέγουσιν, E4; διακελεύονται, E6; ἀκούει καὶ ὁρᾷ, 550A2). The most salient fact is the way Socrates has avoided not only indicatives but any finite form, relying on participles (another feature of the ecphrastic style: cf. Appendix 7). It is τότε that here invokes the aorist, which now describes a result irreversible once it is reached, which has special importance since he is narrating an evolution.

3827

εἰς τὸ μέσον … ἦλθε (B4-5): The “compromise” within that creates the philotimic man is made to echo the ὁμολογία among contending parties within the city that created the timocratic regime (εἰς μέσον ὡμολόγησαν, 547B8). For the aorist cf. E2, 551A8, 560A4-C4, and 566E2. That the main verb (ἦλθε) should be so otiose after so many colorful and dynamically arranged participles is another feature of this “ecphrastic” style.

3828

ὑψηλόφρων (B7): an hapax in Plato, of course, gratuitously stronger than μεγαλόφρων. The ὑψ- prefix is a favorite in Pindar's epideictic language, as for instance in the passage about the ὕψιον τεῖχος that Adeimantus quotes in describing the high-minded aspirations of the young man in Book Two (365B3). But now it is the man, and not the height he aspires to, that the term describes. We have to read between the lines and see that the young man is trying to compensate for leaving the values of his father behind.

3829

φιλότιμος (B7): Timocracy is rule by the thumoeidetic type of man (cf. νεανίας, 549B10), who wants honor (548C6-7) not rule by those who are honored (which is Aristotle’s sense, e.g., EN 1160A36, B17). Jowett’s criticism that “Plato” commits an historical error by distinguishing the timocratic regime from the oligarchic, despite the fact that several Greek regimes in fact combined Socrates’s definition of oligarchy with Aristotle’s definition of timocracy, is misguided.

3830

ἔχομεν (C3): Adeimantus enjoys going “toe-to-toe” with his interlocutor by repeating a word from his question, even more than the usual Greek habit (compare 551D8, E5; 552B1, C1, D7; 553E4; 571B2, and cf. Appendix 8).

3831

ἄλλον ἄλλῃ πρὸς πόλει τεταγμένον (C4-5) alluding to Aesch.Septem, 451 with its proleptic dative of ἄλλος (λέγ’ ἄλλον ἄλλαις ἐν πύλαις εἰληχότα), and remembering also his use of τάττω at 570 (πρὸς πύλαις τεταγμένος).

3832

λέγεις δὲ τὴν ποίαν κατάστασιν ὀλιγαρχίαν; (C10): Again the program gets ahead of itself and nobody objects. Just as Adeimantus’s interruption (548D8-9) caused the timocratic type to be described (E4-549C1) before the evolution that made him that way (C2-550B7), so here his request for a definition of oligarchy (550C10) predetermines the outcome of the genesis from timocracy (reached below at 551A12-B5). The ποιότης of the oligarchy is not however this defining feature but its unintended result (the ἁμαρτήματα subsequently retailed, 551C2-553A4): cf. n.3773 ad 547C9.

3833

ἀπὸ τιμημάτων (C11): For ἀπό cf. its use at 549A4-6.

3834

ῥητέον (D4) indicates that the genesis is to be treated first—before the description of the resultant state, that is.

3835

μεταβαίνει (D3) “impersonal,” as in all strictness it must be since timocracy is timocracy and oligarchy is oligarchy (cf. impersonal μεταβάλλει at 553A7, 555B8)—though the usage varies (μεταβάλλει personal at 562A8; cf. μεθιστάναι at 553E3 and 571A2).

3836

τιμαρχίας (D3) the version of the term that resembles the diction of ὀλιγαρχία, the stage which follows it, as τιμοκρατία had been the version (549B9) that resembled the diction of ἀριστοκρατία, the stage that preceded it (cf. 545B6-7 and n.3733).

3837

ἐκεῖνο (D9) = illud, as though it did not and could not go unnoticed; and yet the timocrat was scrupulous about keeping it secret and hidden (ὑπὸ σκότου, 548A7; κρύψειαν, A8; οὐ φανερῶς, B4-5; λάθρᾳ, B6). The original rule that the guards accumulate no treasure was supplemented by the provision that they have no hiding place to put it (416D7). Socrates’s statement that the even blind man can see what is wrong is therefore something of a joke at the expense of the timocrat, suggesting that it is only from himself that he is hiding. Thus, ἐκεῖνο reaches far back, through Adeimantus’s objection at the beginning of Book Four to the image of Gyges’s self-delusion), and to something that is in the back of almost everybody’s mind.

3838

Cf. 548A9-B2. The δαπάναι they “invent” public expenditures they enact but spend on themselves, to which Thrasymachus had alluded in his great speech (343D6-E6), recalled by Adeimantus in his interruption at the beginning of Book Four (419A4-5). The expenditures remain secret – a family matter they share with their wives (cf. 548B1).

3839

ὁρῶν (E1): There is psychological acuteness in noticing the wordless role that vision plays in envy (invidium, a nimis intuendo fortunam alterius [Cic.TD 3.9.20]), as well as the way envy confuses quantity and quality, which are confused in the phrase τὸ πλῆθος τοιοῦτον.

3840

ἀπηργάσοντο (E2): The aorist is again used of the permanent result: cf.550B5-7 and n.3826.

3841

ἀτιμότερα (551A2): The monetary sense of τιμή and its cognates begins to be felt as we settle down into lower realms: the shift was begun by τιμημάτων (550C11) and continued with the mercantile image of the scales.

3842

ἀεί (A4), in attributive position, gives the participle the sense of a subj. + ἄν in the protasis of a general condition. The truism is often repeated in later authors (Synes.de prov.103; Them.Orat.4.54, 15.195; Cic.Tusc.Disp.1.2).

3843

ἐγένοντο (A8), aorist of result with subsequent patterns of behavior done in the present (A9-10, A12).

3844

Cf. schol. ad loc.: φιλοχρηματισταὶ οἱ φιλοῦντες πορίζειν χρήματα, φιλοχρήματοι δὲ οἱ φιλοῦντες χρήματα. The two doublets (φιλονίκων / φιλοτίμων and φιλοχρηματισταί / φιλοχρήματοι, A7-8) compare cause and effect (cf. 555A1-3).

3845

ἀτιμάζουσι (A10): the inference is based on the etymon and the reallocation of honor just described; but conveniently the term includes the political sense of ἀτιμία and the genetic account has reached its goal (cf. πένητι δὲ οὐ μέτεστιν ἀρχῆς, 550D1).

3846

τότε δή (A12): cf. 550A4. The tenses of the indicatives are again almost purely aspectual.

3847

κατάστασις (B7), under the influence of the verb above (B5) now serves as a synonym for the γένεσις of the πολιτεία or for the process by which it evolves (μετάβασις: cf. μεταβήσεται μὲν δὴ οὕτω, 547C9) as opposed to the structure reached by that process (which is what it meant at 550C10). ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν (B7) comments on the nominalization of that cardinal act with the term κατάστασις, and recalls the methodology of 548C9-D4, according to which a sketch is sufficient for the purpose of bringing into view the corresponding man.

3848

τίς ὁ τρόπος (B8), perhaps with a hint of personification. The question asks what the question, μεταβᾶσα δὲ πῶς οἰκήσει; asked at 547C9.

3849

ἅ ἔφαμεν … ἁμαρτήματα (C1). Adeimantus reminds Socrates of his formulation at 544A2 (τὰς ἄλλας ἡμαρτημένας), itself a repeat of 449A3. The question slants the treatment away from observation of the result toward criticism of the result. Timocracy had been an unnamed regime and needed a description as between the two known ones (547C9-548C7), but oligarchy is already familiar (cf. e.g., 548A6) so that a fuller understanding of it could indeed consist of an inventory of its observable shortcomings.

3850

πρῶτον μέν (C2) to some extent suggests that we should start counting the shortcomings, as the scholiast did (ad loc.). He counted only five since he did not count the appearance of the drones as a distinct shortcoming. Cf. 554A2 and n.3891.

3851

πονηράν (C6): Adeimantus interrupts with a pun based on the etymological kinship of πονηρός and πόνος / πένης. He wishes to show that this time he has it right about the ship’s captain (cf.488AE). We should imagine his expression is a noun phrase in the “accusative of interjection” (cf. νὴ Δία and Gildersleeve, SCG §11). As usual, piloting (like doctoring) is adduced as a science needful to save life: cf. 341C4-2E11 and n.389 ad 341C9.

3852

τὸ μὴ μίαν ἀλλὰ δύο ἀνάγκη εἶναι τὴν τοιαύτην πόλιν (D5): The paradoxical expression was used above (422E8-423A1) where as here Adeimantus was the interlocutor.

3853

ὡς ἀληθῶς ὀλιγαρχικοί (E2). We say “literally” in English as the Greek says ὡς ἀληθῶς (or τῷ ὄντι, cf. 530A3 and n.3527), when the forgotten original metaphor of the is suddenly remembered. Why it “literally” or “truly” meant what it meant before (that ὀλίγοι ἄρχουσιν) has been sufficiently forgotten — eclipsed perhaps by the fact that it is the rich that rule, for which “the few” is perhaps a euphemism — that the new combination of the etymons (ἄρχουσιν ὀλίγων) is felt to be an etymological meaning over against the conventional sense.

3854

γεωροῦντας καὶ χρηματιζομένους καὶ πολεμοῦντας ἅμα (551E6-552A1): At 434AC Socrates said to Glaucon that allowing the moneymaker to do the work of the guards or their helpers was the ὄλεθρος of the state and its μεγίστη βλάβη and truest κακουργία. The string of negative characterizations was there contrived not to dispraise πολυπραγμοσύνη but to conclude that πολυγπραγμοσύνη is ἀδικία, and thereby to corroborate the contrapositive thesis that δικαιοσύνη is οἰκειοπραγία. The present reference, on the other hand, is to 374A4-D7, and Socrates’s term ἐλοιδοροῦμεν (551E6) reminds Adeimantus of the withering and indignant argumentum ex contrariis (cf. n.1104) by which he there made the point to his reluctant interlocutor, Glaucon. ἅμα goes with πολεμοῦντας only and reinforces τοὺς αὐτούς. The order of the three items is species/genus/opposite genus: the underlying ideas, that χρηματιζομένους generalizes γεωργοῦντας and that the military occupation is distinct from these, were brought to the surface recently (547D4-8.)

3855

ἐξεῖναι (A7) designates the lack of a preventive policy: cf. διακωλύεται (B2), and εἴργειν (555C2), and 556A4-6 (with n.3944) which points back to this passage.

3856

πάντα τὰ αὑτοῦ ἀποδόσθαι (A7): For the rule against it, cf. Leg.741BC and 744DE. Given the reference to 374AD, τὰ αὑτοῦ here connotes more than his wealth. It includes all that τὸ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν included there and has since come to include, including the practice of the one trade he is suited for (vs. πολυπραγμοσύνη). To the extent that the phrase does denote aspects of one’s οὐσία that are inalienable, it puts a strain on ἀποδόσθαι, a strain that evinces what is so unnatural and monstrous in the eventuality envisioned. Compare 555C4, where τὰ αὑτῶν is, from the point of view of the rich, replaced with τὰ τῶν τοιούτων, whereas those who have sold τὰ αὑτῶν to the rich still view what they have sold as τὰ αὑτῶν (555D10). The abominable notion of a man giving up “what he is,” which is tantamount to slavery, was broached by Thrasymachus in his praise of the tyrant (πρὸς τοῖς … χρήμασι καὶ αὐτούς, 344B6).

3857

μηδέν (A8) is proleptically neuter, by dint of the partitive neuter plural μέρων.

3858

μήτε χρηματιστὴν μήτε δημιουργὸν μήτε ἱππέα μήτε ὁπλίτην ἀλλὰ πένητα καὶ ἄπορον κεκλημένον (A9-10): The asymmetry of the list above (551E6-552A1: cf. n.3854), is now repaired: two terms for moneymaking are set off by two kinds of fighting; and then these two doublets are set off by a pair of derogatory “names,” πένης and ἄπορος.

3859

κεκλημένον (A10) is parallel with ὄντα (A8) as λόγος is parallel with ἔργον.

3860

ὀλιγαρχουμέναις (B2): The passive participle stands in for the adjective so as to distinguish the ideal type from the empirical examples.

3861

ὑπέρπλουτοι (B3): The garish prefix ὑπερ- is balanced by the adverb παντάπασιν. The rich have it all, the poor have nothing, and there is no middle.

3862

ἃ νυνδὴ ἐλέγομεν (B7), i.e., navigation and the rest, including political rule (551C2-11).

3863

ὑπηρέτης … αὐτῆς (B9) is epexegetical on ἄρχων, recalling the peculiar conception of the ideal state in which the rulers are helpers. For τε in exegesis cf. 361B2-3 and n.749. The expression sets up τῶν ἑτοίμων ἀναλωτής (B9), an alliterative chiasm with comic effect (cf. 375A2-3, 547A2-3). ἑτοῖμα is the wealth he has on hand as opposed to what he might earn—if he worked.

3864

σμήνους νόσημα (C3): Compare the similar appositive use of νόσημα at 544C7, of the tyrannical state.

3865

οἰκία (C3) here stands for πόλις, as οἰκεῖν has been used (547C9, 551D6) and will be used (557A9) for the life of the polis. The immediate purpose of the metaphor is to weld the analogy to the hive.

3866

κέκληνται (D1) recalls κεκλημένον (A10) and with it the notion that villainy is not a legitimate μέρος τῆς πόλεως but an ad hoc designation.

3867

κλέπται τε καὶ βαλλαντιατόμοι καὶ ἱερόσυλοι καὶ πάντων τῶν τοιούτων κακῶν δημιουργοί (D4-6): The list designates theft of property as opposed to violent crime. For generalization of the list done by a periphrasis with a filler term (κακῶν δημιουργοί, D4-5) cf. ἔργον at 374D8, and 431C1-2 (and n.2152), and n.1797 on διατεθῶσιν, 410C10. κακῶν δημιουργοί analyzes the term κακοῦργοι in order to satirize their lack of a true civic role.

3868

ἐπιμελείᾳ βίᾳ (E2) Despite the attempts by Jowett and Shorey to adverbialize the latter feminine dative and Adam to adverbialize the former feminine dative, the double dative is an oxymoronic paradox, indeed a paradox that bodes ill for law and order. Cf. ἀγρίως ὑπὸ σκότου (548A6-7). There is no need to smooth out things, with Slings (Crit.Notes 142-3). Socrates spells out the idea at 554C1-2. The astigmatism of timocracy is giving way to the oxymoron of oligarchy.

3869

The list ἀπαιδευσίαν καὶ κακὴν τροφὴν καὶ κατάστασιν τῆς πολιτείας (E5-6) is metabatic, moving backward from the ill result, to the failure of nurture that led to it, to the fundamental error in policy that allowed or condoned the nurturing to fail. Though the items are connected with flat καί only, the metabatic logic extends the governance of κακήν to κατάστασιν. For the form cf. Leg.800C2-3, ἀθυμίαν καὶ κακὴν ὄτταν καὶ μαντείαν, where again the initial noun in privative alpha sets the tone for κακός to govern both of the following nouns. Usually the extended governance of the adjective is made more obvious, whether by placing it after the first noun, by adding τε to tighten the link between the two nouns, by adding an article that tucks the common adjective into attributive position, or by a combination of these: Leg.686E5, δύναμιν … πολλὴν καὶ ῥώμην; Rep.442A1, λόγοις τε καλοῖς καὶ μαθήμασιν; H.Maj.304B3, τῶν αὑτοῦ χρημάτων καὶ φίλων; Leg.800A4-5, τὰ δημόσια μέλη τε καὶ ἱερά. Leg.800D2-3, ῥήμασί τε καὶ ῥυθμοῖς καὶ γοωδεστάταις ἁρμονίαις, achieves a climactic effect by exceptionally postponing the adjective to the last noun.

3870

τοιαύτη / τοσαῦτα (E9-10): the doublet of quality and quantity along with the echo of Adeimantus’s request that Socrates to tell the character (τοιαύτη, E9; cf. τρόπος, 551B8) of the oligarchic regime by retailing its shortcomings (κακά, E10; cf. ἁμαρτήματα, 551C1), indicates closure of this section.

3871

ἴσως δὲ καὶ πλείω (E10), a reference to the principle that an incomplete version may be sufficient (548C10-D4).

3872

οἷός τε γενόμενός ἐστιν (553A4): Again the outcome (οἷός ἐστιν) is seen as an after-effect of the process (γενόμενος) rather than its stopping point, and again the treatment of the genesis is meant to come first: cf. 547C9 and 548D6-7 and nn. For τε … τε linking this cause and this effect cf. 548D6-7, and for the usage cf. Phdrs.248B7-C2, and Meno 98E7, where μήτε … μήτε links grounds and inference.

3873

μάλιστα (A6), another story-teller’s term as if to choose the most interesting instance out of many possibilities.

3874

ζηλοῖ (553A9): there is a tinge of competitive rivalry in the term: the son's θυμός is animated by the sight of his father, whereas the virtuous man's son felt a different influence from his father, that his rational part was being “watered and tended to” by him (ἄρδοντός τε καὶ αὔξοντος, 550B1-2).

3875

The ἕρμα (B1) is submerged and invisible; ὤσπερ πρὸς πόλει suggests it is a trap. The metaphor recalls Aesch.Ag.1005: ἔπαισεν ἄφαντον ἕρμα, where the Chorus expresses their consternation while Agamemnon, the proud and prideful general, enters his house on the purple carpet (the lacuna in that passage affords us an opportunity to imagine that Plato might just be quoting it).

3876

τά τε ἑαυτοῦ καὶ ἑαυτόν (B2): The personal calamity resembles the sale of “what one owns and is” that was described at 552A7-10 as a malady peculiar to oligarchy.

3877

ἐκχέαντα (B1): the diction is tragic (Aesch.Pers.826, Choeph.520; Soph.Philoc.13, Elect.1219) but the metaphor ἐκχεῖν ὄλβον is as dead as the metaphor “squander wealth” in English (“squander” originally meant scatter, not waste: cf. Skspr.Merch.Ven.1.3.22; As You Like It 2.7.57), and was dead even as early as Aeschylus, or else Orestes’s remark at Choeph.520 (τὰ πάντα γάρ τις ἐκχέας ἀνθ’ αἵματος) would lose its point. Plutarch can write δόξαν τῶν προβεβιωμένων ἐκχεῖν (de lib.educ. 10B), where literal pouring is impossible.

3878

στρατηγήσαντα (B2): Military rank is the paradigmatic goal of the φιλότιμος (cf. 547C3-4, D7, E4; 548A2).

3879

Reading βλαπτόμενον (B4) with all mss. The salient characteristic of this entire passage is the heaping or massing of circumstantial participles in a way that leaves the reader with the burden of construing their logical relations. For a full account of the deployment of this “ecphrastic” style in Book Eight, I again refer the reader to Appendix 7. Here, ἐμπεσόντα announces the fact of legal action, βλαπτόμενον the intent of the action (whence the conative present), and the three subsequent participles the conventional spectrum of punishments sought at law. The participial construction heaps them all into the consciousness of the son who is looking on (whence ἰδών … καὶ παθών, B7).

3880

ἀτιμωθέντα (B5) stresses the pride, rather than the competence, with which he held office.

3881

τὴν οὐσίαν ἅπασαν (B5) includes monetary wealth, but such was never his measure. In the next line, however, in the son’s understanding, τὰ ὄντα does come to mean wealth.

3882

ἰδὼν δέ γε ταῦτα παθὼν καὶ ἀπολέσας τὰ ὄντα (B7): The logic of the three participles (B7) is metabatic: he witnesses the event (ἰδών) and then feels the pain (παθών), and now suffers the objective result (ἀπολέσας); which in turn leads to his reactive response (δείσας) and behavior (ὠθεῖ). Compare Apol.21E3-4: αἰσθανόμενος μὲν καὶ λυπούμενος καὶ δεδίως (where, n.b., καί [primum] legunt omnes mss.).

3883

ἐκ τοῦ θρόνου (B8): Animated by φιλοτιμία the father had naturally has placed his own favorite onto a throne. The son’s headstrong reaction would have been moderated if he had been raised on the kinds of song Socrates asks Glaucon to retain in the ideal state, at 399AB (esp.B7-8).

3884

ταπεινωθεὶς ὑπὸ πενίας πρὸς χρηματισμὸν τραπόμενος, γλίσχρως (C2-3): The reversal of affairs is expressed with an alliterative chiasm that makes γλίσχρως prominent for the way it dangles.

3885

One part of the timocratic son still feels that mere wealth needs these accoutrements in order to deserve a throne (cf.B8 and n.3883), while the other part cynically revels in the empty pomp. The τιάρα, the στρεπτός and the ἀκινακή (C6-7)—terms occurring only here in Plato—are Oriental accoutrements appropriate to the μέγας βασιλεύς, and the plurals are both magnific (sic Jowett) and derogatory. The tiara is a loose turban (ἀπαγέας, Hdt.7.61.1) of which there is a royal version (A.Pers.661) distinguished from others by flaring upward like a bird’s comb (ὀρθήν, X.An.2.5.23). The στρεπτός is a plaited necklace (περιαυχένιον, Hdt.3.20.1). The ἀκινακή is a short sword (Hdt.7.54.2, etc.) worn on the right hip. All can be gold or gilded (τιάρη χρυσόπαστος, Hdt.8.120) and given as presents (Hdt.8.120; X.An.1.2.27) or stolen from corpses (Hdt.9.80.2). Plato may have in mind such a thing as a description of Cyrus as emerging in regal parade, as at X.Cyr.8.3.13 (where Plato’s στρεπτός is Xenophon’s διάδημα).

3886

We may account for the shift from οὐ (D3) to μή (D5-6) by the word order, which makes the early οὐ (along with its mate, οὐδέ) virtually adhaerescent to ἐᾷ whereas the later μή’s follow the dependent infinitives.

3887

μηδ’ ἐφ’ ἑνί (D6) is merely μηδενί in a tmesis that observes the rank of the preposition: compare 429B4 and 610E10, and contrast 516A2.

3888

καὶ ἐάν τι ἄλλο εἰς τοῦτο φέρῃ (D7): What comes immediately to mind is currying the favor of “the right people” (i.e. πλουσίους, D5).

3889

οὐκ ἔστ’ ἄλλη … οὕτω ταχεῖά τε καὶ ἰσχυρά (D8), virtual superlatives acknowledging the superlative μάλιστα in Socrates’s claim at A6, and therefore closing the argument.

3890

σκοπῶμεν δὴ εἰ ὅμοιος ἂν εἴη (E4), after ἡ γοῦν μεταβολὴ αὐτοῦ (E2), again carefully maintains a distinction between the process and the outcome that results from it.

3891

πρῶτον μέν (554A2) recalls that the description of the oligarchic state of affairs, to which the man transformed from timocrat is presently to be compared, was presented as an inventory of shortcomings (ἁμαρτήματα [551C1] or κακά [552E10]), and that these were more or less ordinalized (though with decreasing explicitness) as five or six, as follows: πρῶτον, 551C2 (cf. ἓν μὲν τοῦτο, D1): requiring wealth in rulers rather than competence (label this #1); τόδε, 551D3: that the city is two cities = #2; τόδε, 551D9: inability to form an army = #3; ὃ πάλαι ἐλοιδοροῦμεν, 551E6: multi-tasking = #4; τόδε, 552A4: the possibility of utter destitution = #5; and finally τόδε δὲ ἄθρει, 552B6: the evolution of drones with stingers, B6-E7 = #6. We now are inclined to watch for these five or six points in the description of the man.

3892

περὶ πλείστου ποιεῖσθαι (A2): The oligarchic regime is after all based on the property requirement (550C11-D1).

3893

δουλούμενος (A7): The resemblance to the regime falls under aspect #5, the regime’s enslavement or disenfranchisement of the poor or working class (whose corresponding psychic function was desire): 551A10, A12-B5, D5-7; 552A7-10.

3894

αὐχμηρός (A10): cf. Ar.Plut.84 (αὐχμῶν βάδιζεις, of Ploutus), and Symp.203D1 (of Eros).

3895

θησαυροποιός (A11): Socrates alludes to the “demotic” conception of the four virtues, i.e., the brains, industriousness, guts and reliability needed to amass a fortune. The oligarch does it for money’s sake but accrues from the masses the honor the timocrat desired. Cf. καὶ γὰρ ὁ πλούσιος ὑπὸ πολλῶν τιμᾶται, 582C5-6.

3896

Reading ἦ (B1) rather than ἢ, which better acknowledges the way he has departed from the frame of the discourse with a series of characterizations in the nominative, including asyndeton. Socrates is slanting the individual in the direction of the image of the regime, and Adeimantus goes along with him (γοῦν, B2). The amassing of fortune is the only thing the oligarch rulers are interested in (551A7-10).

3897

τυφλὸν ἡγεμόνα (B5): The hegemonic “vision” that the blind man lacks is described at 484C6-D3. That Ploutos is blind (as he is said to be at Ar.Plut.90) is the other ingredient in the metaphor, but the joke is inexact since the blindness of Ploutos there embodies the idea that men become rich regardless whether they are good or bad. The link is supplied by the first criticism of oligarchy above, according to which wealth is allowed to trump competence in rule: 551C2-D1.

3898

Reading ἐτίμα μάλιστα (B6) with Schneider against ἔτι μάλιστα of the mss. For the inability compare #1. The astigmatism of τιμή (“estimation”) continues to be operant (cf.551A2 and n.3841).

3899

κηφηνώδεις (B7): Socrates coins the abstract adjective for its theoretical serviceability: he is comparing the man to the regime on point #6. When are we to realize that the drone’s desires are desires for the honey produced by the working bees? So much is assumed 559D8.

3900

ἀπαιδευσίαν (B8): The effect of “faulty education” on the man is borrowed from its effect on the city (552E5-6). There, ἀπαιδευσία allows not drones in general but scoundrel-drones to come into being; here it nurtures both types. Whereas there, neither ἀπαιδευσία nor its effect was one of the programmatically prominent ἁμαρτήματα, the parallel plays a prominent role here in the analogy. We must therefore curb our inclination to see the description of the man proceed pari passu with that of the regime and allow the order of the treatment to emerge on its own.

3901

βίᾳ ὑπὸ τῆς ἄλλης ἐπιμελείας (C1-2). This same oxymoronic and unstable alliance of force and care was worded into existence in the policy of the oligarchic regime at 552E2 (cf. also 547D7 and n.3778). The term ἐπιμέλεια resonates throughout Socratic discourse as the term for tending to one’s soul, not lucre: Apol.29D9, E2, 31B5, 36C6; Crito 51A7; Euthyphr.2D2; Lach.179A5,9, B5, 187A4; Phdo.107C2, 115B6; Prot.325C3-4, 326E2, D3, 328E2. The image of the oligarchic man trying to manage his wealth (called here, by a euphemistic misnomer, τῆς ἄλλης ἐπιμελείας, “his overall concern”) at the same time that he quells the costly desires with force (βίᾳ) corresponds to the oligarch’s πολυπραγμοσύνη, having to be a warrior the same time he is a moneymaker (#4 above).

3902

αὐτῶν (C4): subjective genitive. Its antecedent is ἐπιθυμίας (B7) not αὐτῷ (B8).

3903

τὰς τῶν ὀρφανῶν ἐπιτροπεύσεις (C7): Cf. Leg.777DE, Hes.WD 330. In the case of the orphan there is no family to avenge mistreatment of the child.

3904

πολλῆς ἐξουσίας λαβέσθαι τοῦ ἀδικεῖν (C8-9): The expression recalls Glaucon’s vision of such a golden opportunity expressed in his Gyges speech: τοιαύτης ἐξουσίας ἐπιλαβόμενος (360D2).

3905

εὐδοκιμεῖ δοκῶν (C12): For the mild redundancy cf. εὐδοκιμήσεων διὰ δόξαν, 358A5.

3906

ἐπιεικεῖ τινι … βίᾳ (C12-D1): Forced decency, another paradoxical (and unstable) combination. I take the liberty of inverting noun and adjective to get the oxymoron into English. The violence in question he wreaks onto himself.

3907

τῆς ἄλλης οὐσίας (D3) echoes τῆς ἄλλης ἐπιμελείας, with adverbial ἄλλης designating the overriding concern against which he measures all specific things.

3908

δέῃ (D6) is not only a stretch of the sense of δεῖν in the direction of the Thucydidean δέοντα (e.g., 1.138.3), but also a sort of oxymoron by which his desire to gain is as compulsive as his desire to appear moral (ἀνάγκῃ, D2 supra): if he can get away with misdeeds, he must.

3909

τοῦ κηφῆνος συγγενεῖς ἐνούσας (D6-7) is a natural brachylogy for συγγενεῖς ταῖς ἐν κηφῆνι ἐνούσαις and should not give us any more pause in Greek (Phlb.34C6, 41C5-6; Prot.358D1-2) than it does in English.

3910

οὐδὲ εἷς (D9-10): Not only is he two rather than one (for which compare point # 2): both parts of him are characterized by the same thing, desire. What is missing in the plutocrat is honor, just as mind was missing in the timocrat. His two-sidedness is what calls for the oxymoronic semantics we have been noticing.

3911

ὁμονοητικῆς δὲ καὶ ἡρμοσμένης (E4): The language recalls the “psychodynamic” theory of temperance reached in Book Four (ἁρμονία, 431E8; ὁμόνοια, 432A7; cf. also 441E8-42A2). The εὐσχημοσύνη of such a man would be an outer show only, recalling Adeimantus’s εὐσχημοσύνη κίβδηλος (366B4).

3912

φαῦλος (555A1) is a term of abuse from the point of view of the others who would vie for honors.

3913

ἤ τινος νίκης ἢ ἄλλης φιλοτιμίας τῶν καλῶν (A1): The unthinking association of victory, honor, and fine things into a seamless spectrum again represents the timocratic point of view in its own voice. Adam ad loc. reminds us of the rich Athenian’s ambivalence toward λειτουργία. Note the tendency of the enclitic to come early (cf.380D8 and n.1238).

3914

χρήματά τε οὐκ ἐθέλων (A1-2). τε may append an explanation or indicate that more is to come: here it does both. The participles parallel with ἐθέλων (δεδίως, πολεμῶν) are added without connectives.

3915

The pairings of the nouns (νίκη ~ φιλοτιμία // εὐδοξία ~ ἀγῶνες, A1-2) are both pregnant: νίκη is the focus of φιλοτιμία τῶν καλῶν, while εὐδοξία is the goal of the ἀγῶνες (cf. 551A7-8 and n. 3844). The ecphrastic style requires a both heightened involvement and greater diligence from the reader than Plato’s (or Socrates’s) normal style: cf. Appendix 7.

3916

ἀναλωτικάς (A3), by its placement in postponed attributive position nicely depicts his own ambivalence.

3917

συμμαχίαν (A4): The alternative he will reject is described in language that still knows the old glory (agnoscit veteris vestigia flammae, if you will). To rouse the desires that he would repress (ἐγείρειν, A3, cf. βίᾳ κατέχει [554D1] and κρατούσας [E1]) is tantamount to summoning them into an alliance dedicated to victory itself (συμμαχίαν τε καὶ φιλονικίαν recalls a well-travelled path), and his success at self-mastery is tantamount to his defeat (ἡττᾶται, A5). ὀλίγοις though elsewhere approbatory has only a derogatory connotation here, akin to that of φειδωλός.

3918

ὀλίγοις τισὶν ἑαυτοῦ πολεμῶν (A4-5): There is no adversative particle, just the semantic contrast between συμπαρακαλεῖν εἰς συμμαχίαν and ὀλίγοις τισίν. The concatenation of nominative participles requires us to supply their logical relation ourselves.

3919

ὀλιγαρχικῶς (A5), remembers the new sense of “few-ruling” encountered in the oligarchs’ dilemma about arming the citizens (551D9-E3) which is aspect #3, and the last of the six.

3920

καὶ πλουτεῖ (A5-6): Stunning bathos. By the last word he is left mired in ... gold! The inversions and contradictions recall the paradox whether a man can be master of himself (430E11-431A1,ff).

3921

ἡττᾶται (A5) another term that would trigger shame in the φιλότιμος: cf. ἐλαττοῦσθαι, 549C9 and n.3809.

3922

τετάχθαι (B1), closing the treatment of oligarchy and the vicious man that goes with it by recalling the metaphor with which it opened (τεταγμένον, 550C6), although this time he retains the description germane to the individual man (contrast climactic φιλότιμος, 550B7).

3923

γενομένη τε ποῖόν τινα ἔχει (B4): Again the result is thought of as unavailable for scrutiny until the evolution is discovered, but with his puns on τρόπος (B5, B8) Socrates plays with the methodological distinction.

3924

παραστησώμεθ’ αὐτὸν εἰς κρίσιν (B5-6): In all strictness we anticipate the judgment will compare only the most just man to the least just. Socrates tolerates the inaccuracy in order to remind us of the whole purpose, and thereby acknowledges how the depth of detail and pathos in the passage we have just completed might have let us forget the goal, while at the same time he clears the way for an entirely new episode.

3925

ὁμοίως γοῦν ἂν ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς (B7): Compare Glaucon’s remark at 545C6-7 (κατὰ λόγον γέ τοι ἂν οὕτω), which also avowed commitment and confidence in the method and its methodology.

3926

μεταβάλλειν (B8), again impersonal: cf.553A7 and 550D3 and n.3835).

3927

ἀπληστίαν τοῦ προκειμένου ἀγαθοῦ (B9-10), restating πρῶτον τοῦτο αὐτό (551C2) in a different way. προτίθεσθαι (as again at 562B3) denotes placing a goal before oneself (the σκοπός of later ethical theory), but a goal you cannot get enough of cannot be reached, and so the phrase is an oxymoron (contrast the corrective notion of the ἱκανόν [cf. 423E2 and n.2053]).

3928

The νέοι (C2) are seen here as a social class rather than as the immediate children of the rulers, though the line of demarcation is blurred below (cf. τοὺς αὑτοῦ, 556B8). The unthinkable and mortifying notions of the father exploiting the son and the son the father, are suggested before they are brought out into the open.

3929

γίγνωνται (C3): The subjunctive (rather than optative) indicates that the youthful behavior is natural and likely. ἀκόλαστος means licentious and unruly only because it means they fail (ἀ-) to be reformed by punishment (κόλασις); and yet the problem is that the rulers make no rules more than that the young that don’t obey them, and so the expression is oxymoronic. The irony was broached by the repetition of ἄρχοντες (C1). These “rulers” are already acting as if they have nothing to do with what is going on around them (E3-4, infra).

3930

καὶ ἐντιμότεροι (C5): The motive evinces another vestige of φιλοτιμία, not the φιλοτιμία τῶν καλῶν (A1) but χρημάτων (551A4-10) first symbolized in the story by the Persian accoutrements (553C6-7): the ἀκινακή might have been of too soft a metal (gold) to be serviceable!

3931

παντὸς μᾶλλον (C6): the generalized comparative is logically equivalent to superlative μάλιστα.

3932

ἀδύνατον (D1) cf. 550E4-8.

3933

κτᾶσθαι (C8): The diction and the construction (the subject of κτᾶσθαι should properly be the πολῖται) skew the expression toward the πλεονεξία in the rulers.

3934

παραμελοῦντες (D3) replaces ἀμελεῖν (D1), suggesting not just the lack of care but, with παρα-, a misdirecting of care. Compare the warped uses of ἐπιμέλεια above (554C2, 552E2) and contrast the truism Socrates voices at Euthyph.2D1-4 (τῶν νέων πρῶτον ἐπιμελεῖσθαι).

3935

ἐν ταῖς ὀλιγαρχίαις (D3): The plural is empirical (cf. ὀλιγαρχουμέναις, 552B2 and n.3860).

3936

ἠνάγκασαν (D4), a gnomic aorist because of ἐνίοτε. The verb seems to have a special sense in legal contexts like the present, according to which the constraint (ἀνάγκη) of law does not compel but encourage, just as their absence does not require, but allows, a pattern of behavior. Cf.556A9, 601E8 (with 602A5), and Protagoras’s use in connection with pedagogical and civil authority in the upbringing of the young (Prot.326A1, C1, C7, D7; 327D2).

3937

τε καί (D7-8) linking metaphor with its interpretation: cf. n.92 ad 330D7.

3938

οἱ μὲν ὀφείλοντες χρέα, οἱ δὲ ἄτιμοι γεγονότες, οἱ δὲ ἀμφότερα (D8-9): The first two statuses correspond to whether the wealthy have loaned them money against their possessions or have bought them out (ὠνούμενοι … καὶ εἰσδανείζοντες, C4-5: cf. 552A7-8). The third and worst status combines these, in case their debt exceeds their collateral. Note again the shading of τίμη toward monetary worth.

3939

τοῖς ἄλλοις (D10) pregnant for τοῖς κτησαμένοις τὰ τῶν ἄλλων, representing a first stirring of “solidarity” among the disenfranchised, whence the sentiment νεωτερισμοῦ ἐρῶντες.

3940

ἐνιέντες ἀργύριον (E4) echoes and contradicts ἐφιέντες ἀκολασταίνειν (D3-4): first the “rulers” give their victims freedom; second they prick them with a silver sword.

3941

τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκγόνους (E5): The suggestion that these rulers are perverted fathers for their citizen-sons is continued by the language of loans and interest. The comparison of spawning sons to multiplying the principal recalls Cephalus’s indignant response to Socrates’s remark that the rich have many consolations (330B), and suggests reasons he would be satisfied to leave his sons as much his wasteful father had inherited, plus interest of course (ἀλλὰ βραχεῖ γέ τινι πλείω, 330B7).

3942

πτωχόν (556A1) may be a noun in exegesis of κηφῆνα (sharing its article); but I prefer to take it as an adjective sharing predicative position with πολύν in the common figure that pairs quantity and quality.

3943

πῶς γὰρ οὐ πολύν: (A3), a comment in the same vein as what he said at 552D10. It does not indicate that he takes πτωχόν in Socrates’s question to be a noun.

3944

εἴργοντες τὰ αὑτοῦ ὅπῃ τις βούλεται τρέπειν (A5-6): We may read back into this phrase, from the next lines (ἕτερον, A6; and δεύτερος, A9), that the “means of prevention” it describes is also a law or custom, namely the provision or policy alluded to at 555C2 as being forgone (ἐξεῖναι, 552A7).

3945

ἀρετῆς ἐπιμελεῖσθαι (A9-10): ἐπιμέλεια is finally returned to its proper context (cf. nn.3901 and 3934ad 554C1-2 and 555D3).

3946

A law of Charondas (attributed also to Plato apud Theophrastus fr.97.5 [Wimmer] = Stob.Florileg.44.22, cit. Adam) denies remedy at law for the creditor in case a debtor fails to repay (whether the principal or only the interest), on the grounds that lender is himself to blame for having trusted the debtor (αὐτὸν γὰρ αἴτιον τῆς ἀδικίας). Cf. Leg.742C3-6, 849E8-50A1, 915E2-6. At Leg.921AD an exception is made (n.b. τὰ πολλά, 556B1) for contracts that require an investment of time, since both parties in such cases need to rely on a future delivery and future compensation. The absence of a legal means of recovery will discourage predatory lending by the rich (χρηματίζοιντο … ἀναιδῶς) and will dampen the growth and further impoverishment of the underclass that it encourages: ἀναγκάζων (A9) again means using the constraint of law to encourage a pattern of behavior (cf.555D4 and n.3936).

3947

φύοιτο (B3) continues the metaphor of “engendering” a class of drones in the city. Compare ἐμποιεῖν (A1), γενέσθαι (555D5), ἐγγίγνεσθαι (552E3, 552C3-4), and the psychological correlate, “generating” dronelike desires (ἐγγίγνεσθαι, 554B8) in the individual man.

3948

νῦν δέ (B6): The shift to the optative in the apodosis (χρηματίζοιντο μὲν ἄν … ἐλάττω δὲ ἐν αὐτῇ φύοιτο, B2-4) after the more emotional protasis (ἐάν plus subjunctive, A10-B2), began to treat the hypothesis as mere speculation. νῦν δέ (B6) now brings us back to where we left off at 556A2, in “reality.”

3949

With σφᾶς δὲ αὐτοὺς καὶ τοὺς αὑτῶν (B8) Socrates interrupts himself. The reflexives indicate that we can supply a verb of which they are also subject—presumably διατιθέασιν (for the usage cf. Lach.180B6-7). τοὺς αὑτῶν echoes τὰ αὐτοῦ, their existential assets or stake as individuals, but the masculine gender narrows these assets down to their sons, the other young in the city that are neglected (contrast 555C2). For the first time the ruler’s children are broached, and the subject will return below (568E-9C).

3950

μέν / δέ (B8-C2), here comparing cause with effect.

3951

τῶν ἄλλων ἠμεληκότας (C4), including the care of their children. The vagueness of τῶν ἄλλων (C4) satirizes their unawareness of what they are neglecting. Cf. 562B6 and τῆς ἄλλης ἐπιμελείας, 554C1-2; and cf. Adeimantus's ἄλλα at 363E3.

3952

οὐδὲν πλέον ἐπιμέλειαν πεποιημένους ἀρετῆς ἢ τοὺς πένητας (C5-6): The comparison calls back to mind the mendacious saw of Phocylides (ὅταν τῳ ἤδη βίος ᾖ, ἀρετὴν ἀσκεῖν, 407A8). ἐπιμέλεια is granted its proper context again (ἀρετῆς) only for the sake of denying the “rulers” have anything to do with it.

3953

ἢ καὶ ἐν αὐτοῖς τοῖς κινδύνοις (C11-D1): αὐτοῖς indicates that κινδύνοις is the heart of the matter since it is in facing danger during any of these various engagements that the comparison becomes critical. For αὐτός applied to one item in a list to indicate that it is the essential item underlying the others, cf. 526D2-5, 559A11-B1; and Prot.325C7-D1 (where the others are acting on behalf of the father) and cf. n.1794. αὐτοῖς does qualitatively what πᾶσι would have done quantitatively, namely, it gives a berth for a generalizing noun. Cf. 526D2-5 where αὐταῖς conspires with ὅσα τε ἄλλα to generalize. This use is to be distinguished from cases where αὐτός is added to an item to acknowledge that the item (usually listed first) was already being discussed (Crat.423E2-5; Phdo.69C1-2; Leg.747A2-5; Soph.254D4-5; Thg.124B5-7; Tim.60A7-8 [n.b., ἐλαιήρον, A7]). In Phdo.85A7 αὐτή goes with the first in a list of the three birds involved in the Attic legend of Tereus, and means illa, a use perhaps akin to the Homeric use of αὐτός with names of gods.

3954

The long list of places and circumstances (C9-D1), which we had already construed with παραβάλλωσιν (C8), ends up being re-construed with θεώμενοι (D1) in a sort of epanalepsis, which allows the absence of a connective with καταφρονῶνται, whose mood indicates it is syntactically coordinate with παραβάλλωσιν, to go unnoticed (I re-supply the temporal conjunction in my paraphrase). ἴδῃ (D4) then extenuates the protasis even further, to prepare for the climactic description of the poor man’s new insight (D5-E1), which constitutes the apodosis.

3955

μηδαμῇ ταύτῃ καταφρονῶνται (D1) is a litotes. Whereas the “good man” simply ignored his slaves (549A2), in the present situation (ταύτῃ) the rich can no longer afford to ignore the poor they have created. Conversely, the poor man will see the rich man for what he is, on the bodily level at least (D2-5), and καταφρονεῖν will be the result.

3956

πολλάκις (D2), of the typical fact considered in isolation: “betimes.”

3957

πένης (D3): Socrates buries the social classification within the physical description. Even the fact that he is a man is presented first (ἀνήρ, D2, sympathetic: cf. 361B6 and n.753). The physical descriptions of the observing man and of the rich man he observes report the gross effects of the political order: both men notice and neither can ignore the implications. The chiastic order of the descriptors is typical.

3958

ἐσκιατροφηκότι (D3): Contrast with ἐν ἡλίῳ, 422C2, and compare the fatness here with πλουσίοιν δὲ καὶ πιόνοιν there.

3959

ἀλλοτρίας (D4) wonderfully ambiguous: not his natural endowment and therefore more than he can use; but also μὴ τὰ αὑτοῦ, something he acquired that is properly “of” others, the poor he has exploited (contrast σάρκας οἰκείας, Leg.797E5). The meaning of the situation is dawning on the poor man.

3960

The aorist ἴδῃ (D4) is concrete and particular after the present καταφρονῶνται.

3961

ἀπορίας μέστον (D5) an irrisory oxymoron.

3962

σφετέρᾳ (D6), third person plural possessive adjective, here reflexive. As with τοῖς ἄλλοις (555D10) the individual sees his own affliction in solidarity with the others of his class (and conversely sees the man beside him as representing all the others of his ilk: τοὺς τοιούτους, ibid.).

3963

I read Ἇνδρες (D7), with Burnet (ἄνδρες AFDM). Baiter’s emendation (παρ’ [for γὰρ AFDM] at E1) is easy and brilliant, but despondency and resentment are one step away from the step these poor are next said to take (νικήσαντες, 557A2): we need them ready to pounce (cf. 555D9-E1, esp. νεωτερισμοῦ ἐρῶντες).

3964

Adeimantus’s ἔγωγε (E2) claims personal knowledge of such grumblings, and his μέν solitarium indicates his recognition that they would indeed be on the very brink of action.

3965

διακειμένη (E6), in referring to the condition of the state, brings forward διατιθέασιν (B7). The drone element that oligarchy produces is conceived of as a νόσημα πόλεως (552C4).

3966

ἀπὸ σμικρᾶς προφάσεως (E6): By dint of the comparison (an essentially “Ionian” sort of analysis) we can identify this as the so-called medical use of πρόφασις.

3967

ἐξ ἴσου (557A4), a watchword of democracy, as at 561B2 and 561C4 (cf.359C6 and n.4764): the concept is satirized at 558C5-6.

3968

Reading γίγνονται (A5), the lectio difficilior, with F (γίγνωνται ADM): The shift to the indicative is a reversion to the indicative at the beginning (γίγνεται, A2), used to pinpoint the institution that marks the end of the genesis, the κατάστασις of choice-by-lot, a choice without choosing, which does not cause ἰσότης as Adam says, for reasons given by Isoc.Areop.22-3, but is an implementation of it.

3969

ἐάντε καὶ δι’ ὅπλων … ἐάντε καὶ διὰ φόβον (A6-7): For the alternatives of force and fear cf.551B3-5.

3970

τίνα δὴ οὖν … οὗτοι τρόπον οἴκουσι (A9): Socrates acknowledges Adeimantus’s recognition of the distinction between the μετάβασις culminating in a κατάστασις (as at 551B7), and the resultant character that ensues, without explicit terminology. As to the programmatic language, he continues to use the term τρόπος (cf. 555B5,8 and n.3923); and he reverts to the language of οἰκεῖν (557A9: cf. 547C9) for the manner of life.

3971

αὖ (B1).

3972

δῆλον γὰρ ὅτι ὁ τοιοῦτος ἀνὴρ δημοκρατικός τις ἀναφανήσεται (B1-2): Once again the transitional programmatic language is varied. γάρ (B1) explains that the characterization of democracy will be useful for their ultimate purpose since it is already clear that the man corresponding to the regime, which is the true explicandum, will be of a similar sort. By saying this “is clear,” he reminds us of the principle stated at 544D6-E2, that the character of a regime does not spring up from oak and stone but from the men that make it up.

3973

ἐλευθερία, παρρησία, and ἐξουσία (B4-6) are all mottoes or watchwords of democracy (cf. Adam’s citations ad loc.). That is, Socrates is imitating the democratic mind by using them approbatively and without qualification (though ἐλευθερίας μεστή is vaguely oxymoronic). The very description of the phenomena begins to rely on the shortsighted perception of the participants (as Adeimantus notes with his λέγεταί γε). The next step is for words to “mean” the opposite.

3974

ἰδίαν (B8) goes beyond the individuality of the adjacent ἕκαστος and stresses that the individual’s plan is private—that it entirely ignores the questions of public policy and the good and happiness of the whole with which we have been dealing all along, which in fact preserved and exploited “private” individuality according to the principle τὸ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν. The point will be isolated below, at D4-9.

3975

καλλίστη (C4): The expression recalls the ephemeral name Kallipolis which arose in a very different context (527C2). Here, it is immediately taken in a merely aesthetic sense.

3976

On ἄνθεσι (C5) as metonymy for dyes, cf. 429D8.

3977

ἤθεσι (C6) echoes ἄνθεσι. In democracy, as in poetry, rhyme often makes a proof.

3978

οἱ παῖδές τε καὶ γυναῖκες (C8): For the notion that children and women enjoy variety cf. 431C1-3.

3979

μέν (C7), which we may always presume to be concessive, warns us that the other shoe is about to drop.

3980

κρίνειαν (C9) reminds us that we are laying out the regimes in order to judge them side by side, along with the lives of the corresponding men (544A2-B3, 555B4-6). The repetition of καλλίστη illustrates both the distinction between the pretty and the fine, and the failure to recognize it. For some, and indeed maybe the majority, the pretty or the beautiful is, eo ipso, the fine. This identification, including its unconscious character, becomes thematic in the criticism of poetry in Book Ten.

3981

καὶ ἔστιν γε, ὦ μακάριε, … ἐπιτήδειον ζητεῖν ἐν αὐτῷ πολιτείαν (D1-2), a remark emphatically obscure, given the emphatic placement of ἔστιν, the striking vocative μακάριε, the multivocality of ἐπιτήδειον, and the pregnant and paradoxical use of πολιτείαν. καλλίστη had been repeated (on the one hand) but πολιτεία, the noun to which it owed its gender, hadn’t. It was, after all, the sheer variety rather than an organizational scheme that had been admired. ἐπιτήδειον implies the propriety of the investigation but therefore also the incumbency upon them to complete it; μακάριε expresses confidence in Adeimantus’s ability to help; and the emphatic ἔστι, with καί and γε, introduces the point as if it were in danger of being overlooked. All of this elicits Adeimantus’s emphatically surprised response (τί δή, more emphatic than τί δὲ δή), and buys Socrates a chance to explain his new point (D4ff). Again he uses an obscure remark to buy himself time (cf.382A7-9, 602C1-5 and n.1285).

3982

δημοκρατουμένην … πόλιν (D6-7): With the participle he is making some effort to avoid calling the democratic situation a regime: it is rather a showroom of regimes (παντοπώλιον πολιτειῶν, D8). It should not be lost upon Socrates’s audience, nor Plato’s, that the Athens to which Socrates and the brothers will be returning after the conversation is just such a place.

3983

τρόπος (D7): Socrates persists in using this metaphor (557A9, 555B3-10 and n.3970).

3984

παντοπώλιον πολιτειῶν (D8), another convincing jingle.

3985

οὕτω (D9) in its common semi-redundant use linking participle with finite verb (cf. 368D6 and n.952).

3986

The language (βούλεσθαι, κατασκευάζειν, ἀρεσκεῖν, D4-9) impersonates that of the individual “citizen” writing his own ticket, from above (B8-10 and n.3974) and turns the comparison with what Socrates and the brothers had been doing into humorous self-deprecation, which in fact anticipates much modern criticism of Plato’s dictatoriality. Not only has the “citizen” no πολιτεία but also the κατοικίζων (D9: cf. 433A2, 370E5, 453B4, and 558B3) has no other criterion other than his own pleasure for choosing which regime to impose upon the citizens. Shorey, with the remark “κατασκευή is a word of all work in Plato” (ad 557B9), recognizes something is going on but not quite what, i.e., that Socrates is making a bridge.

3987

With παραδειγμάτων (E1) Adeimantus draws the further inference that the shopping policy-maker, in addition to having no criterion by which to choose but his pleasure, would also be choosing among “models” improvised by others.

3988

ᾖς (E3): With this striking use of the second singular here and in the sequel, Socrates appeals directly to the person of the interlocutor in a way that confuses his theoretical job with his personal preference, nicely implanting into Adeimantus the sense of release that is the present theme: cf. αὐτῷ σοι ἐπίῃ, 558A1.

3989

ἱκανός (E3) recalling a faint echo of the justification for requiring certain others, who also have better ways to spend their time, to take up the job of ruling: 520B5-C1.

3990

αὐτῷ σοι (558A1), yourself in your own private world (cf. ἰδίαν, 557B8). ἐπιέναι conveys the first mild suggestion of an attack from the outside.

3991

Adeimantus with γε (A3) fends off Socrates’s vivid overture, prudently giving ἐν τῷ παραυτίκα its objective sense.

3992

δικασθέντων (A4): The passive, used of the charge, as δίκαι δικασθέντες (Crito 50B8). It is properly these rather than the criminal that should be described as being mild in democracy: cf. πρᾷοι used of the ἄρχοντες (562D3). A transfer of the attribute to the criminal is not “ironic” (pace Shorey) but absurd.

3993

Reading ἀνθρώπων (A5) with all mss., excised by Burnet.

3994

καταψηφισθέντων (A5): The initial inference is that this is a genitive absolute, and that what we will be seeing (εἶδες, A5) is the behavior of the other party, the jurors, presented in the accusative; but exactly because these fail to enforce their own decrees, all that is left to watch is the behavior of the convicted, continued now in genitive participles (μενόντων. ἀναστρεφομένων) that, we discover only now, are participles in perceptual indirect discourse (pace Riddell, §26). Next (A7-8), it is the jurors that appear—exactly none of them that is (οὐδενός)—in the genitive absolute construction to which the condemned had been consigned (φροντίζοντος, ὁρῶντος), while the condemned man in turn achieves syntactical hegemony by appearing in the nominative (and majesty, to boot, by appearing in the singular), with an indicative verb and the climactic ὥσπερ ἥρως. This turning of the tables follows up the suggestion of aggression in ἐπίῃ above (A1 and n.3990), as a further adumbration of what will occur later, namely, the unforeseen arrival of the tyrant in their midst. We need to ride Plato’s sentences, not replace them with “simplest” or “least unsatisfactory” interpretations (pace Adam).

3995

μενόντων τε καὶ ἀναστρεφομένων ἐν μέσῳ (A6-7), chiastic with θανάτου ἢ φυγῆς. While the exile who is supposed to be somewhere else stays put, the one who is supposed to be six feet under keeps popping up, a slightly more alarming eventuality tantamount to visitation by a ghost, even though this, too, is allowed to pass “unnoticed” (οὔτε φροντίζοντος οὔτε ὀρῶντος οὐδενὸς περινοστεῖ ὥσπερ ἥρως, A7-8).

3996

Reading καὶ (A7) with all mss., excised by Weil. See prev. n. The καί is here “hypological” in the sense that it associates one word with the other without indicating any logical relation.

3997

ἡ δὲ συγγνώμη καὶ … σμικρολογία ... (B1): sc. οὐ κομψή: the construction is continued from A4, above.

3998

ἡμεῖς ἐλέγομεν σεμνύνοντες (B2): We may cite as instances Socrates’s highly florid statement at 401B1-D3, his confidence at 402B9-C8, his resoluteness at 424E5-5A6, and Adeimantus’s stringency at 424D3-E2, as well as Socrates’s description at 487A which had elicited the envious reaction from Adeimantus.

3999

ὑπερβεβλημένην (B3) is a caricature that overstates what they had said by its strengthening prefix and tense. Socrates adopts the point of view and the tone of the easygoing liberal, for whom any belief in principle is in principle fundamentalistic, and all lines drawn by others are drawn too sharply since any “this” might tomorrow be a “that.”

4000

μεγαλοπρεπῶς (B5) “is often ironic in Plato,” says Shorey; but of the passages he cites, at Rep.362C2 Glaucon is serious, as is Hippias at 291E2; and at Charm.175C4 Socrates is only kidding, while at Meno 94B1 he is entertaining a popular belief to make a point; at Tht.161C6 it is the lack of μεγαλοπρεπεία that he criticizes. Only at Symp.199C7, and here, is the use truly ironic. Shorey’s comment is an instance of a commentator trying to speak for a mind of Plato that he imagines and admires, separately from the minds of the interlocutors through whom alone we hear him speak.

4001

I read ἅπαντα ταῦτα (B6) with DM over ἅπαντ’ αὐτά (A, read by Burnet) and ταῦτα πάντα (F); but rather than also reading καταπατήσασ’, a correction of the Monacensis against all mss., it might be easier to believe (with Slings Crit.Notes, 147) that the original text was καταπατήσασα πάντα ταῦτα. The καταφρόνησις sweeps all our scruples away with a single stroke rather than one by one.

4002

ἰὼν πράττει (B7) rather than ἐπίῃ: the periphrasis expresses suspicion as to the person’s motives. For “positioning oneself to become ruler” cf. 347C.

4003

ἐξ ὁποίων ἂν ἐπιτηδευμάτων (B6-7) incorporates an indirect question into a protasis that is minatory (given ἄν plus subj.), while the apodosis is suppressed. Democracy pays no heed to the wary question, “If it is from this background rather than that from which the man is contriving to make his way into politics, how he will turn out?”

4004

γενναία (C2): Adeimantus ruefully adopts the ironic use (cf. 348C12 and n.540).

4005

Reading εἴη (C4) with ms.A and edd., as the lectio difficilior, over εἴη ἄν of DF (as reported by Slings: Chambry reports the variant from F only and Burnet reports it not at all). It is a case of ἄν carried forward in a parallel clause: cf. n.1306 ad 382D11.

4006

ἡδεῖα … καὶ ἄναρχος καὶ ποικίλη (C4-5): The triad summarizes what came before, in reverse order as we might expect (for ἡδεῖα cf. 558A2 leading to A4-C2; for ἄναρχος cf. 557E2-8A3 and for ποικίλη cf. 557C1-E1), and therefore closes the treatment of the “regime.”

4007

διανέμουσα (C6) includes a reference to νόμος and flatly asserts that the unequal can be made equal simply by a generous enactment or policy decision of the people.

4008

ἰσότητά τινα ὁμοίως ἴσοις τε καὶ ἀνίσοις (C5): Adam tries to explain away the contradiction by distinguishing between arithmetical and geometrical equality, but Socrates has told a joke. It is not ἴσα but ἰσοτητά τινα that is conferred onto everyone, as if they were made equal despite the fact that they aren’t, whence τινα. Paradoxical juxtaposition and oxymoron are giving way to flat denial and inversion of meanings.

4009

γνώριμα λέγεις (C7): Again one should keep in mind the Athens the interlocutors live in. Adeimantus is beginning to confess his own feelings.

4010

ἰδίᾳ (C8) is pregnant, again for the sake of varying the programmatic language.

4011

ἢ πρῶτον σκεπτέον (C8): The goal must not be reached too soon: cf. 528D7, 430C8-E1. The point is made each time.

4012

ὑπὸ τῷ πατρὶ τεθραμμένος (D1). Stallb. ad 391C3 says that in addition to the fact that the father raised him, the dative adds that the son was acquiescent in being so raised: the circumstances around him were a given. Cf. 538C7, 572C1, 574E1.

4013

πρός (559A4) adverbial, announcing a second stipulation of the protasis. Though it often appears with γε (328A6, 466E4; Euthyd.294A2; Gorg.469B1, 513B6; Leg.746D8, 923A4; Meno 90E9; Soph.234A3), it sometimes appears without it (Euthyd.298D5 [reading the mss. rather than the ingenious emendation of Hoeffer accepted by Burnet]; Leg.702C2, 778E7; Prot.321D7; Arist.Lys.628, Plut.1001, Eur.Phoen.877).

4014

Note the parallelism between 559A3-6 and 558D11-E3, with the avoidability of the pleasures done in the optative (ἀπαλλάξειεν ἄν, 559A3 / οἷοί τ’ εἶμεν, 558D11) and their yield done in the indicative (δρῶσιν, 559A4 / ὠφελοῦσιν, 558E1).

4015

Reading αὐτοῦ (B1) with ADM rather than αὖ τοῦ with F. For the sense, cf. αὐτοῖς 556C11 and n.3953. Jowett’s “simple,” Adam’s “merely” and Shorey’s “mere” read too much in. To refer to the use of αὐτό with δίψος and πῶμα at 439A as if the sense there, “unqualified,” can here mean “plain,” is a logical error. In the present passage the purpose for moving from eating to food, as the concrete item underlying the desire to eat, is to provide a place for mentioning ὄψον as an alternate to σῖτος, for which see next note. The commentator who argues αὐτοῦ means “mere” must explain how Socrates can add ὄψου with τε καί.

4016

ὄψου (B1): The expected complement of σῖτος is πότος (cf. 329A5-6, 332C10-11, 389D9 [note the order], 404A12-B1, 437B7-8, 439D6-7, 445A6-8; Crito 47B9-10; Euthyd.280C2; H.Maj.298E1; Leg.782E1-783A4, 789D5-6, 831D8-E2, 839A7-B1; Phdo.64D3-4; Phdrs.238AB; Prot.353C6). Therefore the insertion of ὄψον in its place is emphatic, and the effect is to remind us of the fateful role that the term and the idea played at 372C, where Glaucon’s desire was not satisfied with the odds and ends Socrates offered: he wanted more, and became enervated when he was asked to specify what (372D4-E1). Here ὄψον is “let back in” as long as it fulfills the condition (stated, with equanimity, in the indicative) of being beneficial. The classification is repeated at 585B13.

4017

Reading ᾗ τε παῦσαι ζῶντα δυνατή (B4) with AFDM (sc. si non expleatur, with Stallb), though variously emended by edd.

4018

ᾗ τε ὠφέλιμος ᾗ τε παῦσαι ζῶντα δυνατή (B3-4): Note the usual chiastic shift (vs.558D11-E2 [ἅς τε οὐκ ἂν οἷοί τε εἶμεν ἀποτρέψαι / ὅσαι ἀποτελούμεναι ὠφελοῦσιν ἡμᾶς] and 559A3-4 [ἅς γέ τις ἀπαλλάξειεν ἄν / πρὸς οὐδὲν ἀγαθὸν ἐνοῦσαι) as between statement of cause and effect, principle and example, test and result.

4019

ἡ δὲ ὄψου, εἴ πῄ τινα ὠφελίαν (B6): By asserting it might be beneficial he indirectly denies that we need relish to live; but this does not place it into the category of the non-necessary since it may give some (τινα) benefit in some way (πῃ).

4020

ἐδέσματα (B8) now replaces σῖτος. Plato uses the word only here and at Tim.73A2, where it refers to the extra food that the coils of the bowels were designed to store so as to make a man feel full longer, and thereby to protect him against the natural tendency toward gluttony. The excessive variety (πέρα τούτων καὶ ἀλλοίων) recalls what Socrates offered Glaucon at 373A2-C7 after he had rejected “mere” ὄψον (372C4-E1): πέρα and ἀλλοίων here are derogatory, as παντοδαπά was in that passage (373A4). The distinction provides us a criterion to manage the hinge item (ὄψον), the tertium quid (and absent such criteria there always is a hinge item and a tertium quid that, unmanaged, can bring on a landslide of excess, like the “little something” Winnie the Pooh wants to eleven o'clock or so).

4021

χρηματιστικάς (C4): The term had been used of ἡδοναί at 558D5, in connection with the stinginess of the oligarch (φειδωλοῦ … καὶ ὀλιγαρχικοῦ, 558C11) but now χρησίμους draws out the etymon that almost always remains submerged within it. The English metaphor, thrive / thrifty, is not too different in sense. For ἔργα cf. ἐργαζόμενος (553C3) and ἐργάτης (554A5).

4022

τά γε πολλά (D5): γε is limitative, as if he were trying to be true to experience, though he is of course making the whole thing up. Cf. ἐνίοτε (549C2, E4 and nn.3807, 3816), τότε (550A4 and n.3823, 551A12), etc.

4023

ὧδε (D5) resuming the first person ὧδε at 558C11.

4024

ὡς νυνδὴ ἐλέγομεν (D7): Strictly, he should return to the point he was making when he interrupted himself (558D4), where he had adduced as a circumstance of his upbringing (n.b. participle ἄρχων, ibid.) that the oligarch’s son will resemble his father in controlling his pleasures with force (rather than reason: cf. 554C, D1-3: ἀπαιδεύτως reminds us that this other, surer means has been forgone).

4025

ἀπαιδεύτως τε καὶ φειδωλῶς (D7-8): the uncultured upbringing is due to his father’s stinginess (culture as well as honorable activities costing him more than they produce: 555A1-6, 554B2-6, 553D2-7), which has left him unable to raise his son properly (whence ἀνεπιστημοσύνην τροφῆς πατρός, 560B1, infra).

4026

κηφήνων μέλιτος (D8): Up until now the drone, as the unproductive member of the hive, has served as a metaphor for the citizen who no longer has any role in the city and therefore might become a criminal. The psychological analogue for drone-element is, so far, the desires that are being held down by the desire for money, worse desires being held down by a better or less bad one, though they constantly increase nevertheless because of the absence of παιδεία (552E5, 554B7-8, D2-3, E4-5; repeated at 560A9-B2), some of them being potentially aggressive (554B7-C2, cf. D6-7). It is only now that the metaphor is extended to include the honey (pace Slings), for which the psychological analogue is the sensory pleasure associated with those lower desires.

4027

αἴθωσι θηρσί (D9) a striking metaphor that recalls Adeimantus’s expression ἀλώπηξ κερδαλέα καὶ ποικίλη (365C5-6). αἴθων is an hapax in Plato which the schol. takes to mean “aggressive” (ὀξὺ τὴν ὅρμην: cf. schol. in Hom. Il.15.690: τὸν κατὰ ψυχὴν ἔμπυρον, ὀξύν, σφοδρόν, describing the αἰετὸς αἴθων that stirs up all the other birds). The juxtaposition with θῆρες compounds the obscurity but exegesis follows. The ensuing δεινοῖς could take an infinitive (δύνασθαι σκευάζειν or σκευάζειν simpliciter) but instead we have a third dative, strictly appositive, in epexegesis (καὶ δυναμένοις). The triad, as it were, consists of a striking image, a simple adjective, and a description that spells them out. This fateful “encounter” (συγγένηται, D8) corresponds, in the order of the narrative, to the eye-opening encounter of the sunburnt poor and the fat rich man (556C8-E1), but the point of view has shifted from the former to the latter. In a sense it is an exegesis of μηδαμῇ ταύτῃ καταφρονῶνται (556D1, on which cf. n. ad loc.): the better forces within the oligarchic son one day encounter, close-up, the lower pleasures they had hitherto succeeded to ignore (καταφρονεῖν).

4028

παντοδαπὰς ἡδονὰς καὶ ποικίλας καὶ παντοίως ἐχούσας (D8-9). ποικίλας interrupts the two generalizations (παντοδαπάς, παντοίως) in order to remind us of the inherent appeal of ποικιλία (557C4-9).

4029

We do not need to posit a lacuna between μεταβολῆς and ὀλιγαρχικῆς (E1), with Burnet, or emend with Adam and others. As we could say that ὀλιγαρχία μεταβάλλει εἰς δημοκρατίαν (555B8 and n. ad loc. notwithstanding), it is a near reach to call the μετάβασις oligarchic, since it begins there. Cf. the expressions δημοτικὸς ἐξ ὀλιγαρχικοῦ γεγονώς at 572D3 and ἐξ ὀλιγαρχικοῦ δημοκρατικὸς γίγνεται above (D4-5). What should be noted is that Socrates continues to vary the programmatic language with which he announces the transitions from section to section: cf. 558C8 (ἰδίᾳ), 557B1-2, 555A8-B6 (uses of ὁμοιότητι and τρόπος), 553E2-3 (periphrastic formulation).

4030

μετέβαλλε (E4): On analogy with the imperfect of citation, the imperfect is preferred over the aorist for an event that took place in the discourse (namely at 556E3-8, immediately after the fateful encounter between the rich and the poor).

4031

ἀντιβοηθήσῃ τις … συμμαχία (E9-10): All βοήθεια is rendered by an ally (σύμμαχος); indeed allies are expected to reciprocate βοήθεια, and this is the usual sense of ἀντιβοηθεῖν (Thuc.6.18.7, X.HG 7.4.2). But also, when one side is helped by an ally, the help given to the other side by his respective ally can be called ἀντιβοηθεῖν (e.g., of the Syracusan allies in contrast with the those of Athens, Thuc.7.58), and that is the sense here, since the young man has two parts (μέρει, E5) allied to two inimical forces. Cf. παραβοηθεῖν (572E3) and n. ad loc.

4032

ἢ καὶ τῶν ἄλλων οἰκείων (E10-560A1): The household is added to the father in order to create a plural to counterbalance the plural of the contending unnecessary pleasures.

4033

ὑπεχώρησε (A4) the aorist (along with those following, through C3) creates an outcome in the past out of which a final result (τελευτῶσαι, B7) will emerge, at which point the present can be resumed (κατοικεῖ, C6) to describe the resulting state of affairs. Adeimantus meanwhile treats these aorists as generic and thus answers in the present at 560A8 and B8 (cf. the aorist at 550B5 and 551A8, and the generic force of the related gnomic aorist cf. 508D6 and n.3212).

4034

καί τινες τῶν ἐπιθυμιῶν αἳ μέν... (A5). The pronoun τινες merely continues the indefinite modality announced by ποτε (A4). For its early placement cf. 380D8 and n.1238.

4035

ἐξέπεσον (A6): The metaphor of faction and μάχη is continued.

4036

τινος (A6) apologizing for the metaphor.

4037

κατεκοσμήθη (A7), the language of σωφροσύνη (cf.329D4, 403A7, 410E3, 503C4, etc.).

4038

αὖθις δὲ οἶμαι (A9) answering ποτὲ μὲν οἶμαι above (A4), with ὑποτρεφόμεναι answering ὑπεχώρησε (A4).

4039

ἀνεπιστημοσύνην (B1): The oligarch’s son is less “cultured” than the oligarch (who was brought up by the timocrat and emulated him and followed in his footsteps [553A9-10]). Despite what stinginess he may have learned from his father, his own dronelike desires have grown to be still greater. The father’s culpability for the way his son turns out is of a similar quality to the oligarchic ruler’s culpability for spoiling the populace: both neglect their duties because of their overriding devotion to wealth (τῆς ἄλλης ἐπιμελείας, 554C1-2). Misbehavior in the ruler we can easily resent: the father’s is painful even to contemplate.

4040

τελευτῶσαι (B7) indicates that the gradualist see-saw battle is over: that is, the metabasis is complete.

4041

μαθημάτων τε καὶ ἐπιτηδευμάτων καλῶν καὶ λόγων ἀληθῶν (B8-9). The first two form a pair (with τε καί) as we learn in the Laches (179D7, 180A4, 181C8, 182C2-4 [bis],183A1, 185B3, 190E2). Cf also Prot.327A3-4, Tim.87B7; and Lach.181C8, τὸ μάθημα … ἐπιτήδειον; and Rep.527B1, μάθημα ἐπιτηδεύμενον. Close to the sense of the whole list is Phdrs.270B, λόγους καὶ ἐπιτηδεύσεις νομίμους.

4042

οἱ δὲ ἄριστοι φρουροί τε καὶ φύλακες (B9-10): Referring back (as δή indicates), through 559D7, 554E4-5, D2-7, B7-8, and 552E5, to 549B4, which itself relied on 424D1-2.

4043

θεοφιλής (B10) is close in sense and etymology to εὐδαίμων, a term he must avoid at risk of begging the question. Cf.382E3, 501C1; Leg.690C.

4044

ψευδεῖς δὴ καὶ ἀλαζόνες (C2): False flattery is the psychological correlate to the democratic public policy of equality, if only one recognizes that it is desire and not clemency that motivates the democratic man to embrace it. Compare the first and last things said about democracy above: ἐξ ἴσου μεταδῶσι πολιτείας καὶ ἀρχῶν (557A4); ἰσότητά τινα ὁμοίως ἴσοις τε καὶ ἀνίσοις διανέμουσα (558C5-6), and nn.3967, 4003.

4045

λόγοι τε καὶ δόξαι (C2): λόγοι, whose primary virtue is to be true (ἀληθεῖς rather than καλοί: cf. the complex μαθημάτων τε καὶ ἐπιτηδευμάτων καλῶν καὶ λόγων ἀληθῶν, B8-9), become false (ψευδεῖς) when pressed into the service of flattery; and since they are offered not for their truth but their effect on the soul they come to deserve the lesser name of δόξα.

4046

Λωτοφάγους (C5): The reference to the Lotus-eaters of Odyssey 9 combines the general notion of an overmastering pleasure (Od.9.94: μελιηδέα καρπόν) with the specific notion, also from that context, of forgetting home (νόστου τε λαθέσθαι, ibid. 97), which here corresponds to the son abandoning his father’s influence.

4047

φανερῶς (C6): Contrast the oligarchic father who either keeps his passions at bay or hides the ones he indulges to maintain a show of decency (554B7-D7).

4048

τις βοήθεια (C6), begging to be compared with the rescue at 559E9-60A2.

4049

τὰς τοῦ βασιλικοῦ τείχους ἐν αὐτῷ πύλας (C8): The rejected hegemony is recalled from exile to provide the democratic soul a way to exalt its universal egalitarianism and mediocrity, in unconscious self-contradiction.

4050

αὐτήν (C9) refers to whatever degree of oligarchic restraint might still stand on its own within him (τῷ ὀλιγαρχικῷ [560A4-5] = τῷ ἐν ἑαυτῷ ὀλιγαρχικῷ [559E9-10]).

4051

οὔτε πρέσβεις πρεσβυτέρων (C9): The continuation of the analogy now redoes the scenario of 559E4-560B5: πρέσβεις πρεσβυτέρων alludes to his father (559A9-560A1), whom his pleasures have recast in the disguise of a hoary counsellor from abroad, an idea developed further at 574C2-3.

4052

ἰδιωτῶν (D1): The status of the father is “unrecognized” in the diplomatic sense, and accorded no respect.

4053

αὐτοί τε κρατοῦσι μαχόμενοι (D1): Finally we have moved beyond the oxymoronic and self-contradictory half-measures and verbal squabbling exemplified by such expressions as ἐπιμελείᾳ βίᾳ (552E2). In place of the see-saw of contradiction we have conquest, inversion, and obliteration of the opposition.

4054

μετριότης / κοσμία // ἀγροικία / ἀνελευθερία (D4-5): After contrary items we have a set of contrary pairs in a chiasm (missed by the schol. ad loc.).

4055

καθήραντες (D8). Continuing the inversion of the meanings of words, Socrates now adopts the braggart manner of the new hegemony, whose voice does not notice its own cacophonic kappas (κενώσαντες καὶ καθήραντες τὴν τοῦ κατεχομένου, D8-E1).

4056

τελουμένου (E1) adds a ritual metaphor to κατεχομένου, as καθήραντες had to κενώσαντες above.

4057

κατάγουσιν (E3) continues the metaphor of changing political regimes.

4058

ὕβριν καὶ ἀναρχίαν καὶ ἀσωτίαν καὶ ἀναιδείαν (E2-3): The reiteration of privative alphas portends a vacuous liberation.

4059

λαμπράς … ἐστεφανωμένας (E3): These new regalia embody the ἀλαζονεία of the new order.

4060

ὑποκοριζόμενοι (E4): echoing ὑπεροριζουσι at D6. Though the etymon is κοῦρος, it is hard not to hear κόρος after having heard ὕβρις. After ὕβρις and κόρος, all that’s left to wait for is ἄτη.

4061

εὐπαιδευσίαν (E5), an hapax in Plato and rare elsewhere. Here it tells a lie with transparent crudity.

4062

ἀναίδειαν δὲ ἀνδρείαν (561A1): Say it three times fast and you can’t tell the difference. It is notable that these positive designations are the opposites of the negative designations on the force of which they expelled the other characteristics, above (εὐπαιδευσία : ἠλιθιότης [D2], ἐλευθερία : ἀνελευθερία [D5], μεγαλοπρέπεια : ἀγροικία [D5], ἀνδρεία : ἀνανδρία [D3]). The sanctions remain constant: it is their meaning that is up for grabs.

4063

Reading εἰς τὴν (A3) with FD rather than the bare τὴν of AM that has been read by most edd. since Schneider (1833, ad loc.), who defended dropping εἰς by insisting, oversubtly, that the release into pleasures and the democratic man are distinct, as cause and effect. It is merely a casual metonymy on the same order as the compression we noted at 554D6-7. The statement is programmatic, announcing the transition from treating the evolution to the life of the democratic man, not some halfway house between; Socrates uses metonymy to vary, once again, the programmatic language (cf. n.4029 ad 559E1).

4064

οὐδὲν μᾶλλον (A6): The idiom for expressing skeptical (340B4) or despondent (538D9) indifference (cf. n.353), is now pressed into service to articulate the refusal to exclude (καὶ ἄνεσιν, A4), which is the heart of the democratic outlook.

4065

καὶ χρήματα καὶ πόνους καὶ διατριβάς (A7-8): the three καί’s confirm that just as he no longer distinguished between the pleasures he no longer draws a distinction among the resources by which to procure them. The triad is based on the tripartition of goods into external (for which χρήματα is always the paradigmatic example), bodily (for πόνους used this way cf. Pol.294E5-6) and psychic (διατριβή does tend to be used for study), and this background list will serve to order the sequence of examples below (C7-D5).

4066

ἐὰν εὐτυχὴς ᾖ καὶ μὴ πέρα ἐκβακχευθῇ (A8-9): contrast διψήσασα … τύχῃ, καὶ πορρωτέρω τοῦ δέοντος ἀκράτου αὐτῆς μεθυσθῇ (562C8-D2). The suggestion that the obsessively free man is subject to external influence (ἐπίῃ [558A1], cf. n.3990) is strengthened. The bacchic metaphor elaborates the dangerous mystery of pleasure (560E1-2) he is wading into.

4067

πέρα (A8) echoes πέρα at 559B8.

4068

The necessary ones: cf.559E9-60A2.

4069

εἰς ἴσον δή (B2). For this exasperated and ironic δή cf. 338B1, 396C4, 404A9, 405A3, 405B9, 420E7, 544C6: it is here dismissed with τὶ (on which cf. n.1057 and 558C5). δή is a note continually struck in the present context: 562A4, 562D2, 562E9, 563B1, 563D8, 565E5, 566A2. This “equalization” is a makeshift whereby the unbridled elements in him are diminished just enough and the better elements restored just enough to achieve a precarious balance. It is only as long as this balance holds that he can insouciantly pursue the one and then the other as if they were “equal.”

4070

διάγειν (B3) is nearly, but not quite, otiose: cf. διαγωγή used of the democratic state, 558A2.

4071

ὥσπερ λαχούσῃ (B3-4): The analogy with the democratic style of choosing rulers by lot (cf. ἀπὸ κλήρων, 557A5), brought to the surface by the periphrasis in τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ἀρχήν, now conspires with the developing concept that he is subject to external influences that he does not understand.

4072

καὶ αὖθις ἄλλῃ (B5): It is as if he survives the effect of being ruled by one ἄρχων for his appointed term and then the next.

4073

ἐξ ἴσου (B5), “without prejudice,” the democratic watchword. It is, after all, the sentiment and the dream of not having to choose that underlies the fantasy that all things are equal. τρέφων (B5) stresses unobtrusively the difference between the democratic man whose lassitude unintentionally foments these pleasures and his oligarchic father who consigned what rationality he still had to the determination whether they were necessary, and consigned what will he still had to the control of those which were not.

4074

καὶ λόγον γε … ἀληθῆ (B7): True argument is the complement of the μαθήματά τε καὶ ἐπιτηδεύματα καλά mentioned at 560B8-9, which he had already crowded out with his new regimen (οὕτω διακείμενος, C5) of using his efforts and concentration to pursue pleasure. The role of reason would be to call him back from abandoning them (whence ἐπιτηδεύειν, C2).

4075

προσδεχόμενος (B7): Again (cf. 548A5-C2, 550A4-B7) the description of the resultant person prefers to be expressed with a series of participles syntactically dependent upon but semantically superior to “place-holder” verbs (ζῇ, A6; διάγει, B3), to the point that the construction is continued (οὐ προσδεχόμενος, B7) across an answer (πάνυ μὲν οὖν, B6). For such a continuation across answer cf. 548B2 and n.3784, and 558A7, B1.

4076

οὐδέ (B7) is epexegetical, explaining οὐ προσδεχόμενος by pointing back to the metaphor at 560C2-D1.

4077

καλῶν τε καὶ ἀγαθῶν (C1), the loosely conceived and uncontroversial expression for value (cf. 400E2-3 and n.1591).

4078

ἐπιτηδεύειν καὶ τιμᾶν (C2), correcting οὐδεμίαν ἀτιμάζων ἀλλὰ τρέφων (B5) with the usual chiasm. With τιμᾶν we have an echo of the thumoeidetic compromise long since abandoned.

4079

ὁμοίας (C4) means not, of course, that they are similar to each other but that the very categorization or characterization of them as good versus bad is wrong-headed. For ἀνανεύειν cf. 437B1: it is only by saying “No” to every limit that he says “Yes” to everything.

4080

ἐξ ἴσου (C4): The language is slightly strained, as if the pleasures had rights, so as to weld the analogy with the much-vaunted ἰσονομία of democracy (cf. Hdt.3.80), satirized at 558C5-6.

4081

μεθύων καὶ καταυλόμενος / ὑδροποτῶν καὶ κατισχναινόμενος (C7-8): The expression reaches for a satirical isocolon. Here he spends his χρήματα (A7).

4082

Here are his πόνοι (A8).

4083

ὡς (D2) not merely quasi (Jowett) but suggesting his own outlook, that philosophy is of course a noble pursuit (cf. μεγάλα ἡγοῦνται, 498A5). Socrates is describing the diminishing perspective of the soul from its own point of view, allowing Adeimantus—and us—to judge for ourselves.

4084

λέγει τε καὶ πράττει (D3) suggests that his standing up (ἀναπηδῶν) and voicing of his opinion is more a matter of πρᾶξις than λόγος, as usual in an open forum (cf.564D9 and n.4146). Cf. πράττῃ (558B7 and n.4002).

4085

Besides “philosophizing,” his διατριβαί (cf. A8) include dabbling at his pleasure in the triad of civic roles: government (πολιτεύεται), war (πολεμικούς), and business (χρηματικούς).

4086

χρῆται αὐτῷ (D7): sc.τῷ βίῳ, still another expression that describes the process of his life in a way the keeps it from adding up to anything.

4087

μακάριον (D7) is a climactic term as before (335E9, 419A9 and nn.254, 1975), here capping the list, which he repeats from the end of his description of the democratic state (ἡδεῖα … καὶ ἄναρχος καὶ ποικίλη, 558C4-5).

4088

ἰσονομικοῦ τινος (E1), the good old term now corroded into something less than itself: cf. n.4080 ad 561C4.

4089

καὶ πολλαί (E5), in all truth a gratuitous addition, recalling 557C7-8.

4090

The παραδείγματα (E6) are like samples on display in a παντοπώλιον (cf. 557D8).

4091

τετάχθω (562A1) retrieving the language with which the treatment of oligarchic man had closed (555B1), which itself looked back to the close of the treatment of timocratic man (550C6).

4092

I take the ὡς clause (A2) as an abbreviation of a clause like ὡς (“since”) εἰ δημοκρατικὸς προσαγορεύοιτο ὀρθῶς ἂν προσαγορεύοιτο (sc. ὑφ’ ἡμῶν).

4093

For the dripping irony (ἡ καλλίστη δή … , A4) and postponed anticlimax (τυραννίς τε καὶ τύραννος, A5), compare the sentence with which tyranny was originally introduced: ἡ γενναία δή … νόσημα, 544C6-7; and compare the hyperbaton Dante uses when he finally sees the devil, Inf.34.1: “Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni.” Note also that in this case alone the personality corresponding to the regime (properly, the τυραννικός) is called for the first time by the political office (τύραννος). Not only is the rhyme (τυραννίς / τύραννος) irresistible: in the very end, as we will see, the τύραννος and the τυραννικός will become one and the same person.

4094

τρόπος (A7), again; and the genitive formulation (τυραννίδος) again varies the programmatic language: cf.561A1-4 and n.4063.

4095

τρόπος (A10), reused in a similar but different meaning, again.

4096

προύθεντο (B3): cf.555B9 and n.3927.

4097

καθίστατο (B4), as used of the ὅρος of oligarchy (550C10 [κατάστασιν], 551B5 and 7).

4098

Reading ὑπέρπλουτος (B4) with ADM against πλοῦτος of F and most modern editors, as snidely meaning “superwealth” (Jowett compares such nouns as ὑπερσοφιστής, ὑπερθεμιστοκλής, ὑπέρδουλος, late or comical formations that are also snide, but cf. already ὑπέρσοφοι, Euthyd.289E3). Cf. ὑπερπλουτεῖν, Ar.Pl.354. The fact that the ὑπέρπλουτοι at 552B3 were a kind of persons (the adjective also found once in Aeschylus, Pr.466, though Aristotle will prefer ὑπερπλούσιοι: Pol.1295B7) rather than a kind of wealth, can hardly tell against taking it in the other sense here—both are virtual coinages. It is not wealth but more wealth than others have that is both the principle of oligarchy (n.b. 551B1-2, 555B10) as well as its undoing, as the term πλούτου ἀπληστία repeats just below (B6).

4099

ἡ τῶν ἄλλων ἀμέλεια (B6: cf. C5), again without πάντων, recalls the phrase τῶν ἄλλων ἠμεληκότας (556C4 and n.3951).

4100

ἀπώλλυ (B7), the imperfect again, to cite the movement of the argument: cf. 559E4 and n.4030.

4101

τὴν ἐλευθερίαν, εἶπον (B12): Socrates’s εἶπον goes far beyond the usual narrative insertion of ἦν δ’ἐγώ, which denotes nothing but change of speaker, so as to stress for our benefit his one word answer.

4102

ἐν δημοκρατουμένῃ πόλει (B12-C1): Omitting the article avoids the hint of adjectivality in referring to this non-regime: cf. 555D6-7 and n.3935.

4103

κάλλιστον (C1), of democracy, again.

4104

φύσει (C2) suggests a contrast with νόμος. This Rousseauian impatience with human institutions per se is not as provocative to the Greek ear as it was to that modern European, but it is just as much a fantasy.

4105

ῥῆμα (C3) stresses the “speech act” over its content (cf. 473E6). Again (cf. λέγεταί γε δή, 557B7) an Athenian is speaking from experience. We may cite, with Adam, Menex.239Aff, Eur.Ion 669-675, and Thuc.2.37.

4106

ὅπερ ᾖα νυνδὴ ἐρῶν (C4): cf. 449A7. What he “says” or argues is a question, in the dialectical manner. Cf. 603A10 and n.4934.

4107

Again he insists (C5) on using ἄλλα (or ἄλλοι) without πάντα (or πάντες): cf. B6 and n.4099.

4108

δεηθῆναι (C6) introduces a new tone and a new force operating in the devolution of the polis, consonant with the new notion of ἀπληστία.

4109

προστατούντων (D1): This new term, a lurking semantic inversion, introduces a new kind of power or authority, new and intriguingly vague, a power lurking here in the job of pouring wine, a job entrusted to underlings. Might this be that unexpected external influence that has been lurking beneath the surface (compare τύχῃ here with εὐτυχής [561A8 and n.4066])? The governance of τύχῃ extends to both διψήσασα and προστατούντων, semantically if not syntactically. For the boundary gone beyond, in πορρωτέρω, cf. 561A8-9.

4110

δή (D2) acts like τότε δή (551A12, 550A4-5), but also adds a tone of exasperation (cf. n.4069 ad 561B2).

4111

κολάζει (D3), indicative, against our expectation of an infinitive (κολάζειν, dependent on οἶμαι [C8] with τοὺς ἄρχοντας as accusative subject). That is, we had expected the statement that the rulers, if they were not too easy going (πάνυ and πολλήν are wonderfully ambiguous), would choose this moment (δή, D2) to draw the line and chastise the drunken City. Instead the rulers’ moderate lassitude only invites a demand for more lassitude (this is the meaning of ἀπληστία ἐλευθερίας), and the City’s demand arrogates to itself the higher moral ground (κολάζει). Compare the unexpected change of subject at 558A4-8 (with n.3994 ad καταψηφισθέντων, A5).

4112

αἰτιωμένη (D4) portrays the shallow tone of the City’s rebuke, as a self-interested claim rather than a moral one and requiring a πρόφασις (i.e., an exonerating excuse or explanation) from the rulers. A judge would still be needed to settle the matter.

4113

μιαρούς τε καὶ ὀλιγαρχικούς (D4): τε καὶ insinuates the criticism that the man’s political outlook is due to his personal baseness, by baldly combining a galvanizing slur (μιαρούς) with a popular buzzword (ὀλιγαρχικούς). We approach the end of civil discourse and enter the world of coarse demagoguery.

4114

δρῶσιν γάρ (D5): Adeimantus shifts to the plural because he is imagining the concrete city.

4115

The πηλός in προπηλακίζει (D6) reveals that the uncleanness in μιαρούς above comes only from their rhetoric.

4116

For οὐδὲν ὄντας (D7) cf. 556E1.

4117

ἰδίᾳ τε καὶ δημοσίᾳ ἐπαινεῖ τε καὶ τιμᾷ (D8-9): The gratuitous extension of equality and its praise to every aspect of life, even where its application would be unclear (ἰδίᾳ), is characteristic of the rising obsession with “freedom.” The extension provides a berth for the next point, about private homes.

4118

ἀναρχίαν (E4): “No longer liberty, but anarchy” (J.-C.).

4119

πῶς τὸ τοιοῦτον λέγομεν (E6) cannot mean “What do you mean by that?” To the contrary, with the first person plural Adeimantus joins in the attempt to articulate the bestial outcome: cf. ἐροῦμεν at 563C1. We have missed the tone of the exchanges here and below (C1-2, C3-5, D2-3), perhaps because the extension of social freedom down to the level of animals strikes us as funny (at first), rather than appalling and even mortifying, as it apparently was felt to be by Adeimantus and would be, perhaps, by any Greek.

4120

Exasperated δή (E9), again: cf. 561B2 and n.4069.

4121

σμικρά (563A3), with ἄλλα: Socrates is not saying that teaching is a small thing (sic J.-C. explaining such a scandalous remark as ironic), but is voicing the same insight Ulysses is made to voice in Triolus and Cressida I.iii, 101-118 (“O when Degree is shaked...”), who likewise provides a wide spectrum of examples. The importance of the matter of degree, even in things that may seem small, is eloquently shown by René Girard (The Theatre of Envy, ch.18 [Oxford 1991], but earlier also in Violence and the Sacred, ch.2 [Baltimore 1977]), namely, that “undifferentiation” (such as our democratic city is approaching) unleashes forces of envy that lead to an orgy of violence on the social level. Cf. 586C1-5.

4122

φοιτητάς (A4) rather than μαθητάς exploits the idiom that to “come around” (φοιτᾶν) means to study with somebody, and thereby makes palpable the threat that he is free to do otherwise. Socrates’s interest is less in the teachers per se than all relations involving respect, upon which social order depends, most importantly the relation of πατέρες τε ὑέσιν καὶ πάντες οἱ τινῶν κηδόμενοι, about which Adeimantus complained in Book Two (362E5-3A1).

4123

εὐτραπελίας (A8): Schol. ad loc. defines εὐτραπελία as the ability to kid and be kidded, embodying the mean between criticizing everybody (βωμολοχία) and being offended by everybody (ἀγροικία).

4124

Taking πλήθους (B5) with ἔσχατον and ἐλευθερίας with πλήθους (Schneider).

4125

οἱ ἐωνημένοι καὶ αἱ ἐωνημέναι (B6), an even more gratuitous extension than 562D8-9, which helps him next to remember to include equality between the genders (B7-9).

4126

ἐροῦμεν ὅτι νῦν ἦλθ’ ἐπὶ στόμα; (C1-2): Aesch.fr.696 Mette, referred to also by Plut.amat.763B and Them.orat.4.52. In both of whom it introduces a remark as no longer avoidable though previously postponed (whence the aorist, ἦλθε). With Aeschylus’s νῦν, Adeimantus is pointing to the exchange at E3-6.

Adeimantus’s aversion to describe this creeping insidiousness (καταδύεσθαι, 562E3), expressed here the second of three times (cf.562E6 and 563D2-3 and nn.) stands in strong contrast to the self-superior condemnation against a similar phenomenon that he eagerly voiced in Book Four (424D7-E2, where note παραδυομένη [D3], ὑπορρεῖ [D8] and the deep breath Socrates takes in answering him [E3]: cf. nn. ad locc.). The cautionary tale that Book Eight is turning out to be, into which he injected himself as the interlocutor at 548D8, has enabled him better to recognize and even confess his own feelings.

4127

ἐλευθερώτερα (C4), n.pl., modifying the periphrastic subject (τὸ τῶν θηρίων) agrees as usual with the “real” subject (θήρια, n.pl.). Cf. 567E8-8A2 (χρῆμα … ἀπολέσας, 567E8); Leg.657D, Phlb.45E.

4128

ἄπειρος (C5): Another allusion to the experience of life in Athens!

4129

παροιμίαν (C6): The schol. ad loc. gives us the trimeter οἵα περ ἡ δέσποινα τοία χ’ἡ κύων but the sense given to that proverb is that the maid imitates her mistress (cf. Diog.3.51 [=Paroim.Gr.2.44], and Diog.5.93 [=1.269]), whence ἀτεχνῶς, as Adam notes.

4130

τὸ ἐμόν γ’ … ἐμοὶ λέγεις ὄναρ (D2), another proverbial expression, again expressing more candor than usual from Adeimantus. “You’ve said aloud something I’ve only thought inwardly before!” τὸ ἐμὸν ὄναρ designates a hidden inward thought, outwardly unspoken out of shame (Callim.Ep.32,2 [Pf.= Anth.Pal.12.148]) or out of a sense of one’s personal insignificance (Luc. ὄνειρον ἢ ἀλεκτρυών, 7; Callim.Ep.48,6 [Pf.= Anth.Pal.6.130]). The Mantissa Proverbiorum (Paroem.Gr.2.774) appears, from the word order it gives to the proverb (τὸ ἐμὸν ἐμοὶ λέγεις ὄναρ), to be quoting our passage and then gives this interpretation: ἐπὶ τῶν τὰ ἑτέροις συμβάντα πρὸς τοὺς πεπονθότας διηγουμένων (one man recounts what happened to another man, without knowing the man he tells it to had the same experience). For similar uses of ὄναρ in Plato, cf. Charm.173A7, Symp.175E3, Tht.201D8. Adeimantus’s remark is exactly consonant with Socrates’s claim that a description of this nightmare of total licentiousness would be incredible except to a person who had witnessed it (C3-5). Such a rude experience Adeimantus has indeed had, out in the country.

4131

ὁτιοῦν δουλείας τις προσφέρηται (D6): δουλεία can have a positive sense cf.494D6 as well as 442B1, and 590C8-D6; but “slavery” here merely expresses the enervated libertine's reaction to any requirement brought on from the outside (cf. ἐθελοδούλους, 562D7). προσφέρειν implies the motive of the suggestion is corrective or therapeutic: cf. 442E2. We will be able to drop Thompson’s emendation (προσφέρῃ) from the apparatus as soon as we find a single instance of the verb used transitively in the middle (unless we count this as one). The force of the voice is to depict the phase during which the measure is still in the planning stages and not yet applied.

4132

ἵνα δὴ μηδαμῇ μηδείς (D8-E1): again a despotic refusal (ἀνανεύει, 561C3). Note exasperated δή and compare Thrasymachus’s ὡς δή at 337C2.

4133

καὶ μάλ’ … οἶδα (E2): Again a reference to his personal experience as an Athenian—but Plato’s insistence on having Adeimantus speak this way reminds us Plato himself will have had similar experiences. The dialogue after all is about him and his brother and Glaucon, and about Socrates persuading them out of their own “best” ideas.

4134

καλὴ καὶ νεανική (E4): the former from the slogan and the latter used of youthful vigor so unformed as to have the potential for good or evil (425C5, 491E4, 503C4), but also to denote the charm or thrill of the new (363C3, Gorg.508D1). The fact that these two things often come together is the reason it is prudent to resist “innovation” (νεωτερισμός).

4135

ἀρχὴ οὕτωσι καλὴ καὶ νεανική (E3-4): the notion and the paradox will be repeated more concretely when the tyrant actually sprouts up: προστατικὴ ῥίζη, 565D2).

4136

νόσημα (E6), referring exactly to 552C4, as we shall soon see.

4137

καταδουλοῦται (E8): Enslavement is a new metaphor: before, the νόσημα was said to destroy the city’s order (ἀπώλεσεν [E7]: compare ἀπώλλυ and καταλύει [562B7, B10], used when the parallelism was first introduced). This paradox of freedom and slavery then stimulates a digression on ἀνταπόδωσις (563E9-4B2), which interrupts the narrative about what happens next with the νόσημα (i.e., τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο, E5). The digression is then closed by a repetition of the metaphor that stimulated it (δουλοῦται [B2], the prefix characteristically dropped in repetition: cf. 399E8 and n.1567).

4138

ἐν ὥραις τε καὶ ἐν φυτοῖς καὶ ἐν σώμασιν (563E10-564A1). For σῶμα designating animals in contrast to plants, cf. 380E4-5 and 401A4 (where ἄλλων is complementary-adverbial: cf. n.1597). It is the ἀνταπόδωσις of the Ionian φυσιολογία that he refers to, a concept that characteristically confounds the moral and physical worlds. For Socrates’s use of the φυσιολογία cf. 380E3-4 and n.1240. That it is only half-serious is felt by Adeimantus as his reply shows (εἰκός, A2 and A5, picked up by Socrates with εἰκότως τοίνυν, A6).

4139

πλείστη τε καὶ ἀγριωτάτη (564A8): πλείστη picks up the use of πλέον above (563E7: cf. ὅσον, 563B5; and ἐπὶ πᾶν, 562E1), while ἀγριωτάτη is an extension and a narrowing of ἰσχυρότερον (563E8), adding an unexpected and unwelcome flavor that is quite the opposite of ἁπαλήν at 563D5.

4140

ταὐτόν (B1): As Shorey succinctly says, “ταὐτόν implies the concept,” citing Parm.130D6; Phlb.13B3, 34E3; Soph.253D1-2, etc.

4141

τὸ μέν … τὸ δέ ... (B5-6): The division of the drones into leaders and followers is new. Previously the distinction between them was that some were more dangerous than others, as he next reminds us (B6-7). They begin to embody a nightmarish inversion of the ideal ἄρχοντες with their ἐπίκουροι.

4142

ἰατρόν τε καὶ νομοθετήν (C1): The metaphor precedes the basic notion it elaborates (νομοθετήν) because the physiological humors had just been introduced (B10): cf. 343C6 and n.440 on “reverse καί;” 359A3, 381A4 and nn.714 and 1243. The medical metaphor of excision is continued below (567C5-7). Cutting away part of the hive inhabited by drones is known to Aristotle (HA 9.40, 624B21).

4143

τριχῇ διαστησώμεθα (C9): Adam cites Theseus’s speech from E.Suppl.238-245, which presents a tripartite division of the groups that constitute a city: the useless rich, the poor who envy them, and the demagogues who deceive the poor—a division that is more significant for its differences from the present passage than its similarities.

4144

οὐκ ἔλαττον (D2) redoes the quantitative πλέον (563E7) with a litotes that prepares for the emphatically qualitative πολὺ δριμύτερον (D4, corollary to ἰσχυρότερον, 563E8), itself a further intensification of ἀγριωτάτη (A8).

4145

προεστός (D8): cf. προστατούντων, 562D1 and n.4109. By the merest etymological reference we are given our only indication, and given it only after the fact, how this drone element came to be in charge (note the perfect): that it was because of the people’s enervation with practical politicians (τοὺς ἄρχοντας, 562D2). Finally we are given some reason for the distinction, repeated above in the abstract but never instantiated, between political changes that are λάθρᾳ rather than βίᾳ (557A6-8, 551B3-5).

4146

λέγει τε καὶ πράττει (D9) repeats the idea that the speeches are a kind of political action (cf. πράττῃ at 558B7; cf. 561D3 and 565B2 below; cf. 494E4-5, 589A7; Gorg.481A1 (with my n.); Phdrs.273E5. Prot.318E5-319A2 suggests the pair covers politics in contrast to home management [=διοικεῖν]): a movement is afoot.

4147

βομβεῖ τε καὶ οὐκ ἀνέχεται (D10), echoic of the bumbling buzz of bees, τε καί linking metaphor with meaning (cf.330D7 and n.92).

4148

χωρίς τινων ὀλίγων (E2): This second awkward mention of these nameless few (cf. ἐκτός ὀλίγων, D8) ushers them in to be mentioned next (E4-7) as a group distinct from the πλῆθος (ἀποκρίνεται, E4). The awkwardness casts them in the role of the unneeded odd-men-out, and soon enough they will be made to feel that way themselves (565C1-4).

4149

οἱ κοσμιώτατοι φύσει (E6). This designation is suspicious for its vagueness, and all the more suspicious for the assertion that this small (ὀλίγων, D8, E2) group always turns out to be rich, advanced without argument and accepted without cavil. In fact the term cherishes a certain envy of those whose talent makes it easier for them to become rich, for which cf. E.Suppl.241, νέμοντες τῷ φθόνῳ πλέον μέρος (where πλέον pairs the vice of the poor with the vice of the rich: πλειόνων ἐρῶσ’ ἀεί , 239). The suggestion of envy returns with καλῶν κἀγαθῶν λεγομένων (569A4) which refers back to this passage and therefore bars us from giving κοσμιώτατοι here the sense of temperate frugality that it is usually given in order to account for their turning out wealthy. The truth is, envy calls them κοσμιώτατοι because they are wealthy.

4150

τοῖς κηφῆσι (E9): The metaphor of the drones is extended one step further (cf.559D8 and n.4026) by conceiving them stealing the honey produced by the hardworking bees in the hive.

4151

βοτάνη (E13): The metaphor is repeated in Plut.de rect.rat. 42A.

4152

οἱ προεστῶτες (565A7), the perfect participle drawn out of προεστός above (D8), now by dint of the definite article becoming a technical term for an established class or set of functionaries.

4153

οὐκοῦν μεταλαμβάνει … ἀεί, καθ’ ὅσον δύνανται οἱ προεστῶτες, τοὺς ἔχοντας τὴν οὐσίαν ἀφαιρούμενοι, διανέμοντες τῷ δήμῳ, τὸ πλεῖστον αὐτοὶ ἔχειν (A6-8): The construction holds a surprise. The semantics and the chiastic order of the two participles ἀφαιρούμενοι and διανέμοντες suggest that the money is simply being transferred from the rich to the deme, but then αὐτοὶ ἔχειν arrives, which being in the infinitive turns out to be the principal construction with δύνανται, though it introduces a new and unexpected element. For a similar surprise cf. κολάζει, 562D3 (and n.4111). διανέμοντες recalls the redistribution dreamed of by the democrat as the means to achieve “equality” (διανέμουσα, 558C6).

4154

μεταλαμβάνει γὰρ οὖν οὕτως (B1): they “get a share”—of what the drones have confiscated! For γὰρ οὖν assenting to the obvious cf. 357D3.

4155

ἀμύνεσθαι (B2): The abrupt change of subject requires us to infer for ourselves that Socrates refers to the κοσμιώτατοι, whom his terminology favors, as innocent victims: they are required to enter the buzzing hullabaloo against their better instincts (for they are truly κόσμιοι), and counteract the speechifying (λέγοντές τε καὶ πράττοντες [B2-3]: cf. 564D9 and n.4146) of the bosses.

4156

αἰτίαν ἔσχον (B5), the regular passive form of the deponent (cf. the humorous syllepsis at 566C2-3). For the idea compare αἰτιωμένη (562D4 and n.4112). The aorist is used for the outcome, as above.

4157

ἐπιβουλεύουσι τῷ δήμῳ (B6): the alarmist accusation (n.b., ὡς) that the few are plotting against the many represents an inversion of the plotting of the many against the few that brought about democracy (551D6-7, 555D9, 556D6-E1), the plot being finally carried out at 560B7-561A4.

4158

νεωτερίζειν (B6), is obviously a two-edged sword (cf.555D10), but here it is a pejorative political term.

4159

τότ’ ἤδη (C1), again, for the crucial point in the development.

4160

ὡς ἀληθῶς ὀλιγαρχικοί (C2): We have to presume the meaning is “rulers of few and none,” because that is what it meant last time (551E2), but as soon as we think of that passage we notice that the situation is completely different. As before their fewness is a measure of their lack of force, but this time they are the subjugated rather than the subjugators. In short, they will lose the status that made an awkward exception of them (above, 564D8 [ἐκτὸς ὀλίγων] and E2 [χωρίς τινων ὀλίγων]).

4161

ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦτο τὸ κακόν .. ἐντίκτει αὐτούς (C3): The κοσμιώτατοι are forced to stoop to the level of the demagogues: cf. B2-3 and n.4155.

4162

εἰσαγγελίαι (C6), as trials before a large public body, are particularly amenable to demagoguery.

4163

ἕνα (C9), placed in emphatic position. Socrates perhaps is quoting Ar.Eq.1127 where Demos says βούλομαι τρέφειν ἕνα προστάτην. Up until now the bosses were in the plural (διαβαλλόντων, C1; ἑτέρων, B5; οἱ προεστῶτες, A7; etc.); note also the avoidance of this explicit singular for the demagogue at the rostrum (564D7-E2) done by means of the abstract expressions τὸ προεστός, τὸ δριμύτατον and τὸ ἄλλο.

4164

προΐστασθαι (C9), being a verb, continues the de facto rather than de jure description of their empowerment and standing. The transition from the previous question to this one will become clear at 566A6-7: see next notes.

4165

ῥίζης (D2) continues the metaphor or τρέφειν τε καὶ αὔξειν (C10). The mass’s tendency to throw all its belief behind a single champion is a necessary prerequisite (ἄρα) to the creation of a tyrant. μέν (D1) however suggests that something else will be needed. ἄρα reveals the statement is an inference rather than an observation, so that Adam’s comment, that if Plato means here to be historical he has failed at it, does not apply. The paradox that the tyrannical “volunteer” that springs up comes from “no other” root than the happy champion of the people—that in truth it is not a volunteer after all—has been prepared by οὐκ ἐξ ἄλλης (564A6) and the law of antapodosis (563E9-4A1), as well as 563E3-4 (καλὴ καὶ νεανική): beautiful and vigorous as it seems, the ἀπληστία of freedom brings on an ugly and debilitating tyranny.

4166

τίς ἀρχὴ οὖν μεταβολῆς ἐκ προστάτου ἐπὶ τύραννον; (D4). Presumably the root has pushed up a προστάτης who could, because of the deme’s desire for a boss and protector (C9-10) during a time of controversy (565B9-C8), become a tyrant (D1-2); now all that is needed is the fateful act or event that will initiate this transformation (ἀρχὴ μεταβολῆς).

4167

As by Pausanias, 8.2.

4168

τούτῳ (E1), dative of the person upon whom the necessity impinges, after he was the subject. Of such an “inversion of government” in the syntax (one nominative yielding to another under which what was previously nominative becomes dative), Riddell offers several examples (§271). The change of construction emphasizes the inevitability and objectivity of the necessity. Cf. the shift at 558A4-8 (cf. n.3994).

4169

σφόδρα πειθόμενον (E3-4) redoes διαφερόντως προΐστασθαι ἑαυτοῦ (C9-10).

4170

ἐμφυλίου αἵματος (E4) re-introduces a larger group with a higher sanction (the φυλή), which embraces the polis and all its various regimes. We also encountered it in Book Five (469B5-471C3) when the treatment of racially Hellenic enemies had to be distinguished from the treatment of barbarian ones (compare ἀπέχεσθαι at 469C7 with 565E4), and conflicts within the race were distinguished (as στάσεις) from conflicts against barbarians (as πόλεμοι).

4171

οἶα δὴ φιλοῦσιν (E5) sc. οἱ προεστῶτες, referring to the institutionalized victimization of rich persons by the bosses. They distribute their wealth to the deme (and themselves) to keep the deme in their thrall (565A6-8), and they manufacture εἰσαγγελίαι καὶ κρίσεις καὶ ἀγῶνες against them (565C6).

4172

βίον ἀνδρὸς ἀφανίζων (E6): “snuffing out some person's life” (ἀνδρός is generic and has its usual sympathetic tone: cf.361B6 and n.753). Amazingly, a direct object for all five acts committed by the προστάτης (E3-566A2) is absent, as if the boss is unaware what he is doing (as the person who eats the entrails on Mount Lycaea is unaware they contain human bits). Of translations I have consulted only Schleiermacher’s abstains from adding an object: most add two or three. For the aposiopesis compare 364B7-C1 and n. ad loc.; for the exceptional vagueness compare the amazing use of αὐτῷ at 588B6 (cf. n.4632).

4173

γευόμενος (E7): The climactic instance of the theme of public speechifying as a kind of action (cf. λέγει τε καὶ πράττει, 564D9 and n.4146): the mouth of the orator is bloodied by his victim’s flesh.

4174

ἀποκοπάς and ἀναδασμόν (566A1-2) smack of revolution: Leg.684E1-2, ps.Dem.24.149, Isoc.Panath.259, Arist.Pol.1305A3-7 (cit. Adam).

4175

ὁ στασιάζων πρὸς τοὺς ἔχοντας τὰς οὐσίας (A6), a title by which the deme now champions its boss and protector. Cf. ὁ τοῦ δήμου βοηθός, B7-8 below. The astigmatism of timocracy, the conflicted oxymorons of oligarchy, and the flattering inversions of democracy, are being replaced with bald and murderous falsehoods, still flattering but now promulgated by forces the deme does not see. Socrates leaves it up to Adeimantus, and Plato up to us, still to recognize what words mean and what is actually happening.

4176

βίᾳ (A9) as opposed to λάθρᾳ (B3, infra). The distinction between the ways the final change is reached is repeated (cf. 557A6-8, 551B3-5), but what is truly λάθρᾳ in the shift to tyranny is the intention of the tyrant (the change is in fact happening before everybody’s eyes), not the action of the κοσμιώτατοι that plot against him, as Socrates indirectly will assert at B10-11. Cf. προεστός at 564D8 (and n.4145).

4177

ἀπειργασμένος (A10), an allusion to the celebratory, and final, restoration of unnecessary desires in the democratic man (λαμπρὰς μετὰ πολλοῦ χοροῦ κατάγουσιν ἐστεφανωμένας, 560E3-4).

4178

ἐκβάλλειν (B1) conative present (contrast aorist ἐκπεσών, A9), as are the presents διαβάλλοντες and ἐπιβουλεύουσιν (B2).

4179

διαβάλλοντες ἐν τῇ πόλει / βιαίῳ δὴ θανάτῳ (B2): Here is the final version of the transition effected λάθρᾳ or βίᾳ (cf. A9 and n.4176).

4180

αἰτεῖν (B6) defensive, as was αἴτημα (B5). The tyrant is depicted as threatened, but the syntax succeeds at hiding his own role in fabricating the claim.

4181

ὁ τοῦ δήμου βοηθός (B7-8) a title suitably innocuous, vague, and brief—compare the studiously vague expressions “Il Duce” and “Der Führer” and “Big Brother.” In truth it is a large step that has been taken from his previous title (A6).

4182

αὐτοῖς (B7): The ethical dative refers to the same personnel that constitute the deme, an irony lost on the voting mass (the deme). We are near the magical moment dreamed of by Thrasymachus (344B5-C2), which is identical to the disastrous moment foretold in Solon’s admonition (Diod.Sic. 9.20): frg.9West [ἀνδρῶν δ’ ἐκ μεγάλων πόλις ὄλλυται, ἐς δὲ μονάρχου | δῆμος ἀϊδρίῃ δουλοσύνην ἔπεσεν], and frg.11 West [αὐτοὶ γὰρ τούτους ηὐξήσατε ῥύματα δόντες | καὶ διὰ ταῦτα κακὴν ἔσχετε δουλοσύνην]: where compare ῥύματα δόντες with διδόασι, B10.

4183

θαρρήσαντες (B10) suggests rashness without suggesting large-mindedness (e.g. the μεγαλοπρέπεια with which democratic citizens welcomed any political activist as long as he claims to be εὔνους ... τῷ πλήθει: 558B5-C1). With θαρρήσαντες Socrates uses a term they might well use of themselves, but at the same time by means of the balanced contrast with δείσαντες, suggests something else to us. With the invisible deception of the tyrant, the ignorance of the deme is now represented with “Sophoclean” irony. We have come, then, to the point where news is harder to believe than fiction (Karl Kraus).

4184

αἰτίαν (C3) governed by ἔχων in a mild syllepsis. It is another trumped-up charge. Cf. ἐπαιτιώμενος οἷα δὴ φιλοῦσιν (565E5), αἰτίαν ἔσχον (565B5).

4185

μισόδημος (C3) is as much a propagandistic label as was βοηθὸς τοῦ δήμου above.

4186

Hdt.1.55.

4187

θανάτου δίδοται (C8): The verb suggests we compare this enactment of the deme with its last one (διδόασι [sc. φύλακας], B10).

4188

μέγας μεγαλωστί (C9-D1), quoting Homer Il.16.776 which describes Hector’s felled charioteer, Cebriones, and how he was brought down low but retained his pride. After the oracle this allusion suggests that if the κόσμιος does stay, he will at least perish with honor.

4189

τῷ δίφρῳ τῆς πόλεως (D2): The metaphor is used at Polit.266E8-11, but here the pomp lives on blood.

4190

τί δὲ οὐ μέλλει; (D4). Will Adeimantus cut through Socrates’s irony to express aversion, regret, consternation, or worry that this might happen to him, as he did in regard to the rude confrontation he has had with animals in democratic Athens?

4191

τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν (D5) a euphemism for the quality of life that the evolution into tyranny results in, and therefore another variation in the programmatic announcement. It is “ironic” as was the characterization of tyranny (ἡ καλλίστη δή) with which the evolution of the tyrannical regime was introduced, an assertion made before the investigation even began (562A4); but the term also reminds us that the men are being described only for our own purpose (the purpose of the brothers, with Socrates aiding): to judge how happy their lives are, and ours would be if we were like him.

4192

τοῦ δὲ ἀνδρὸς καὶ τῆς πόλεως (D5-6): The pairing of man and state is a suitable characterization of the tyrannical πολιτεία, since the evolution of the regime (the πόλις) has been shown to be tantamount to the apocalyptic appearance of the tyrant (the ἀνήρ). Contrast the expression that introduced the treatment of tyranny as a whole, i.e. of the state and the personality—at 562A4-5: τυραννίς τε καὶ τύραννος (cf. n.4093). We could start to think that the τυραννικὸς ἀνήρ (i.e., the personality whose identification is the real goal for describing the tyrannical regime), is being identified with the τύραννος himself, and in a sense we will be right; but then we would, I hope, remember we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope: The personalities, in contrast with the regimes, have been described in terms of their inward order, including the marks left by parental relations (the youth in the oligarchic regime almost an exception: cf. 556B8 and n.3949), rather than in terms of the individual’s relation with his fellow citizens.

4193

βροτός (D6) tempts the boundaries between man and god, but also, because of the etymological connection with βιβρώσκω and the cannibalism of 565D9-E1, the boundaries between man and animal. Cf. ἵλεώς τε καὶ πρᾷος εἶναι (E3 and n.4196).

4194

καὶ οὔτε τύραννός φησιν εἶναι ὑπισχνεῖταί τε πολλά (D9-E1): The connectives juxtapose the fact that he forgoes to claim (or avoids to confess?) he is tyrant, with the fact that he makes many promises, without even broaching the logical relation between these claims, so as to require us to find his underlying strategy on our own.

4195

χρεῶν τε ἠλευθέρωσε καὶ γῆν διένειμε (E2): The two actions, adumbrated above at A1-2, are put into the aorist in contrast to the preceding future promises; the present tense returns (προσποιεῖται, E4) to describe the present result of this record of action. Of course the description is one-sided: the “freeing” (ἠλευθέρωσε) of debts will burden the debtors with loss, and the “redistribution” (διένειμε: cf. 558C6 and n.4007) of land can only “redistribute” it from persons that happen to own it to persons who happen not to own it.

4196

ἵλεώς τε καὶ πρᾷος (E3). The former term properly applies to the relation between the gods and man, and in particular the gods’ prerogative to look down kindly upon man, and man’s attempt to act well, so as to appease the gods (427B7 supra, Leg.792D2; Phdo.95A4-6; Iliad.1.583, 2.550; h.Cer.204). The term is formulaic therefore in the language of the kletic hymn (h.Hom.1.17; 19.48, 20.8, 21.5, 23.4; Hes.Op.338,340; Pind.O.7.9; Soph.El.655: cf. Leg.664C8, 712B5; Phdo.95A4-6), although it can be used in the context of appeasing a hero, as in Il.9.639, 19.178; and it is used of a man superhumanly contented, namely, Socrates after drinking the hemlock (Phdo.117B3, cf. Rep.496E2).

While this term compares the tyrant to a god, the second term (πρᾷος) compares him to an animal, alluding also to his potential for violence (cf. ἀγριωτάτη, 564A8), as well as to the demos’s subconscious awareness of it.

4197

γε (E6), here and throughout the passage (566C8, E10; 567A5, B7, C4, E7; 568A3, B3, B9, C2, C6; 569A8, B5) marks the lowered expectations to which Socrates is becoming inured; and οἶμαι (E6, 567A5) verges on “I daresay.” Contrast exasperated δή in the treatment of democracy (561B2 and n.4069).

4198

πρῶτον μέν (E8) in a proleptic position, goes with the ἵνα clause.

4199

ὅπως ἄν (567A6) varies ἵνα (E8, 567A1) under the force of the conditional ἄν in καὶ ἄν γε (A5): The tyrant stirs up an enemy to keep the citizens busy and would stir one up if he suspected that any citizens would prove recalcitrant to his rule. Cf. K.-G. §330.4 and GMT §328 (Smyth appears wrongly to restrict this conditionalizing use to object clauses: §2215, cf. 2201b).

4200

ἕτοιμον (A10) neuter, in its stately and archaic idiom with the infinitive (sc. ἐστί), for the inevitable result or punishment (E.HF 85, Solon 4.8 [West]; Anac.50.11 [Page=395 PMG], Simon.103,7 and 15 [Page=608 PMG]). Cf. also πότμος ἕτοιμος, Iliad 18.96. J.-C. say the ellipsis of ἐστί is common.

4201

ἀνδρικώτατοι (B5) a rough-hewn term that will be tamed down into ἀνδρεῖος below (B12).

4202

For the tone of ὑπεξαιρεῖν (B8) cf. (with J.-C.) Thuc.8.70.2. ὑπό implies stealth and ἐξ implies irreversibility. We coined the transitive verb to “disappear someone” to describe analogous tyrannical phenomena, criminal or totalitarian, in the 20th Century.

4203

ἄρξειν (B9) future: cf. C8 below.

4204

τίς ἀνδρεῖος, τίς μεγαλόφρων, τίς φρόνιμος, τίς πλούσιος (B12-C1): The list relies on the background list of the tripartite goods to provide a division of the types of benefit (ὄφελος, B10): ἀνδρεῖος here stands for bodily strength, μεγαλόφρων moves away from it to make a transition to the psychic goods (τίς φρόνιμος), and finally we have the external goods (πλούσιος). In short, anything of value is to him a threat (cf. the inversion of χείριστον / βέλτιστον below, C5-7).

4205

καθήρῃ (C3), for the “purgation” of good things cf. 560D8 and 573B4.

4206

καλόν γε καθαρμόν (C4): Adeimantus joins Socrates in his snide tone, here and in the sequel, and ruefully joins him in imagining the tyrant’s development (C8, D10-11, E7).

4207

ἐν μακαρίᾳ ἄρα … ἀνάγκῃ (D1), a necessity not at all far from the Diomedean one (493D6 and n.2956).

4208

ἐὰν τὸν μισθὸν διδῷ (D10-11): Adeimantus’s definite article expresses a cynical certainty they will have their price; his present designates that the tyrant is adopting a policy.

4209

κηφῆνας (D12): Working for pay is always ἀκούσιον (strictly speaking: 345E5-346D8) and always undignified (cf. 419A10, Achilles’s remark in Hades [θητεύεμεν, 386B5], and Demosthenes’s demagogical use of the term against Aeschines at 18.43), and always involves an apolitical or politically unintegratable element (371E4). It is this last element, along with Adeimantus’s metaphor πετόμενοι, that brings (winged) drones to Socrates’s mind.

4210

αὖ (D12): The local supply had turned into the bosses: now we have to rely on foreign types (ξενικοί, whence derogatory παντοδαποί).

4211

αὐτόθεν (E3): Why go abroad when you have a supply of foreigners at home (our slaves)? The τίς δὲ αὐτόθεν of AFDM (versus τί on the Monacensis) is a brachylogical parallel to the two questions (τίνες / πόθεν) of D9. The disfigurement of the text by Slings (Crit.Notes,153) is unwarranted: interlocutors often interrupt for reasons we do not immediately understand (e.g., 549C7, Phdrs.273D1, 277D5, al.). Adeimantus is surprised and apprehensive about a resource within and worried about what ends the tyrant will be willing to go (ἐθελήσειεν).

4212

τοι (E7) is derogatory: Adeimantus doesn’t even offer an explanation or use a verb. We may infer he has in mind their having been inured to slavery (contrast 567A5-8, B12-C3).

4213

The τυράννου χρῆμα (E8) consists of the χρᾶσθαι (568A1) he is left with. There is a reminder of the play on the etymology of χρᾶσθαι at 559C4, in addition to the idiomatic use of χρῆμα in metonymy (of a “monster”: cf. Smyth §1249). ἀνδράς, predicative with φίλοις τε καὶ πιστοῖς, remembers ἀνδρικώτατοι, B5.

4214

The ἑταῖροι (568A4) are the slaves he freed and the νέοι πολῖται are his imported mercenaries, making the usual chiastic order (ABBA) with 567D10-E2 and E3-7; whereas the converse attitudes (μισοῦσι / φεύγουσι) are ABAB with (θαυμάζουσι / σύνεισιν). σύνεισιν then reminds Socrates of Euripides’s συνουσία (B1) and triggers his digression.

4215

πυκνῆς διανοίας ἐχόμενον (A11). For ἐχόμενον with gen. compare φρονήσεως [ἄξιον] ἀληθινῆς ἐχόμενον (496A8-9, where ἄξιον seems to be a marginale imported into the text). But φρονήσεως ἀληθινῆς, in that passage, is incapable of the cynical meaning that πυκνῆς διανοίας here must bear, namely, “subtle intention.” The poet is playing with irony (“Yes, very wise indeed, these toadies are”) rather than calling a spade a spade and speaking straight about evil. That poets can be presumed to flatter tyrants with lies cf. Prot.346B5-8.

4216

σοφοὶ τύραννοι τῶν σοφῶν συνουσίᾳ (B1) does make a trimeter. An Euripidean instance or version of the saying is not preserved, but we do have this line attributed to Sophocles (frg.12 [Dindorf] = frg.13 [Nauck]).

4217

ἰσόθεον (B3): The claim, imported from Eur.Troad.1169 (γάμων τε καὶ τῆς ἰσοθέου τυραννίδος), suggests the source of the satirical hyperbole in μακάριον (567D1 and E8), and goes back to Glaucon’s admiring use of the term at 360C3.

4218

τοιγάρτοι … ἅτε σοφοὶ ὄντες … συγγιγνώσκουσιν ἡμῖν (B5-6): Socrates hoists the poets on their own petard (cf. σοφόν, A8, with B1 and B5). We for our part recognize their clever speech to be the speech of unscrupulously clever persons, too clever to take responsibility for the demagogical effect of their words, which effect he next describes (C2-5).

4219

κομψοί (C1): Adeimantus completely grasps Socrates’s point, corroborating it with another cynically two-edged adjective: they will do better being expelled by us than defending themselves by admitting their toadiness to the tyrants so as thereby to lose their patrons.

4220

περιιόντες (C2) here suggests the meddlesome troublemaking of the travelling sophist. Cf. 338B2 (and n.) and the picture drawn at 600C6-E2.

4221

μισθωσάμενοι (C3): These hirelings were listed as their ὑπηρέται at 373B7-C1.

4222

τε καί (C4) provocatively stressing the continuity between tyranny and democracy, the order indicating we are to look backward in the discourse, and thereby bringing to mind the regimes still higher up in the text (ἀνωτέρω, C9) and earlier in the “decline.” Though we have become inured to the notion that Book Eight narrates a “decline,” the metaphor of a slope is entirely absent up until this point. The configuration of the list at 544C1-7, as well as the expressions μεταξύ 544D2, διϊτέον 545A2, πάλιν 545C4, and ἐν μέσῳ 547B8, each and all forwent an opportunity to introduce such a metaphor. Even the σκοπιά to which we ascended in Book Four (445C4-7) described the theoretical ascent, not its subject matter. From that high vantage we beheld the “one” good (not “highest”) and the “countless” kinds of evil (not “lower”); and as the study of the worse states there began, the opportunity to introduce a “descent” was again passed over (ἐξ ἀλλήλων μεταβαίνειν, 449B1).

4223

μισθούς (C7), deeply derogatory (cf. 567D10 and n.), governs τούτων.

4224

Reading ἀποδομένων (D8) with all mss. (ἀπολομένων A2): There is no need to emend. With τε Adeimantus creates in advance a berth for a second item that he introduces only after Socrates interrupts him (E1). He wishes to depict the impiety by which permanent assets are liquidated merely for daily expenditures. By mentioning the indirect effect of tax relief he brings up the deme, to whom after all the tyrant owes his office, and thereby provides himself with a segue to the metaphor πατρῷα, just below, the abuse of which continues his theme of impiety. Compare the give and take by which the two categories of πιστοί are introduced, at 567D9-E7.

4225

συμπόται (E3) replaces σύνεισιν (A5) with a more concrete image, then filled out with gratuitous insouciance by the exegetical ἑταῖροι καὶ ἑταῖραι.

4226

μανθάνω (E4): Socrates announces he “gets” the jocular sense of Adeimantus’s τῶν πατρῴων, a joke based on his own innocent use of θρέψεσται at D2, as γεννήσας shows. We are to imagine the tyrant “moving back in” with his parents (that he brings his entourage along makes it all the more ridiculous). For idiomatic μανθάνω in reply cf. 372E2 and n.1050.

4227

Reading δέ (E7) with all mss. except Ven.184, and subsequent τε with AFD (over M) for unadversative connection. With πῶς Socrates reproduces the same sense of apprehensive indignation Adeimantus registered at 567E4.

4228

ἀγανακτῇ τε καὶ λέγῃ (E7): τε καί announces the λόγος will be tinged with impatience, or that his impatience will be expressed in words—the impatience of a parent dealing with an irresponsible son.

4229

συγκλύδων (569A3) must refer to the miscellaneous ἑταῖραι. Apart from the non-Platonic Ax.369A9, the word appears in Attic only at Thuc.7.5, in paraphrase of a speech, as in the present passage (Gulippus there addresses his men about the “riffraff” that have just bested them). We must therefore consider the term a creature of the Umgangssprach, which indicates the father’s tone here. Later the word becomes acceptable in literature (though in Plut.Mor.201F it is again within a quote: contrast 661C, vit.Marc.45; Luc.Alex.16, Merc.Cond.24; Hdn.7.7.1). cf. Appian (apud Gr.Lex.Man., s.v.συγκλύς): colluvie hominum vilissimorum.

4230

ἐλευθερωθείη (A5), the old nostrum of democracy now mouthed by the democratic father.

4231

τῶν πλουσίων τε καὶ καλῶν κἀγαθῶν λεγομένων (A3-4). That they are rich (πλούσιοι) is a fact; λεγομένων goes only with καλῶν κἀγαθῶν, a vague catch-phrase like κοσμιώτατοι φύσει (564E6 and n.4149), serving as an index of the envy the Boss foments in the masses.

4232

καὶ νῦν κελεύει (A5) after the sputtering shambles of a protasis (568E7-569A5), shows with an apodosis how Father Deme’s words result in deeds. καί is illative and κελεύει is a virtual quote: “Accordingly I now order you out.”

4233

τότ’ ἤδη (A8): This time it devolves upon Adeimantus to narrate the fateful moment. For his asseverative oath by Zeus in the accusative cf. 574C6 and n.4333.

4234

For ominous γνώσεται (A8) used of πάθει μαθεῖν, cf. 362A2.

4235

ἡσπάζετό τε καὶ ηὖξεν (B1), ruefully looking back and seeing the moments in reverse order: ἀσπαζεται, 566D9; τρέφειν τε καὶ αὔξειν, 565C10.

4236

ἀσθενέστερος ὢν ἰσχυροτέρους ἐξελαύνει (B1-2): Adeimantus demurs to be explicit.

4237

πῶς … λέγεις; (B3): Socrates reiterates indignant incredulity (cf. 568E7), to require Adeimantus to be explicit.

4238

ἤδη (B7) temporal: in contrast with the tyrant’s silence on the point during his first days at the helm (οὐ … φησιν, 566E1). His conduct finally makes the confession (ὁμολογία) unnecessary (ὁμολογουμένη is middle).

4239

καπνὸν δουλείας (B8-C1): cf. ὁτιοῦν δουλείας, 563D6.

4240

ἐλευθέρων, δούλων (C1): The genitives, pace Shorey, are objective.

4241

Cf. τὸν καπνὸν φεύγων εἰς τὸ πῦρ ἐνέπεσεν (Diogen.8.45 [=Paroim.Gr.1.314]).

4242

ἀκαίρου (C2) suggests an impervious resistance to compromise.

4243

μεταμπισχόμενος (C3), is a reference to the ἱμάτιον πεποικιλμένον of 557C5.

4244

Note (B8-C4) the chiasm “of before and after” (φεύγων / δουλείας / ἐλευθέρων // δούλων / δεσποτείας / ἐμπεπτωκώς) corroborated by a restatement in parallel (πολλῆς καὶ ἀκαίρου ἐλευθερίας // χαλεπωτάτην τε καὶ πικροτάτην δούλων δουλείαν), with etymological redundancy for closure.

4245

Though αὐτὸς δὴ λοιπός (571A1) constitutes a programmatic announcement that we are making the transition to the tyrannical personality corresponding to the regime, by its emphatic position αὐτός also looks back to the deme over against him, whose fate was finally revealed when his intentions became clear (569B8-C4), and λοιπός suggests there is no political capital left to decline further, and that the tyrant stands alone. Now that the deme discovers his motives they might very well ask who he was, all along, and why he wanted to take over. The programmatic announcement continues the ambiguity of τύραννος / τυραννικός (cf.566D5-6, 562A4-5).

4246

μεθίσταται (A2): the personal construction is another variation of the programmatic language.

4247

μακάριος (A3): Again Socrates substitutes it for εὐδαίμων: it is the latter that is the proper object of their inquiry (354C3, 361D3), but he never forgets the vaunting use of the former by Thrasymachus (344B7: cf. 354A8, 561D7, and 567D1 and E8), who silently watches.

4248

ὃ ποθῶ ἔτι (A5): cf. Prot.329D1-2, ὃ ἔτι ἐπιποθῶ; Phdrs.234C5, Tim.19A8.

4249

ἔτι (B2): Adeimantus again (cf. A4, A1) echoes Socrates’s ἔτι (A5), in his manner of going “toe-to-toe” (n.3830). For the conversational idiom ἐν καλῷ cf. S.El.348, E.Herac.971, Ar.Eccl.321, Thesm.292.

4250

κολαζόμενοι δὲ ὑπό τε τῶν νόμων καὶ τῶν βελτιόνων ἐπιθυμιῶν μετὰ λόγου (B6-7). The forces limiting the παράνομοι ἐπιθυμίαι are reminiscent of the alliance of θυμός and λόγος described in Book Four (440A8-B8): that psychology comes back more explicitly below (571D6-572B1).

4251

λέγεις δὲ καὶ τίνας … ταύτας (C2). The collocation of δέ and καί is condemned by Denniston where δέ is “purely connective” (306 [cf.585], who would presumably read δέ with FD). But Adeimantus’s δέ is adversative, in the sense that he waits to know which pleasures Socrates has in mind before he accepts the category (ταύτας), whence also καί.

4252

τὰς περὶ τὸν ὕπνον (C3): These desires and pleasures can affect us in waking life, too: the reference to sleep is merely for exemplification. Men are ashamed they feel such pleasures; hence Plutarch elaborates that they appear during sleep because μεθ’ ἡμέραν ὁ νόμος αἰσχύνῃ καὶ φόβῳ καθείργνυσιν (virt.profect.83A: cf. ἀποφυγοῦσα [sc. κακία] δόξας καὶ νόμους καὶ πορρωτέρω γιγνομένη τοῦ δεδιέναι καὶ αἰδεῖσθαι, virt.vit.101A); and J.-C. are hard pressed to tell us they carry no moral opprobrium (ad loc.,409) though καὶ πάνυ δοκοῦσιν … εἶναι immediately suggests Socrates and Adeimantus would disagree and 575A4-5 (the ἔνδοθεν θόρυβος) proves it. For purposes of the conversation Socrates needs to enable Adeimantus to acknowledge their existence without having to confess to them (cf.572B3-7); but Plutarch’s comment also reminds us of Glaucon’s confession that only fear of being seen makes the “just” man “just.” The story of Gyges might just as well have been a dream; but by now, because we have invented the tripartite psychology, we have reached a position from which we can ask and begin to understand where such dreams come from!

4253

ἐκείνου (C5) inferring the part the above-mentioned pleasures affect, τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν. The list (λογιστικὸν καὶ ἥμερον καὶ ἄρχον) includes explicitly the rational part of the soul but the θυμοειδές only indirectly: ἥμερον suggests it is in a state of support and alliance with the λογιστικόν (cf. 441E4-2B3 for the whole nexus of ideas).

4254

ἰέναι (C6) is the continuation of ἀποσάμενον ὕπνον, and ἀποπιμπλάναι is its purpose. The presents are conative. For the sense of ἰέναι cf. the cognate noun ἴτης and Prot.349E.

4255

αἰσχύνης (C8) alongside φρονήσεως invokes again the θυμοειδές (by its “Leontian” function, 439E6-40A2), alongside the λογιστικόν.

4256

Anarthrous μητρί (C9) a virtual proper name (cf. Soph.OT 981-2): Smyth §1140.

4257

βρώματος (D2) suggests cannibalism by its very sound (cf. βροτός). Cf. βρώσεις at 619C and n.4193. It is not merely eating unhealthy foods that Socrates has in mind. Cf. Plut., βρώσεις ἀθέσμους (de virt. et vit.101A).

4258

οὔτε ἀνοίας οὐδέν … οὔτ’ ἀναισχυντίας (D3-4), repeating αἰσχύνης καὶ φρονήσεως (C9) in the usual chiasm of before and after (cf. n.14): again the reactions stemming from the λογιστικόν and the θυμοειδές, the latter now being brought closer to the surface.

4259

αὐτὸς αὑτοῦ (D6): The juxtaposition recalls the paradox of self-mastery (430E11-431D5, esp. 431B5 and D5); and while ὑγιεινῶς points back to the sickly overindulgence of the previous description (C5-6), its exegesis with σωφρόνως revitalizes the etymon of that word, since keeping his pleasures under control will now be seen to preserve (σώζειν) the mindful treasures of his dreams. The entire paragraph (D6-572B1) recalls the vision of the noble soul’s consciousness described at 372A6-C1.

4260

μέν (D7) / δέ (E1): Postponing these to allow the substantive to follow its article is not uncommon (Denniston 186, 373 n.).

4261

μήτε ἐνδείᾳ δοὺς μήτε πλησμονῇ (E1-2): For the dative with δούς cf. πληγαῖς … δοῦναι, 574C3-4; θανατῷ δίδοται, 566C8; ὀδύναις ἔδωκεν, Phdrs.254E5 (cf.Hom.Od.17.567); and ἀχέεσσί γε δώσεις Hom.Od.19.167.

4262

Based on the experience being described, I read του καὶ (572A2) from the corrector of A, and take the genitive to be the object of αἰσθάνεσθαι. (cf.485B1-2 and 515D2 [and n.]).

4263

ἤ τι τῶν γεγονότων ἢ ὄντων ἢ καὶ μελλόντων (A3): The epic and mythological formula stresses the human limitations which the healthy and temperate man hopes, however briefly, to glimpse beyond.

4264

With παντελῶς (B2) Adeimantus acknowledges the access of loftiness in the vision of the soul’s inner workings to which Socrates has just given himself over, as does Socrates himself (ἐξήχθημεν, B3). We recognize the style of the passage—the balanced and sustained accumulation of participial phrases placing many balls in the air at one time and relying on the content more than hypotaxis or connectives to indicate the organization—as one of Plato’s distinct styles we have called ecphrastic: cf. 372A5-C1, 399A5-C4, 409B4-C1, 511B3-C2, and the string of nouns at 532B6-C3 (cf. Appendix 7 for a full treatment of ecphrastic style in Books Eight and Nine). Pater, from his usual dreamy distance, famously called this passage Plato’s “evening prayer” (Plato and Platonism 124, apud Bosanquet ad loc.) and indeed Socrates had described, in similar though more objective terms, the peaceable and moderate and evening of the men who dwell in his simple and true polis, including their bedtime prayer (372A5-C1).

4265

ἄρα (B4), far from being skeptical (Denniston, 39), marks the acknowledgment of a fact despite the discomfort that the addition of δεινόν τι to the ensuing list of adjectives expresses.

4266

ἄρα (B6), sympathetic with the ἄρα above (B4).

4267

δημοτικός (B10) replaces δημοκρατικός. In the aftermath of the analysis of democracy and its evolution into tyranny the notion that the deme was ever in charge of anything has been debunked (as was the notion that δημοκρατία even deserved to be called a regime: cf. 557D6-7 and n.3982): the δῆμος was always a demotic mob.

4268

ἦν … γεγονώς (C1): The pluperfect is a virtual imperfect of citation (n.582), whence Adeimantus’s answer, ἦν γάρ (D4).

4269

ὑπὸ φειδωλῷ (C1), the dative again used with ὑπό to depict the coldness of the father’s nurture: cf.558D1 and n.4012. To say his father raised him “from youth” seems at first redundant, but see next note and n.4273.

4270

παιδιᾶς τε καὶ καλλωπισμοῦ ἕνεκα (C3): Socrates (not Plato, pace Adam) speaks from the point of view of the φειδωλός. Fun and fancy show (cf. ματαίους, 554A8) are not the entire complement of, nor a particularly representative alternative to, the money-making desires, but rather are the desires that the φειδωλός takes pleasure in forgoing even, when his boy was a παῖς. There is another class, unmentioned, which he has succeeded to repress (554B7-C2), and which will presently rear its ugly head in his son.

4271

κομψωτέροις ἀνδράσι (C6) redoes the striking expression αἴθωσι θηρσὶ καὶ δεινοῖς (559D9-10).

4272

μεστοῖς (C6) means not only that they are themselves satiated (cf. γεμόντα, 559C9) but that they have a full supply to share with others (cf. ἔχουσας δυναμένοις σκευάζειν, 559D10).

4273

μίσει (C8) frankly and accurately identifies how he felt about his father caring about money more than τῶν ἄλλων (556C4 and n. 3951)—i.e., himself. Compare the spite with which the timocrat’s son cloaked himself in Persian finery with the wealth he enthroned (553C4-7).

4274

μετρίως δή (D1), exasperated (cf. n.4069 ad 561B2).

4275

ἑκάστων (D2) depicts his eschewal to exclude: cf. τῇ παραπιπτούσῃ ἀεί (561B3) and ὁμοίας φησὶν ἁπάσας (561C4), and the comic picture given at 561C6-D7.

4276

οὔτε ἀνελεύθερον οὔτε παράνομον (D2) nicely describes with a doublet of double negatives his aversions to what he is backing away from without knowing where he is going. J.-C. miss the fastidiousness of the double negatives and see only, with the demotic son, “the mean.”

4277

ἦν (D4) answers ἦν at the beginning of Socrates’s description (giving assent by repeating the interlocutor’s key or important word, with γάρ); δόξα refers to the evaluative description of his resulting life as μετρίως (D1) along with its implicit exasperation (δή, ibid.); and τοιοῦτον refers to the intervening description of the character that led to it (C6-D1). As usual the programmatic language is varied (cf. the transitional programmatic language at 573C11-12).

4278

τίθει τοίνυν (D8) answering (τοίνυν) Adeimantus’s answer (τίθημι). The present imperative continues the process that was initiated by the aorist (θές, D5), and gives berth to the detailed elaboration that follows. The difference in verbal aspect belongs to the act of positing not (with J.-C.) the contents posited. Conversely at E.Hipp.473-4 a present is followed by an aorist that views the process begun as being completed (cf.Barrett [1964] ad loc.).

4279

ταῖς ἐν μέσῳ ταύταις ἐπιθυμίαις (E2): the word order directs our attention to D1-3 above: ταύταις is not so much in an improper attributive position with ταῖς … ἐπιθυμίαις as in the proper predicate position with ἐν μέσῳ: “the pleasures we just referred to as in the middle.” Cf. an expression like ὁ δεινὸς λεγόμενος γεωργός (Smyth §1170).

4280

τοὺς δ’ αὖ παραβοηθοῦντας (E3): We are meant to compare the rescue and counter-rescue (ἀντιβοηθεῖν: cf. n.4031) that the democratic father had undergone when he was an oligarchic son on the road to democracy (559E4-560A2). Here as there the language of “rescue” becomes inarticulate because the person being rescued finds himself allied to both enemies. Hence the bastard formation παραβοηθεῖν, to “counter-aid,” to all appearances an hapax in this sense.

4281

δεινοὶ μάγοι (E4): Another reference to the αἴθωσι θηρσὶ καὶ δεινοῖς (559B9) faced by his father.

4282

ἄλλως (E5) is proleptic, as often, but the prolepsis adds an ominous tone. They are bringing out the ultimate weapon.

4283

μηχανομένους (E6): The apodosis is supplied with another participle, dependent—ἀπὸ κοινοῦ with the others—on τίθει (cf. schol. ad loc.). δέ after ὅταν (E4) indicates that at this point the γιγνόμενα περὶ αὐτόν are no longer the same (D8-9) as what happened to his father (pace Stallb.).

4284

καί (E6) is epexegetical. ἕτοιμα refers back to 552B9, the early life of the drone.

4285

ἔρωτα (573A2), emphatically placed, is not a mere synonym for ἐπιθυμία but almost Ἔρως, the deity immanent (B6-7), for whom these ἐπιθυμίαι will henceforth play ancillaries (A4-8), at best (B2-4).

4286

οὐδέν … ἀλλ’ ἢ τοῦτο (A3): The corroboration is entirely empirical, as at 572B7-9.

4287

If δή (A4) is to be read (FD : om. AM), it is preparatory to τότε δή below (A8).

4288

ἄλλαι (A4) is again proleptic, indicating the antecedent αὐτόν: these ἐπιθυμίαι are “other” than the master ἔρως they contrived above to implant (ὅταν δ’ ἐλπίσωσιν … ἐμποιῆσαι, 572E4-6), and now proceed to implant, in regal detail (ὅταν … ἐμποιήσωσιν, 573A7-B4).

4289

βομβοῦσαι (A4) recalls the image of the civic swarm of drones buzzing around the rostrum (βομβεῖ, 564D10) but the order of analogy is yielding to the disorder of passion.

4290

γέμουσα (A5) redoes μεστοῖς (572C6).

4291

As the great entourage approaches it is first heard (βομβοῦσαι, A4, borrowed from 564D10), then smelled (θυμιαμάτων, A5), then seen (στεφάνων, A5), then tasted (strikingly specific οἴνων, A5) and finally touched (conversely, an indirect euphemism that buries συνουσίαις in a periphrasis). The entourage is prefigured by ἐκβακχευθῇ, 561A9; their crowns by ἐστεφανωμένας, 560E3.

4292

αὔξουσαί τε καὶ τρέφουσαι (A7): Their direct object is not expressed but must be inferred from περὶ αὐτόν above, which expressed what had been the focus of all their other actions: cf. τοῦτον τρέφειν τε καὶ αὔξειν μέγαν, 565D10. These are αἱ ἑαυτῆς (i.e., ταύτης τῆς ἐπιθυμίας) συγγενεῖς ἐπιθυμίαι ἐπὶ σωμάτων κάλλος of Phdr.238C1-2 which there also come on stage before we discover that the identity of αὕτη ἡ ἐπιθυμία they are sponsoring is ἔρως (C3-4).

4293

κέντρον ἐμποιήσωσι (A7): This is the stinger that also turned the κοσμιώταται of the democratic regime into something beneath themselves (ὡς ἀληθῶς ὀλιγαρχικοί [565C2-4]), and that had earlier committed sundry villainies in the oligarchic regime (552D1-E3). The drone they stimulate thereby is the ἔρως they contrived to implant in the democratic son at 572E5: it was already within the boy but now becomes the master force in his soul (B1): cf. n.4299, infra.

4294

τότε δή (A8).

4295

οὕτως ὁ προστάτης τῆς ψυχῆς (B1): another title, following those that emerged at 566A6 and B7. The arousal of Eros by the lesser ἐπιθυμίαι becomes also a shield of madness protecting him from the resistance of prudence or temperance.

4296

χρηστάς (B2): Cf. μηδένα ὅτου τι ὄφελος (567B9-10).

4297

δόξας ἢ ἐπιθυμίας … ποιουμένας χρηστὰς καὶ ἔτι ἐπαισχυνομένας (B2-3) redoes the pair represented above by ἄνοια and ἀναισχυντία (571D4: cf. n.4258), δόξας going with χρηστάς and ἐπιθυμίας with ἐπαισχυνομένας (a distributed binary construction). In the ordered soul the λογιστικόν determines what is χρηστόν and instills, in the thumoeidetic, a δόξα (cf. δόγμα, 412E6, 414B6) which guides it to control the ἐπιθυμητικόν with the force of its Leontian, willful shame. We are witnessing the undermining of this alliance by the desires beneath.

4298

ἀποκτείνει τε καὶ ἔξω ὠθεῖ παρ’ αὐτοῦ (B3): τε καί is “i.e.,” not “or” (as if Eros were dealing with his enemies in the usual way, by killing some and exiling others [ἐκβάλλειν … ἢ ἀποκτεῖναι, 566B1; cf. 560A5-6, 557A3). The passage is parallel to the political passage on tyranny, at 567B3-C8 (which also uses the metaphor of an inverted “purification:” 567C3), and the psychological passage on democratic man, at 560C5-D6 (and again note “purification” at D8); in particular ἀποκτείνει τε καὶ ὠθεῖ corresponds to political tyrant’s ὑπεξαιρεῖν ... δεῖ (567B8) whereas in the psychology of the democrat, there is the impatience of ὠθεῖν, but as yet no murdering (D1-6). In the present passage murder is a means to removing these despicable virtues from his sight (for τε καί linking means and ends or cause and result, cf. n.92), because “he” cannot tolerate their presence. The soul is having to demolish its conscience. We may (and must) compare the fleeting but violent affect Glaucon shows when he removes the perfectly just man from his sight (361E4-362A2) and confuses the lesson the just man is supposed to have learned (but didn’t since he was dead: καὶ γνώσεται, 362A2) with the “lesson” he wanted to teach him, as if he were being driven by a paranomic or paranoid dream.

4299

αὐτῷ (B1) is read in all mss. though doubted by Adam. The shift from the direct to the reflexive αὑτοῦ (B3, again read in all mss.) presents the eros at first operating within the man as a second and alien subject; but as it banishes all else (B3-4), it becomes the only subject that is there. In other words, what had been a man becomes a zombie: cf. D4-5, infra.

4300

καθήρῃ (B4): Removing the last vestige of σωφροσύνη echoes φανερῶς, 560C6. The purgation of temperance is of course a preposterous inversion. The irony of condescending approbation used in the depiction of democracy, is replaced by a depiction of tyranny in which even the most cynical perversion of language seems to know it would fall on dead ears.

4301

Reading καὶ μανίας δέ (B4) with mss. AM (καὶ om. FD), with Riddell (§144): “The δέ and the καί enter into the meaning abreast of one another.” The double connective stresses that the two acts are both contrary and separate.

4302

μανίας … ἐπακτοῦ (B4), alluding to the revelry of the prodigal son and his entourage of foreign riffraff in the description of the tyrannical polis (568E2-3) but also to the ousting of reason from the acropolis of the democratic son’s soul (560B7-C3: cf. esp. καθήρῃ / πληρώσῃ [B4] with τὸν αὐτὸν τόπον [560C3]; and the stimulating entourage [573A4-7] with ψευδεῖς καὶ ἀλαζόνες [560C2]).

4303

λέγεις γένεσιν (B5). With the climactic paragraph the account of γένεσις is complete; next comes the ποῖος (cf.τοιοῦτον, 572D4 and n.4277, and τοιοῦτος below, C11) which will lead to the ζῆν.

4304

φρόνημα (C1) the verbal noun, represents a momentary mood (contrast φρόνησις).

4305

ὑποκεκινηκώς (C3): ὑπό specifies that the anxiety is superficial and therefore transient.

4306

ἐπιχειρεῖ τε καὶ ἐλπίζει (C4), adduced as tyrannical acts. Variation in the presentation of parallel examples leading to a generalization is regular in epagoge (as we learned in the epagoge with Polemarchus in Book One). That the tremendously unjust man can convince even the gods lies beneath and comes to the surface of both brothers’ praises of injustice in Book Two (Glaucon: 362C1-8; Adeimantus 363A5-7 [n.b. εὐδοκιμήσεις]; 365E6-366A4).

4307

δέ (C7) adversative, stressing the adjective.

4308

μεθυστικός τε καὶ ἐρωτικὸς καὶ μελαγχολικός (C9). Eros, inebriation and madness each have a tyrannical aspect (B9-C4), but to call a man τυραννικός requires these elements to penetrate into his way of being (φύσις, C8: cf.514A1-2, 515C5-6, 576A6 and B7) and his habits—linguistically speaking to become his adjectives (whence τοιοῦτος, C11 infra), and psychologically speaking to replace his personality (καθήρῃ / ἐμπλήσῃ, B3-4). Hence, we have completed the γένεσις of the τυραννικὸς ἀνήρ since we have reached his ποιότης. According to the casualness of epagoge, the list restates the three attributes reached, in a new order that happens to place the most important one in the middle. For such change in order cf. Leg.727A4-5 vs. sequel to 728A; 733E3-6 vs. 734D2-4 (and England ad 734C3: “the ordering is not that of a parade”).

4309

Reading ἀνήρ (C11) with all mss., instead of Campbell’s emendation, ἁνήρ, accepted by Burnet. The sentence repeats the programmatic terminology of 572D4, with which it is to be associated (since the treatment of the tyrannical man was there being introduced as a model for that of the democratic man): γίγνεται here repeats ἦν there (sc. γεγονώς from 572C1), τοιοῦτος repeats τοιοῦτον; what remains to be done is reach a judgment (cf. δόξα, 572D4, and our n.4277) about the life (as the democratic man had judged his own as μετρίως δή … ζῇ, D1-3). The γένεσις forms a personality (τοιοῦτος) that reaches a critical moment (τότε δή, 573A8: cf. 550C4-5, 553C4, 560B7 [τελευτῶσαι]) that determines the subsequent life (ζῆν). Cf. n.3773.

4310

τοῦτο σὺ καὶ ἐμοὶ ἐρεῖς (D1): “Why don’t you let me in on the answer, too?” with the scholiast (παροιμία ἥνικά τις ἐρωτήθεις τι ὑπὸ γινώσκοντος τὸ ἐρωτηθέν, αὐτὸς ἀγνοῶν). Cf. ἂν εἴπῃς, 408D6, and the jocular exchange at 608D5-12.

4311

ἑορταί … καὶ κῶμαι καὶ θάλειαι καὶ ἑταῖραι τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα (D2-4). ἑταῖραι reappears from its brief (568E3) but persistent (συγκλύδων, 569A3: cf. n.4229) appearances above. This item has a way of intruding regardless of what else is in the list (e.g., 373A3, and cf. αὐλητρίσι added at Tht.173D5): it does belong there, after all, since its presence is one of the principle reasons for the others. θάλειαι is to be read, with all mss., whatever noun is to be supplied with it (notwithstanding LSJ’s timid “nisi hoc legend.”, s.v.). Variation and inconsequence have a particular place (alongside variation of number and the inclusion of surprising items) in the rhetoric of the satiric epithumetic list, as ἑταῖραι next shows. Cf. Leg.842D3-5 (and Engl. ad loc.), and the converse use nominalized qualities in Alc.I 122B8-C2; Gorg. 484A4 (μαγγανεύματα), 490C8-D1; Leg.839A7-B1; Rep. 373A7; and cf. n.465.

4312

οἰκῶν (D4) indicates the degree to which Eros has become the only “person that is there” in the man. Contrast the “man within,” of the Image that is coming, below (588C2-E1).

4313

The language πολλαὶ καὶ δειναὶ παραβλαστάνουσιν ἐπιθυμίαι ἡμέρας τε καὶ νυκτὸς ἑκάστης (D7-8) recalls παντοδαπὰς ἡδονὰς καὶ ποικίλας καὶ παντοίως ἔχουσας (559D9-10) but in the tone of cold observation rather than participation. “Day and night” describes the immersion in the pursuit of pleasure to which Eros subjects them (cf. Gorg.493E8-494A1).

4314

ἀναλίσκονται (D10). The vestiges of the oligarch’s “frugal” outlook are wiped away (cf. δανεισμοί, E1).

4315

ὥσπερ ὑπὸ κέντρων ἐλαυνομένους (E5): ἐλαύνω draws out the second meaning of κέντρον and turns the men into goaded and herded cattle, a new metaphor mitigated by ὥσπερ.

4316

τῶν τε ἄλλων … καὶ ὑπ’ ἔρωτος (E5-6) is in strictness an appositive to κέντρων, as the meaning opposed to its metaphor. ἄλλων (E5) is proleptic in the manner of an ἄλλως τε καὶ construction, to highlight αὐτοῦ τοῦ ἔρωτος, and has its case both by being appositive to κέντρων that came before and by dint of the ὑπό that comes after it (E6), placed in hyperbaton to emphasize ἔρως even more.

4317

ἀπατήσαντα ἢ βιασάμενον (573E8-574A1): Again the inside (λάθρᾳ) and the outside (βίᾳ).

4318

φέρειν (A3) of inanimate booty, as in the phrase ἄγειν καὶ φέρειν.

4319

Occasionally ἤ (A3) has the stronger sense of “or else” (n.403), introducing what is, as here, an emotionally (in addition to or instead of logically) unattractive alternative, in litotes.

4320

When it lacks a genitive πλέον ἔχειν (A7) is not neutral. The reference is to 565A8.

4321

ἀρχαίων (A7) means more than “older” (just as νεώτερος means more than “younger”) it refers to the early history of the man when he lived on necessary pleasures, and invokes the image of the alcoholic buying whiskey instead of milk with his last five dollars. Compare, below, the approbative sense of ἀρχαιότατον (C3, and n.4331) and the derogatory sense of νεωστί (B12, C1).

4322

τῶν πατρῴων (A10). To neglect bringing up one’s sons (as the oligarch did) is to forget where things are going; but to attack one’s father (with the tyrannical man) is to forget where things came from. τῶν πατρῴων does mean his patrimony (pace Adam): it is money he will inherit when his father passes on, which he here arrogates to his own possession a little ahead of time (for the father’s contrary view of the matter cf. 568E8-569A5).

4323

καὶ ἀπατᾶν (B2), is epexegetical to κλέπτειν in the manner of reverse καί (cf. n.440), directing us to associate this alternative (μέν) with ἀπατήσαντα ἢ βιασάμενον above (573E8-574A1). We already know what to expect in the δέ-clause, where in fact we get a corresponding reverse καί with βιάζοιτο (B4).

4324

ὦ θαυμάσιε (B7), the vocative expressing the speaker’s feeling, as often (n.550).

4325

γέροντός τε καὶ γραός (B7-8) are anarthrous because predicative (pace Stallb. who compares μητρί at 571C9, q.v.).

4326

φείσαιτο (B8) another vestigial twitch of the φειδωλός oligarch long gone.

4327

τῶν τυραννικῶν (B9): What had always been a fugiendum is now just what we must expect him to pursue, for he is a τυραννικός.

4328

ἀλλ’ ὦ Ἀδείμαντε, πρὸς Δίος (B12). As at the analogous moment in the development of the tyrant himself (568E7), Socrates expresses incredulous indignation, again before Adeimantus does, and in much stronger terms. The tyrannical man begins at home and breaks the taboos in an order reverse to that of the tyrant, whose culminating act is to violate his Father-Deme.

4329

οὐκ ἀναγκαίας (B13) would be a pointless litotes except that it points to the distinction Socrates drew between pleasures necessary and non-necessary (558D8-559C1).

4330

φίλην καὶ ἀναγκαίαν (B13). In addition to the use of ἀναγκαῖος in family relations (E.Androm.671, apud Shorey; Xen.Mem.2.1.6, HG 1.7.10, apud Stallb.), Socrates here uses the word of the mother’s love to allude again to that same distinction: the necessary is that without which life is impossible and from which we ultimately benefit (558D11-E2). The ἀναγκαίως of 527A6, cited by J.-C., has nothing to do with this: cf. n.3477. From the point of view of the enervated and debauched young man, the necessary is eo ipso unattractive.

4331

ἀρχαιότατον (C3) The exaggeration expresses the tyrannized young man’s enervation at the same time that it reminds us his father is more than anyone else his ἀρχή (cf. ἐγέννησεν, 569A1). Compare the attitude of the democratized youth, who can at least remember having feelings of respect for his father: πρέσβεις πρεσβυτέρων, 560C9; and compare the story of the adopted child whose relation with his adoptive his parents is not ἀρχαῖον enough to sustain the beliefs he learned from them (537E9-539A3), while this tyrannized son who has real parents will throw the beliefs he learned from them overboard (D5-E2, infra).

4332

καταδουλώσασθαι (C4) echoing 569A2.

4333

μὰ Δία (C6): Adeimantus's accusative answers the Socrates’s genitive (πρὸς Δίος, B12), the genitive making a plea from the god (as it were) and the accusative making a proud asseveration he is called upon to witness (cf. Gildersleeve, SCG §11; the contrasting tones are reproduced at Euthyphr.4E4 [Socrates] vs. 5B8 [Euthyphro], and Apol.26E3 [Socrates] vs. 26D4 and 26E5 [Meletus]). At the analogous moment in the narration on the political tyranny (569A8) Adeimantus employs exactly this same accusative in an admonitory but asseverative understatement (γνώσετάι γε νὴ Δία) as if to disabuse Socrates of his naivete.

4334

τό (C7) with τεκεῖν.

4335

γε (C9): By repeating Socrates's γε at C7 he shares his sarcasm.

4336

πολὺ δὲ ἤδη συνειλεγμένον … τὸ σμῆνος (D2-3) describes the next stage (ἤδη) reached after the one described above as πυκνάς τε καὶ σφοδρὰς ἐννενεοττευμένας (573E4), the nest of plaintive babies replaced with an organized swarm. The harsh alternatives faced at A3-4 have only gotten worse.

4337

νεωκορήσει (D5) “sweep out a temple.” The standard crimes are not listed by their usual names (τοιχωρυχεῖν, βαλλαντιοτομεῖν, λωποδυεῖν, ἱεροσυλεῖν: cf. 575B6, infra, and n.4350) but spelled out with verbs and objects as if being witnessed in flagrante (D3-5), with colloquialistic disrespect.

4338

ἃς πάλαι εἶχεν δόξας ἐκ παιδὸς περὶ καλῶν τε καὶ αἰσχρῶν, τὰς δικαίας ποιουμένας (D5-7), fuller statement of 573B2, δόξας … ποιουμένας χρηστὰς καὶ ἔτι ἐπαισχυνομένας, expressing greater pathos for what is at stake.

4339

λελυμέναι (D7) echoing 571C8 (in addition to 567E5-6), and suggesting thereby that we should supply ἡδοναί with αἱ (from ἡδονῶν, D2) rather than δόξαι from ἃς πάλαι (D5). But by now the difference hardly matters (cf. 573B1-4, δόξας ἢ ἐπιθυμίας: cf. n.4297), which is echoed here. Complacent opinion is being uprooted by a force it was always too weak to resist (mature reason was always necessary: cf. 538C6-539A1); but also the ἐπιθυμίαι that had before been only occasionally “opined” in any man’s dreams (ὄναρ), now threaten to eclipse all of his consciousness ὕπαρ. The language is phenomenologically accurate despite the lack of a technical vocabulary of psychology. His desires are becoming the only beliefs he has.

4340

ἐν ἑαυτῷ (E2) apologizes for the political metaphor, as at 575C8-D1 (ἐν ἑαυτῷ … τύραννον) and 579C5 (ἐν ἑαυτῷ πολιτευόμενος).

4341

ὕπαρ τοιοῦτος ἀεί (E3): Opinion no longer limits desire.

4342

οὔτε τινὸς φόνου δεινοῦ ἀφέξεται οὔτε βρῶματος οὔτ’ ἔργου (E4). The triad looks back at 571C9-D3: ἔργον is therefore aposiopesis for incest. On βρῶμα cf. n.4257. On early placement of τε cf. n.1235.

4343

Reading τυραννικὸς (575A1) with D (vs. τυραννικῶς AFM), which leaves ἐν πάσῃ ἀναρχίᾳ καὶ ἀνομίᾳ to be the adverbs with ζῶν. This quasi-political title is then explained with μόναρχος (A2).

4344

ἅτε αὐτὸς ὢν μόναρχος (A2): Eros has ousted belief; he rules alone. But since he is unruly (ἀναρχία) and also the only ruler (ἄρχων in the sense of holding all power), i.e., the τυραννικός, there is no law.

4345

τὸν ἔχοντά τε αὐτόν (A2). For the phrase ἔχων ἔρωτα cf. Leg.837B6, Phdrs.239C2; S.Ant.790; for other troublesome “possessions” cf.366E9 and 591D9 (κακά), and 610C10 and E1 (ἀδικία); and Phdrs.231D1 (συμφορά), 238B1. The τε (A2, read by all mss.) re-focusses attention onto the man afflicted by Eros (hence its placement between the subject [τὸν ἔχοντα, who is also Eros’s object with ἄξει] and his momentary object [αὐτόν, which is Eros, also the subject of ἄξει]). The mind shifts off Eros as subject just enough that αὐτόν is not αὑτόν. The entire paragraph is describing the man collapsing into his passion, and anacoluthon is inevitable, as it was between the reflexive and direct pronouns at 573B1 and B3.

4346

τὸν περὶ αὑτὸν θόρυβον (A3-4) is the μανία (573B4) that replaced the better δόξαι (574D5: cf. δόξας ἢ ἐπιθυμίας, 573B2) brought in from outside (ἔξωθεν, A4: cf. ἐπακτοῦ, 573B4)—an increasing population of side pleasures (παραβλαστάνουσιν, 573D7)—supplemented by a new population of pleasures unleashed from within (ἔνδοθεν, A5). For the brachylogy of αὐτῶν (A5) cf. τροφῆς κακῆς ἤ τινος ὁμιλίας, 431A7. θόρυβον of course echoes the sound of the supporters of the προστάτης that became political tyrant (βομβεῖ, 564D10), a rabble recently re-encountered in the development of the tyrannical personality, confusing the man with noise and irrational distractions as they ushered Eros in (βομβοῦσαι, 573A4-B1), as his bodyguards, whose population only increased from that moment on.

4347

τῶν αὐτῶν τρόπων (A5) alongside ἔξωθεν (A4) recalls the relation between a sympathetic external alliance or influence and an element within, and the role it played in the transition from oligarchy to democracy (556E3-9) and from the oligarchic to the democratic man (559E4-7: n.b., ὁμοίας ὁμοίῳ), though by now there is no other element against which the alliance has to contend, on which cf. n.4280 on παραβοηθοῦντας (572E3).

4348

ἢ οὐχ οὕτος ὁ βίος τοῦ τοιούτου; (A6-7): This remark is the programmatic announcement that the description of the personal life is complete, which should be the end the sixteen part treatise. But the description is now allowed to continue without programmatic notice or notification (575A9-6B9, introduced with a flat καί that makes no claim as to the logic of the connection). In particular, for the first time we are given a prediction of the individual man’s political fate, or the political excrescence of his internal turmoil, and the line between the individual (the demonstrandum) and the regime (the demonstrans) is crossed, just as in the account of the tyrannical regime the line between a regime (of rulers) and an individual (who rules) was likewise crossed without programmatic warning or notice. Cf. τυραννίς τε καὶ τύραννος (562A5), τοῦ τε ἀνδρὸς καὶ τῆς πόλεως (566D5-6) and nn.4093 and 4192.

The purpose of this departure from the method, accepted without complaint by Adeimantus and unnoticed by the commentators, will become clear at 578B9ff. The last time we witnessed such unnoticed neglect of a departure from the program was when Socrates began to linger on less and less relevant idealistic details in the ideal state rather than moving on to the promised treatment of practicability: the lingering there was very significant, interrupted finally by Glaucon at 471C2, and eliciting Socrates’s strong reply.

4349

The two alternatives of leaving and staying (A9-B4) echo those presented at 560A4-B5, the moment in the struggle between the oligarchic father and his democratizing son, affected by abettors pro and con (for which cf. also 556E2-9 and 550A4-B5); but also echo those at 566A9-B3, when the democratic state teeters into tyranny by dint either of force or stealth (cf. n.4176).

4350

κλέπτουσι, τοιχωρυχοῦσι, βαλλαντιοτομοῦσι, λωποδυτοῦσιν, ἱεροσυλοῦσιν, ἀνδραποδίζονται (B6-7). This list of six “petty crimes” (also in X.Mem.1.2.62, as a list of crimes for which the penalty is death!) reproduces all five of the crimes which Thrasymachus himself had adduced as petty, from an entirely different point of view (344B3-4). Socrates adds the rather recondite term, λωποδυτοῦσιν, perhaps on the force of the remark above (ἐφάπτεσθαι … τοῦ ἱματίου, 574D3-4). He means also, of course, to allude to the behavior of the stingered drones which he had described with a list of only three crimes at 552D3-6.

4351

ἐὰν δυνατοὶ ὦσι λέγειν (B8) continues to carve out a place for the likes of Thrasymachus, whose silence is becoming more and more noticeable as Socrates’s language recalls his speech more and more explicitly—though of course these uses for rhetoric are very low level (σμικρά) and he has much more important things to teach.

4352

σμικρά γε … κακὰ λέγεις (C1). For γε in negative answers (here it is conditional assent) cf. Denniston, 131-2. This is the third time Socrates and Adeimantus have played with the idea of smallness. Cf. in Book Six, 498D5-6; and in Book Four, 425A8-9, 424D5-E3, 423C5-E2. Adeimantus's temperament is well adapted to casual snideness.

4353

οὐδ’ ἵκταρ βάλλει (C4) a proverb (cf. Zenob.5.55 [=Paroem.Gr.1.143], DV 3.46 [=op.cit.2.43]), used also by Aelian (NA 15.29). The important point is not whether or how there can or cannot be a rough breathing alongside the delta of οὐδέ, but that the proverb is approbatory: The petty criminals cannot hold a candle to the tyrant! Socrates continues his imitation of or allusion to Thrasymachus’s scandalous praise of “perfect” injustice (τελεωτάτη ἀδικία, 344A4).

4354

μετὰ δήμου ἀνοίας (C7) refers exactly to the political moment at 566B10-11 (δείσαντες μὲν ὑπὲρ ἐκείνου, θαρρήσαντες δὲ ὑπὲρ ἑαυτῶν), but recalls also the personal condition of the oligarch’s son and the empty acropolis of his soul (560B7-9).

4355

μέγιστον καὶ πλεῖστον (C8) brings forward the vision of the fully invaded self lately described at 575A1-6, but οὗτοι and ἐκεῖνον refer to the personages first imagined at 564C9-E2 (and n.b. προστατικὴ ῥιζη, 565D2) and then reappearing in a different guise at 572E4-3B4. We are to realize that something was going on inside the drones during the devolution from oligarchy to democracy, and we are to learn where tyrants come from.

4356

τύραννον (D1) is “tyrant” as Adam insists, but it’s still only a metaphor (from 575A1-2) for Eros regnant, for which again ἐν αὑτῷ (restated by ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ) apologizes (cf.574E2 and n.4340). Adam’s note, that “Plato” ignores the fact that what Adam suddenly calls “successful” tyrants are not slaves of passion, is at best a petitio principii and in any case irrelevant. Socrates has already said it is the δριμύτατον of the δριμύτερον that becomes προστάτης (564D4-E2): the presumption there and here is that he is not chosen by political scientists but by the drones, social wastrels, and bum pleasures that admire his superior δριμύτης. The relevant problem is to translate this notion into the psychological dynamic by which manageable pleasures yield to unmanageable ones. The first indication we have is from Thrasymachus (344C1-2).

4357

ἐὰν μὲν ἑκόντες ὑπείκωσιν (D3): This protasis is a proviso following upon what came before: ἑκόντες ὑπείκωσιν is tantamount to the act of selection for which γεννῶντες was a metaphor, above (C7). Cf. 566B6-11 and n.4182. It is just this willing acquiescence, which Socrates now characterizes as ἄνοια δήμου, that Thrasymachus wants his audience of potential students to believe they can bring about by the kind of eloquence they might learn from him; and the proof is the internal reaction they feel from the sample he gives them (344B5-C2: n.b. οὐ μόνον ὑπὸ τῶν πολιτῶν, C1).

4358

ἕξει τε καὶ θρέψει (D7-8), like κολάσεται and ἐκόλαζεν just above, are a continuation of the cynical language by which tyranny is being denounced unbeknownst to itself.

4359

τοῦ τοιούτου ἀνδρός (D8-9): The phrasing suggests another programmatic conclusion about the tyrant (cf. A6-7): since the individual has been destroyed by the eros within him he becomes nothing but what his desire leaves him to be.

4360

οὗτοί γε τοιοίδε γίγνονται (E2): Who or what is the subject Socrates now proposes? We have just now seen that, beyond the original program (A6-7 and n.4348), the tyrannical person has a political future as a political tyrant, so that it becomes possible to ask, in reference to the political tyrant (whose “political” or institutional origin we had dealt with in its place during the narration about the cities, 564C9-E2), what after all is his personal background. In truth, the investigation of ethics on the large canvass of the state was from the very beginning proposed only to make the search for personal justice indirect and palatable enough to pursue without derailments like the interruption of Polemarchus at the beginning of Book Five. The case of the tyrant has shortcircuited the experiment and brings it to an end!

4361

The description (E3-576A2) closely resembles the first appearance of the tyrant (566C10-E4): πρῶτον μέν, 575E3 ~ ἐν ταῖς πρώταις, 566D8 / κόλαξιν, E3 ~ ἀσπάζεται, D9 / ἑτοίμοις ὑπηρετεῖν, E4 ~ ὑπισχνεῖται, E1 / ὡς οἰκεῖοι, 576A1-2 ~ τοῖς περὶ ἑαυτὸν … ἱλεώς, E3.

4362

διαπραξάμενοι δὲ ἀλλότριοι (A2), semantically and syntactically a quick turnaround at the end of a sentence that has reverted to the method of heaping participles we have seen before (most recently, 571D6-2B1: cf. n.4264 and Appendix 7), relying heavily upon us to be canny enough to know what is going on. The quick change in the tyrant once elected remains implicit in Thrasymachus’s account (344B5-C2), but it is exactly this that Socrates here has in mind. διαπράττεσθαι often suggests underhanded dealings (either condemned by abhorrent aposiopesis [Alc. 2.143C9, D1; Crat.395B4; cf. Rep.411E1] or praised by savvy understatement [Gorg.478E7, satirized in 479A, 510E1; Parm.128C5; Rep.586C8]), as well as suggesting hidden motives (Rep.337E1, 360A7; Symp.181B5, 183A1).

4363

ἐλευθερία (A5) is not power over someone as Thrasymachus thinks and says (344C5-6: cf. Callicles at Gorg.485E1) but a symmetrical relation (a two-way street as opposed to the one way street of despotism and slavery), which nourishes and is nourished by friendship. Contrast what the tyrant has for friends (here and before at 567E5-8A3), and compare what the tyrant has not tasted (ἄγευστος, A6) with what he has (565D9)!

4364

φύσις (A6) is life-horizon (it pairs up with ζῶσι: see next n.), not inborn nature (cf.573C8, 514A2, and 576B7 below).

4365

The dyadic formulation (A4-6), with the ABAB parallelism of μέν / δέ operating in tandem with the chiastic ordering of the ideas (life, friends, slavery, freedom, friends, life [i.e., φύσις]) resembles the twin-verse rhetoric of the Psalms.

4366

ἀπίστους (A8), is inferred from their friendlessness: cf. the connection at 568A1. The personal life of the tyrannized man bereft of friends mirrors the institutional horror faced by the tyrant (567D1-568A2).

4367

ἐν τοῖς πρόσθεν (B1): He refers in general to the conclusions he reached with Glaucon about justice, at 441D-444E. The three aspects of the tyrannical person--his inability to have friends, his lack of trustworthiness, and his complete unjustness--are a new collection that appears to describe how his inner state disables him from having equal relations with other persons.

4368

οἷον ὄναρ διήλθομεν ὃς ἄν ὕπαρ τοιοῦτος ᾖ (B5): lit., “Anybody who is in waking life like the man we described in dream.” J.-C., ignoring or resisting, again, the pedagogical power of adducing nightmares (cf. ad 571B) take ὕπαρ and ὄναρ to refer to the “real world” in contrast with the world of the dialogue (ὄναρ), despite 574D8-E3. From Plato and Socrates we learn nothing if not that there is nothing more real than thinking (so ὄναρ / ὕπαρ at 476C and 520C). Horns of ivory and bone are things of the hazy epic past before a man asked himself if he was asleep or awake. The reason this description caps all that has come before (κεφαλαιωσώμεθα) is that the conception is horrific; but what makes it horrific is the notion that our nightmares could become our waking life.

4369

τυραννικώτατος φύσει (B7) refers not to congenital nature (this would lead to the ἀργὸς λόγος) but the “second” nature of habit, as in the definition of the “tyrannical man in the accurate sense” (ἢ φύσει ἢ ἐπιτηδεύμασιν ἢ ἀμφοτέροις [573C8, and n.4308]).

4370

μοναρχήσῃ (B8), cf. 575A2 for what this means. Lacking the resistance of superior rulers or laws (ἀναρχία / ἀνομία, ibi) he becomes stronger and therefore only worse.

4371

διαδεξάμενος τὸν λόγον (B10): In playing Socrates’s interlocutor Adeimantus has been the immediate witness to the debasement that a man undergoes who admits disorder (injustice) into the relation of the parts of his self. Glaucon on the other hand has been watching and so he can interrupt. His interruption is more than a sign from Plato that a new phase is beginning, since in all strictness the treatment of the decline already ended at 575A8.

We have come far enough in the drama to reflect again on the interruptions and the attitudes of the brothers. Twice, Adeimantus has interrupted the conversation to bring Socrates to task (419A, 487B); and twice Glaucon relieved Adeimantus to ensure that Socrates would continue (427D, 506D). With the exception of his first and very fateful interruption (372C), Glaucon has been the partner for constructive conversations (finding justice in state and soul, overcoming the paradoxes, reaching for the μέγιστον μάθημα and going through the propaideutics [and propaideutic exercise!], that lead to it), while the conversations with Adeimantus have been critical and defensive (censorship of poetry, defending the spare austerity of the guards’ regime, defending the philosopher against the opinion of the masses, narrating the decline of moral substance). In the case of Polemarchus’s interruption it was first Adeimantus and then even Glaucon that joined in.

This difference that the drama has gradually revealed between the two was presented emblematically at the very start, Glaucon accompanying Socrates as they were interrupted on their way back to Athens, and Adeimantus already planning to dine at Polemarchus’s (327AC). At the beginning of Book Two, the beginning of the present conversation, the difference was cast in the plaintive albeit frank way that Glaucon requested Socrates to answer his questions about the just life (357A-358E) in contrast with the way that Adeimantus, playful but rude, admonished Socrates that he would have to deal with his questions also (362D2-E1). Cf. Appendix 8 for a full analysis and evaluation of Adeimantus as interlocutor.

4372

πλεῖστον / μάλιστα // μάλιστά τε καὶ πλεῖστον (C1-2): a chiasm of cause and effect (cf. n.1693).

4373

τοῖς δὲ πολλοῖς πολλὰ καὶ δοκεῖ (C3-4), a joke: not many opinions but the many’s opinion: “Though the opinion on this matter is as common as those who hold it.” Socrates reminds Glaucon (and Plato reminds us) of the last time he required him to make his own judgment regardless of the many (473A2-3).

4374

ταῦτα (C5), “second person” demonstrative.

4375

πόλιν ἂν εἴη ὁμοιότητι (C7): For the construction cf. 555A8-9; for predicative ὁμοιότητι cf. Parm.133A5, Tim.75D2.

4376

Reading ἄρα ἡ (D2) with FDM (“ἄρα ἢ F” as printed in Chambry is perhaps a typographic error). The sense is obvious without importing ἀρετῇ from the margin (with Schneider and all subsequent edd.): “As to virtue the relation of city to city stands in a direct relation to their corresponding men; but what is the relation between the top and bottom city? An inverse relation.” For the collocation οὖν ἄρα in Plato cf. Tht.149B10, Charm.160E13.

4377

εὐδαιμονίας τε καὶ ἀθλιότητος (D7): For this absolute “genitive of the topic” cf. 577B3, 470A5, 375E1-2 (and n.1127), 365A6, and in Book Ten 612D4; also Gorg.509D7, 517C7; Phdo.78D10.

4378

κρίνεις (D7) the term is more specific than the language of dialectical exchange (e.g., δοκεῖ [C4] or λέγεις [D6]): Socrates calls on Glaucon to play judge (and Glaucon notices: cf. his expression, προκαλῇ, E3 and n.4383), as he warned him he would at the beginning of Book Eight (ἱκανοὶ κριταί, 545C5), before Adeimantus intervened. This verb and its cognates will be used twenty times during the first two proofs (576D7; 577A1, A6, B7; 578B2; 579C6, D6; 580B3, B5 (bis), B6, C1; 582A4-5, A6, D2, D7, D11, D15, E1; 583A; and cf. 585C1), many more uses than all the uses added together from elsewhere in the Platonic corpus -- and then it will be dropped completely. Compare the deployment of the language of νοῦς at the end of Book Six.

4379

ὡς χρή (D9): Here is the old theme of viewing the city as a whole, brought on (420B4-421C6) as a corrective to Adeimantus’s disappointed reaction (419A-420A) to the home-life of the guards as it had been triumphantly described by Glaucon and Socrates at the end of Book Three (416D-417B). Projecting the moral questions onto the larger canvas of the city enabled the young men to insert some distance between themselves and the problem of morality and then to remain objective in their analysis, but it came with the mortgage that they would identify with the citizens (Glaucon, 372AB) or imagine themselves as the leaders of the city by default (Adeimantus, 419A), rather than seeing the whole city as a model of their whole soul. The overarching moral goal of the conversation might, conversely, be said to be to enable the part of themselves they think is their ego actually to be in charge of the rest of their soul rather than enslaved by the soul’s lower elements. This is the radical conclusion reached at the end of Book Four, so intensely challenging to personal conscience that it there elicited the objection of Polemarchus, to which first Adeimantus and then even Glaucon acquiesced.

4380

καταδύντες (E1) is a metaphor proleptic to ἐν τῇ διανοίᾳ … ἐνδύς (577A2), which is itself part of Socrates’s crucial invocation that Glaucon “go within.” Adam’s association with sneaking in under the tyrant’s gaze (ad loc., comparing καταδῦναι with the perfects καταδεδυκώς at 579B8 and Gorg.485D6, with which it patently has nothing to do), is grossly impertinent.

4381

οὕτω (E2) in its semi-redundant use: cf.327C14, 511B8, 557D9, 577C2.

4382

δόξαν ἀποφαίνεσθαι (E2) continues the juridical metaphor with the notion of a public announcement of the finding, and is remembered at 580B1. Cf. Tht.170D4-9, and Leg.780A1, Lys.214A2, Phdrs.274E3, Tht.168B4.

4383

προκαλῇ (E3): Glaucon notices the legal connotations of κρίνεις (D7) and ἀποφαίνεσθαι (E2) and so identifies Socrates’s methodological suggestion as a πρόκλησις – in law, a stipulation suggested by one party to a lawsuit and accepted or declined by the other, as for instance an offer in limine to provide evidence extracted from slaves under torture, or a challenge that the other party provide such evidence. It seems such offers and challenges were used only to impugn the credibility of one’s opponent, were seldom accepted, and even then never perfected (R.J.Bonner and G.Smith, The Administration of Justice from Homer to Aristotle [Chicago 1930] 2.128-9).

4384

τὰ αὐτὰ ταῦτα (E6): By claiming that the προκλήσεις Glaucon is suggesting are the same in the case of the man as in the case of the state, Socrates means to compel an assent as strong as the one Glaucon has just given. His claim, in turn, rests on the parallels he can produce in the two descriptions, announced by the verbal repetition of ἐκπληττώμεθα, D8 (cf. ἐκπλήττεται, 577A3) but then continued by the more subtle language of his analogy, between looking at (βλέποντες, D8) one man and his entourage (περὶ ἐκεῖνον, D9) instead of entering (εἰσελθόντες, E1) and contemplating (θεάσασθαι, E1) the whole city from deep within (καταδύντες, E1) so as to get a picture of it as a whole (εἰς ἅπασαν … ἰδόντες, E1), and looking from the outside (ἔξωθεν ὁρῶν, 577A3) at a person and (sc. i.e.) his facade (προστάσεως, A4) instead of putting on (ἐνδύς, A2) and contemplating (διιδεῖν, A3) his inner self (ἦθος, A2) from within (ἀνδρὸς ἦθος, A2) so as to get an adequate view of it in its entirety (ἱκανῶς διορᾷ, A5).

4385

ὀρθῶς (577A1). Socrates’s focus on the κρίσις and the preliminary efforts that will ensure it is done properly (ὀρθῶς, 576E3; 577A1, B5) recalls the κρίσις suggested by Glaucon, along with the elaborate stipulations he insisted upon (359E1-361D6) to ensure it be done properly (ὀρθῶς, 360E3). It is the same κρίσις and the re-use of the term helps us realize we have come full circle. Glaucon did not there ask permission from Socrates for his elaborate προκλήσεις (n.b. on the contrary Socrates’s reaction, βαβαῖ at 361D4). That Socrates should here ask Glaucon’s permission is a fairer procedure; but beyond the procedural nicety his request provides him an opportunity to set out in advance how the judge must act, whereas in contrast Glaucon’s stipulations were in fact designed to pre-empt and disable a judge from making the right choice and to make it easy for him to make the wrong choice (οὐδὲν ἔτι ὡς ἐγῷμαι χαλεπόν, 361D7-8).

4386

ἐκεῖνον (A2) laudatory. The judge Socrates now describes is a greater man than most.

4387

ἐνδύς (A2), of putting on clothes, echoes καταδύντες (576E1, spatial): the etymological similarity invites us to compare knowing something outside yourself (by steeping yourself in it) and feeling what you are from the inside, the most important and difficult thing that Socrates is requiring Glaucon to do.

4388

ἔξωθεν (A3): Finally, thanks to the tyrant’s insides, a derogatory edge is put on relying on the outer appearances, since they might cover it up. The distinction of insides and outsides was first drawn as a triumphant breakthrough at the end of Book Four (443C9-D1, n.b. ἔξω πρᾶξιν [C10] and the sequel), which in effect mooted the question whether justice involved civic action, a breakthrough from which Polemarchus and the company tried to make Socrates retreat – in a sense to protect their privacy!

4389

σχηματίζονται (A4): The language recalls Adeimantus’s youthful tactic for success: 365C3-4. For προστάσεως cf. προστήσασθαι, 599A8.

4390

συνῳκηκότος (A6): The perfects are empirical (cf. 400A6 and n.3964). Home-life is the visible medium or metaphor for the conscience, as Adeimantus’s climactic use of σύνοικος at the end of his speech indicated (367A4), to which this refers. It was after all the vision of home-life (nothing political) in the πολίχνιον that stirred Glaucon’s reaction at 372AB. When the dispute re-arose at the end of Book Three (415E6-417B9: n.b. οἰκήσεις, 415E8; ζῆν τε καὶ οἰκεῖν, 416D4) Glaucon’s objection had been quelled, but now it was Adeimantus that erupted (419Aff). It was, moreover, just the vision of home-life that inspired Polemarchus’s objection and legitimated it in the eyes of the brothers, at the beginning of Book Five; and the vision became recrudescent once again in Book Eight, in the provision of the ταμιεῖον (548A7, cf. 416D6). Indeed it was the ταμιεῖον more than any dark discrepancy in divine numerology that was seen to start the devolution of the entire personality step by step. The devolution itself continually took its cue from the home-life of the young man (viewed now in terms of its emotional significance rather than the ταμιεῖον and the hidden parties it made possible). And in the end, the very culmination of the political decline was nothing but the destruction of the home, in the tyrant’s rape of his metaphorical “parents” (i.e., the deme that spawned him, 568E1,ff); but even this was only an adumbration in metaphor of the tyrannical man, whose marauding began at his actual home (cf. 574A6-10 and note the appalling mistreatment of his parents, 574B12-C8) and then spread to the city at large (574D3-5, finally to become institutionalized tyrannical marauding, 575C2-D9). The notion that Plato is suggesting to his reader his own experience with Dionysius (Adam) is a gross misunderstanding of the moral metaphor of home; it is refuted by Socrates’s next remark (B6-8); but worst of all it evinces a irremediable insensitivity to the problem that Socrates is trying to adumbrate for Glaucon and therefore to the entire purpose of the book. The opinion of “Plato” of no interest to the argument whatever: the brothers’ conscience and progress through the dialogue is all that matters.

4391

ἑκάστους τοὺς οἰκείους (A8) includes wife, father and mother, sons and daughters, and slaves. All these relations are brought to bear in the course of this Book even, indirectly, the relation with the wife.

4392

γυμνός … τῆς τραγικῆς σκευῆς (B1) proposes to follow Glaucon’s lead from Book Two and strip away the irrelevant distractions (γυμνωτέος, 361C3).

4393

τοῖς δημοσίοις κινδύνοις (B2): For κίνδυνος as the test of a man cf. 556D1.

4394

ἐξαγγέλλειν (B3) suggests he has been sent on a mission to spy.

4395

ὀρθότατ’ ἄν (B5): Glaucon completes Socrates’s rambling sentence for him, indicating how eagerly he agrees with the analogy and the changes in the conditions of the κρίσις that it entails. His acquiescence is more easily won here than it was the last time, at 472B3-473B2. How far he has come from blandly positing that the men were just and unjust and then adding elaborate externals contrary to their deserts (360E1-361D3)! There, he had pictured them from the outside as a child would see them (καθάπερ παῖς ἔξωθεν, A3). That Glaucon accepts these revisions is (next, B6ff) what qualifies him to act as judge: How dismal it is that Adam (ad loc.) must interpret the answer to mean that “Glauco [sic] admits most fully the claim that Plato has earned the right to speak with authority on this subject.”

4396

τῶν δυνάτων ἂν κρῖναι (B6-7): The high-minded tone is continued (from ἐκεῖνον ὃς δύναται, A2).

4397

ἤδη ἐντυχόντων τοιούτοις (B7). Though a reference to their experience confronting Thrasymachus in Book One cannot be ruled out, the instructive reference is to the recent description of the tyrannical personality, with which, as men, they can inwardly identify and which will guide the conversation from now on. At this point Adam announces that all critics agree with his own idea that Plato is speaking through his characters about what happened in Sicily, excepting the “strange” doubts of J.-C.

4398

ἵνα ἕξωμεν ὅστις ἀποκρίνεται (B7-8) recalls 348A7-B4: καὶ ἤδη δικαστῶν τινων τῶν διακρινούντων δεησόμεθα. The solution there desiderated, ἀνομολογούμενοι πρὸς ἀλλήλους σκοπῶμεν ἅμα αὐτοί τε δικασταὶ καὶ ῥήτορες ἐσόμεθα, is herewith achieved. For Glaucon’s original presentation of the κρίσις was, as he confessed, ex parte (κατατείνας ἐρῶ, 358D3) and Adeimantus owned up to the same thing (κατατείνας, 367B2). Cf. ἀντικατατείναντες λεγώμεν, 348A7, and n.529. For the dialectical preparation cf. n.3418.

4399

In ἀποκρίνεται (B8) there is a play on δυνατὸς κρίνειν, at the same time that by the pair of terms ἀποκρίνεσθαι / ἐρωτᾶν Socrates brings us out of the courtroom and into the quieter environment and dispositive certainty of dialogue, as ὧδε σκόπει (C1) confirms (cf. σκοπῶμεν, 348B3). For the pair cf. 515D5 and n.3332. Adam makes the sentence apologize that the dialogue form is unable to bring its author and inventor on stage, but the brunt of it is that Glaucon’s ability to act as judge (κριτής) has been vetted so that dialogue (i.e., his ἀποκρίσεις) will provide a reliable solution (see prev. n.).

4400

τὰ παθήματα (C3), a new term but an old idea. The original question the brothers asked about justice at the beginning and end of their speeches was τίνα δύναμιν ἔχει αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτὸ ἔνον ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ; (358B5-6, cf. 366E5-6) and finally τί ποιοῦσα ἐκατέρα τὸν ἔχοντα αὐτὴ δι’ αὑτήν (367B4, E3). The παθήματα are the answers to the question τί ποιεῖ;

4401

καί (C8) illative.

4402

ὁρῶ … σμικρόν γε τοῦτο (C9): He has taken the lesson from 576D8-E1.

4403

καί (D2) illative.

4404

δουλείας τε καὶ ἀνελευθερίας (D2-3), τε καί used to link the parallel or borrowed term (δουλεία) with its ethical or psychic application (ἀνελευθερία, not used of a lack of political freedom but “slavishness”).

4405

μοχθηρότατον καὶ μανικώτατον (D5). Above, the small part of the city that was free (C8) was not characterized by an adjective. The warrant for the two adjectives used here of the man, is their opposition to ἐπιεικέστατον, itself rather vague. The first adjective again straddles the political and psychic realms and the second teases out the more properly psychic aspect. Ultimately the inference relies on personal experience.

4406

ἥκιστα ποιεῖ ὃ βούλεται (D10-11), echoing the “Socratic Paradox” so well known to Glaucon (cf.357B4 and n.666).

4407

περὶ ὅλης εἰπεῖν (E2): Socrates echoes Glaucon’s qualification (τὸ δὲ ὅλον ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν, C9), itself echoed from the πρόκλησις at 576D8-E1.

4408

πενιχρὰν καὶ ἄπληστον (578A1): The former term is poetic, bridging from the political poverty to the psychic, and is then explained by the psychological term ἄπληστον. The soul comes up short because its desires are insatiable.

4409

τήν τε τοιαύτην πόλιν τόν τε τοιοῦτον ἄνδρα (A4-5): Socrates allows himself the latitude in his pacing of the argument to ask both questions at once, though he should according to the method ask them seriatim, and does in fact so answer them (A7-8, A10-12).

4410

ταῦτά τε καὶ ἄλλα τοιαῦτα (B1): The miseries heretofore collected and now generalized (τοιαῦτα) are (1) loss of autonomy to lust (577C5-E2); (2) impoverishment due to insatiability (577E5-578A2); and (3) fear and torment (A4-8). These items do not constitute a logical whole. They are selected to answer the promises Thrasymachus made for the tyrant in his large speech: autonomous sovereignty over others (δουλώσηται, 344B6), strength (ἰσχυρότερον καὶ ἐλευθεριώτερον καὶ δεσποτικώτερον, C5), wealth (χρήμασιν, B6; cf. A7-B1), lack of fear (φοβούμενοι, C3).

4411

οὐκοῦν ὀρθῶς; (B3). Glaucon’s interruption keeps Socrates's τε (B2, in the reading of mss. AD: FM have γε) from receiving its καί. One anticipates the sequel will be καὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀθλιώτατον—the conclusion we have so long been waiting for. Instead things become complicated, not only by Glaucon’s interruption but also by the tense of ἔκρινας, with which Socrates suddenly points back to 576E3-5, preferring to note that all the detail we have accumulated about polis and man corroborates what he said with no preparation about the polis right when Glaucon interrupted. The reason for spelling out the details however was not to corroborate that decision but to give some detail to what the parallel conclusion about man would entail. Just as Socrates had sped up the pace in one of the lead-up questions above, the awkward byplay sets into dramatic relief Glaucon’s coming answer to the target question.

4412

Glaucon’s worry (οὐκ ὀρθῶς; B3) and Socrates’s approval (καὶ μάλα, B4) echo the exchange at 576D2-3, where Socrates was careful to ask the question about the city first—that tyranny is the most wretched city, which he agrees is obvious—and the question about the man second (E6ff), which is the burden of the entire conversation to decide in a conclusive and compelling manner. So here, as there, he asks the question about the man separately, and (with the present participle ἀποβλέπων, B5, instead of the aorist as above, B1) invites Glaucon to think things through before deciding it.

4413

τοῦτο, ἦν δ’ἐγώ, οὐκέτι ὀρθῶς λέγεις (B7). Stunning irony and bathos at this most crucial moment! We have seen before that when the interlocutors disagree with Socrates they don’t disagree enough (373A1ff, 420A2ff, 487D6ff). Here, where Glaucon agrees with the proposition they have been trying to reach all night, he doesn’t agree enough! The surprise was however prepared for the attentive reader, who might have noticed that the description of the tyrannical man continued after it was said to be finished (575A6-7), and in particular went on to recount his political future (cf. n.4348). Plato relied on his reader to notice Socrates running on past his program and requiring Glaucon to interrupt, in Book Five (cf.466E1, 468A1-4, 469B5, with the climax at 471C2-E5, and cf. nn.2605, 2611, and 2623). Shorey (citing his note c at 2.104) suavely mentions Plato’s penchant for “climax upon climax” but as usual something much more specific and wonderful is at work in the drama here.

4414

ἐκπορίσθῃ ὥστε τυράννῳ γενέσθαι (C3): The impersonal construction is striking; and the limping transitional clause that prepares for it (δυστυχὴς ᾖ) is suspicious. Are we meant to hear the phrase ἐκπορίζειν σύμφερόν τινι from Book One (341Aff) and sense that the Thrasymachean advantage (σύμφερον), to become tyrant, has been turned into a disaster (συμφορά)? It is, moreover, an appalling understatement that this eventuality would be a matter of luck, good (according to Thrasymachus there) or bad (Socrates here). We saw, after all, in the exceptional extension of the treatment of the man’s personal life that went on to narrate his political fate (575A9-6B9: cf. n.4348) that to become an “outer” tyrant (a τύραννος) is the natural outcome for a man who is inwardly most tyrannical (the τυραννικώτατος φύσει, 576B7)!

4415

Glaucon refers specifically to Socrates’s assertion at 576B11-C3, where the very degree (n.b. μάλιστα) of the tyrannical man’s unhappiness was increased in proportion to the time he spent as a tyrant, if such he became.

4416

τῷ τοιούτῳ (C6), with all mss., a “second person” demonstrative that refers to the kind of argumentation they began to use at 577C (n.b., παθήματα, C3), as we shall see when the conclusion is reached below (n.b., πάθος, 579D5-7).

4417

περὶ γάρ τοι τοῦ μεγίστου ἡ σκέψις, ἀγαθοῦ τε βίου καὶ κακοῦ (C6-7). With this solemn remark (C6-7) Socrates justifies the rigor he is proposing (compare 472B3-473B2), at the same time that he is reminding Glaucon (and us) to look back to the initial challenge raised by Thrasymachus’s long speech (343B-4C), to which he replied, inter alia, that much was at stake: ὅλου βίου διαγωγὴν ᾗ ἂν διαγόμενος ἕκαστος ἡμῶν λυσιτελεστάτην ζωὴν ζῴη (344E1-3), reiterated at 352D5-6. For Socrates requiring certainty beyond mere agreement cf. Meno 89C7-10.

4418

ἐκείνου (D6) technically a shift from plural (τοῖς τυράννοις) to singular, but the plural paired the private individual with the tyrant (the plurals ἰδιωτῶν [D3] / τυράννοις [D5] each represented a class), whereas the comparison then remembers (with ἐκεῖνος, ille) that the tyrant always stands alone.

4419

ἐν παντί (E8). There is no need to cite the idiom (LSJ s.v. πᾶς, § D.IV): Glaucon is simply answering the question ἐν ποίῳ … τινι καὶ ὁπόσῳ φόβῳ (E5-6).

4420

οὐδὲν δεόμενος (579A2-3) is an idiomatic litotes: to “feel no desire” in the sense of being above such things (cf. 367A8-B1, 405C5, 410B2, 581E3-4; Apol.21C3; Gorg.507D3; Prot.331C5, 347E3), though of course he does have good reason, as Adam notes, citing from Schneider the use of the idiom at Plut.Vit.Tib.Gr.21.2(834). Wonderfully, the measures the tyrannical individual is here forced to take to save his skin, are the very measures the political tyrant took in order to secure and then maintain his political power (566E1, 567E5).

4421

ἢ ἀπολωλέναι (A4), again resembling the choice of the tyrant: cf. ἢ μὴ ζῆν (567D3). For the phrase cf. Hdt.7.118.

4422

ἄλλος ἄλλου δεσπόζειν ἀξιοῖ (A6-7): Scruples about the justice of slavery surface again, in a criticism of Thrasymachus, at 590C8-D6.

4423

ἔτι … μᾶλλον (B1) shows how idiomatic is the idiom ἐν παντί, doubling a superlative in a way that mirrors the doubling in the concept of the τυραννικὸς τυράννων, who is ἔτι ἀθλιώτερος (578B11).

4424

ὁ τύραννος (B3): the definite article designates the τυραννικὸς τύραννος γενόμενος of 578C3, as the exegetical participial phrase (φύσει ὢν οἷον διεληλύθαμεν) goes on to stipulate.

4425

φύσει (B4) refers to the personality as opposed to the office as at 576B7.

4426

λίχνῳ … τὴν ψυχήν (B5): An essentially somatic affliction penetrates to his soul.

4427

ἐπιθυμηταί (B7), now of innocent desires.

4428

οἱ ἄλλοι ἐλεύθεροι (B7): ἐλεύθεροι is almost predicative (with its etymon ἐλεύσεσθαι recrudescent) and ἄλλοι is almost adverbial: “his fellow citizens who incidentally are free to come and go, in comparison to him.” The notion that Plato here “speaks con amore” about “his own sojournings” (Adam) further saturates Adam’s interpretation of this passage with tendentious fantasy and continues the undoing of the literary anonymity of the author whom he now romances personally into being an occasional φιλοθεάμων. If (per Adam) Xen.Hiero 11.1 is “singularly close” to our passage (although, by the way, it is linguistically quite independent), and if Plato gets his description from his personal experience with Dionysius, can Adam avoid the conclusion that Xen.’s source must be Plato? The envy with which Xenophon’s passage reeks (e.g., μειονεκτοῦντας) reveals, however, why debunking the tyrant’s happiness would be a popular pastime that would settle down into a series of standard stereotypes.

4429

καταδεδυκώς (B8) cf. Gorg.458D6.

4430

The point is to illustrate how circumstances of his external situation for which he cannot be blamed (~ the πόλις that he finds himself in) might exacerbate the difficulties of his internal makeup for which he can be blamed (~ the ψυχή he has allowed himself to take on). In this comparison ἰδιώτης (578C1, 579B6) is the “ancipital” hinge-term (cf. nn.677, 1245, and 1424) between the soul in the individual and the individual in the polis; and the point of the illustration is to reveal that the individual with a tyrannical soul would never become tyrant by choice but only by chance (578C2, 579C7). Again the Thrasymachean fantasy is turned on its head: the everyday individual whom he seduces with the fantasy of becoming tyrant is fostering, with Thrasymachus’s help, internal passions that would render that superficially attractive goal more and more miserable as the passions the fantasy unintentionally fosters and serves become stronger. Clueless, Adam comments (ad 579B) that the description of this private man with slaves, which serves as a paradigm of the individual tyrannized by Eros, is drawn from Plato’s experience with Dionysius, which makes a failure of Socrates’s argument since it is predicated on postponing any reference to the political tyrant.

4431

πλείω (C4), quantitative, asserts the demonstrandum: that he is worse off (ἀθλιώτερος, 578B11, correcting the assertion ἀθλιώτατος of the private τυραννικός, 578B6, cf. 579C5). τοῖς τοιούτοις is not a dative of degree of difference: the measurement implied by πλείω requires apples to be compared with apples and this is what τοῖς τοιούτοις (qualitative) stipulates, namely, fear (compare 578D8-E7 and φόβων … μεστός, 579B5, with φόβου γέμειν, 578A4), torment of desire (compare ἐρώτων μεστός and λίχνῳ ὄντι, 579B5, with 577E2-3, 578A7-8 and A11), and enslavement (compare 579A1-3 and οὔτε … ἐλεύθεροι, 579B7 with 577C5-D12). καρποῦται (C4) perhaps echoes, and answers, 362A8.

4432

μὴ ἰδιώτης καταβιῷ ἀλλὰ ἀναγκασθῇ ὑπό τινος τύχης τυραννεῦσαι (C6-7): By closely repeating the paradoxical language of 578C1-3 down to its inceptive aorist (μὴ ἰδιώτην βίον καταβιῷ ἀλλὰ δυστυχὴς ᾖ καί αὐτῷ ὑπό τινος συμφορᾶς … τυράννῳ γενέσθαι), which was the initial statement of what needed to be proved, this sentence becomes a Q.E.D. Again Socrates has the speech of Thrasymachus in mind: after comparing the unjust individual with the just one in the public and private lives (343D1-344A1), he endeavored to make his point crystal clear by imagining the unjust man becoming tyrant (344A2-C4).

4433

ὁμοιότατά τε καὶ ἀληθέστατα λέγεις (D3): in praise of the analogy of the κάμνων. Cf. similar praise, in answer, at Soph.252D1.

4434

For the addition of φίλε to the vocative of the proper name cf. n.3407.

4435

πάθος (D5), refers to the method suggested at 577C1-3 and acknowledges that that method has been deployed here.

4436

παντελῶς (D5) suggests that his experience is comprehensively miserable. The inward misery and the misery from external circumstance exacerbate each other in the case of the tyrannical man become tyrant.

4437

Reading κἂν εἰ μή τῳ δοκεῖ (D9), reading the indicative supplied by a scr. in the Lobcovicianus (δοκῇ AFDM Stob.): it is a formula of strong asseveration for which the indicative appears to be integral (cf. 473A2-3). For the sentiment cf. 576C3-4.

4438

τῷ ὄντι (D9-10) echoic in slightly different senses for the sake of paradox: the tyrannical man who becomes tyrant in fact (τῷ ὄντι) enjoys in fact (τῷ ὄντι) the role of slave.

4439

δοῦλος τὰς μεγίστας θωπείας καὶ δουλείας (D10), an elegant instance of reverse καί (cf. n.440). δοῦλος itself is a metaphor; the “internal” accusative θωπείας explains the metaphor and then the more “cognate” accusative (for which cf. 490D3, Apol.22E2-3) closes the whole figure by reverting to the metaphor.

4440

ἐάν … ἐπίστηται (E3): not optative but subjunctive, not ideal but vivid, acknowledging the work Socrates and Glaucon have done over the last few hours and just now resolved to apply, rejecting again the “childish” view with which they began (cf. 576E6-577B4: n.b. θεάσασθαι there and here, and cf. n.4384).

4441

ἃ τὸ πρότερον εἴπομεν (580A2): Cf. 576B8-9, an agreement he had reached with Adeimantus.

4442

μάλιστα μέν / ἔπειτα δέ (A5-7): Cf. 575C3-4, another agreement reached with Adeimantus, to which Glaucon is now asked to subscribe.

4443

διὰ πάντων (A9) the idiom is old (Riddell §112). Even if it has a technical meaning (J.-C. and Adam ad loc.) it is nevertheless given a second meaning here, that Glaucon himself has gone through all the steps and considered all the data (ἐξ ἁπάντων τούτων, A5).

4444

τὸν ἄριστόν τε καὶ δικαιότατον (B9): The play on Ariston’s name goes all the way back to the beginning of the inquiry (368A1-4).

4445

τυραννικώτατος … τυραννῇ (C3-4): The dyadic description with adjective and verbal form is repeated, with variation, from βασιλικώτατον καὶ βασιλεύοντα (C1-2). Note that the best man is best without holding public office (he rules only himself), but the worst is worst only if he does. That the ἄριστος can be called βασιλεύς (B3-4) goes back to Glaucon's remark at 576E3-5 and to Book Four (445D3-6). Now that we are contemplating the individual type, the image of the king over against the tyrant has special power.

4446

ἐάντε λανθάνωσιν … ἐάντε μὴ πάντας ἀνθρώπους τε καί θεούς (C6-7) echoes the stipulation made by Adeimantus on behalf of both brothers, in their setting out of the question in Book Two (367E4-5).

4447

ἀπόδειξις (C9), emphasizing the argumentative or logical aspect of what they are doing as they exercise the sound judgment (κρίσις) Socrates has been emphasizing.

4448

Reading Adam’s bright and simple emendation δὲ ἰδέ (D1), for the δεῖ δέ of the mss. It is corroborated by the ensuing ἐάν clause, idiomatic for requesting the interlocutor’s indulgence and commonly appended to mitigate a second singular imperative (“si qua placuerit,” Stallb.): cf.358B1 (and n.689), 427D3-4, 432C2, 455B1-2.

4449

The extra give-and-take (D1-7) emphasizes that Socrates is presenting this second proof to be examined dialectically by question and answer, as he did the one before (577B7-8 and 578C9-D1) and will do the third and final one, after (583B8-C3). Cf. n.3418.

4450

εἴδη (D3): It is easier to speak of parts, and I shall in the translation, but Socrates uses the qualitative language of εἴδη. In some other context it might be necessary to decide (cf. nn. ad 615A4 and 435E2).

4451

Reading τὸ λογιστικὸν (D4) with A (λογιστικὸν A2FDM : λογιστικὸν ἐπιθυμητικὸν θυμικὸν Par.1642) against the athetization of all modern editors except Apelt. It is the subject of δέξεται or an adverbial accusative with ψυχή understood as subject. For singling out the λογιστικόν without the preparation of listing all the parts compare 602E1. What makes this second proof possible is not the tripartition of soul per se but the fact the one of its parts is amenable to argumentation bearing on the entire soul, which in the event provides both the method and the conclusion of the present argument (cf. ἀμφισβητοῦνται, 581E6 and n.4475; and 583A4-11). By intimating as much to Glaucon at the outset Socrates is rekindling the mental state that he stimulated in him in Book Four with his digression on non-contradiction, so that Glaucon’s own rationality could be marshalled to decide the structure of the soul.

4452

ἡδοναί … ἐπιθυμίαι τε ὡσαύτως καὶ ἀρχαί (D7-8): the list orders the items in the reverse of logical priority, as the move from ἡδοναί to ἐπιθυμίαι immediately suggests. The distinct ἡδοναί sought by the distinct ἐπιθυμίαι of the soul are pursued under the initiation or office (ἀρχαί) of the soul’s distinct parts. That ἀρχή should be used of the “unruly” parts is a paradox by which the comparative argument is made possible. Plato's sensitivity to, and indifference to, the paradox is shown in a passage like Phdrs.237E2-8A2, where for the moment the mind is said to exert κράτος over the desires and the desires to exert ἀρχή over the mind. There is a similar ambivalence in the terms ἄγειν and ἕλκειν (cf. n.3416).

4453

ἦν (D10), the imperfect of citation (n.582).

4454

εἶχεν (E1), the imperfect again citing previous discussion.

4455

γάρ (E2) proposes to explain the claim by restating what they had said.

4456

καί (581A3) moving on (A3-B11) to the identification of the respective pleasures (ἡδοναί, D7). The addition of φιλία (A3) as a synonym for ἡδονή prepares the way for naming or characterizing the pleasures with compounds formed with the adjectival prefix φιλο-.

4457

κέρδος (A4), a term not yet relied upon in the conversation.

4458

φιλοχρήματον (A6), the old term (from 580E5) precedes the newly proposed one (φιλοκερδές [A7], from τοῦ κέρδους [A4]).

4459

πᾶν ἀεὶ τέταται (B6) redoes ἀεὶ ὅλον ὡρμᾶσθαι (A10): the perfects describe the loves or desires as fixed in the nature of the parts (cf. n.4782). The mind is in tension with truth it barely knows (cf. συντεταμένως, 499A4-6; συντείνας, 591C1; ἀτενεῖς, 547E2). The present μέλει (B7) draws an inference.

4460

καί (B12), moving on from the ἡδοναί to the ἀρχαί (from 580D8).

4461

κομιδῇ γε (C5): At 435E3-436A3 the belief was accepted axiomatically that men are characterized by one or another of the soul’s natural loves (mutatis mutandis, these very three: θυμοειδές, φιλομαθές, φιλοχρήματον, ibid.).

4462

ὑποκείμενον (C6) perhaps evokes the image of a chart.

4463

ἐγκωμιάσεται (C10), future indicative apodosis after optative protasis, forgoing to insist on the logical relation between protasis and apodosis so as to portray their responses as behavior known from experience rather than merely theoretically. Cf. n.4475 on ἀμφισβητοῦνται, E6.

4464

This is the force of τε (C10): The editors read and report the tradition variously: ὅ τε χρηματιστικὸς legit Slings, χρηματικὸς in F notans | ὅ τε χρηματιστικὸς legit Chambry, ὅτι χρηματικὸς in F notans | ὅ τε χρηματιστικὸς legunt J.-C. et Burnet sine nota | ὅ γε χρηματιστικὸς legit Shorey Hermanno (apud Adam) tribuens | ὅ γε χρηματιστικὸς legit Adam “M” (=ms. Cesenas collatum Rostagno) nisus, Hermanno adiuvendo | ὅ τε χρηματιστικὸς in A notans. Of comments, however, there is only J.C.’s excellent remark that “the second τε changes to δέ as the sentence becomes adversative,” which presumably means that what we anticipate will be a (second) τε, answering this first τε, becomes instead a δέ (the δέ, presumably, with which the φιλότιμος is introduced at D5) because what had started as a list of three positive examples has taken on the form of a disagreement among the three types, each certain that his own is best. The problem with τε however is not that it is answered by τε, but that if it is, then there is nothing to connect the sentence with what came before (a fault that Hermann’s easy but unsupported emendation into γε [“anacoluthi vitendi causa”] does not repair). The asyndeton is mitigated by the quasi-demonstrative force in τὸν ἑαυτοῦ ἕκαστος.

4465

χρηματιστικός (D1) describes the life (cf. βίων, C9) that the φιλοχρήματος ἀνήρ pursues because of his love. Cf. 551A7-8 and n.3844.

4466

οὐδενὸς ἀξίαν (D2): οὐδενός quite quantitative (“not one”): presumably the man would measure “worth” by a quantity of drachmas.

4467

ἀργύριον (D3) the χρηματιστικός will characteristically dispense with metaphors and abstractions.

4468

καπνὸν καὶ φλυαρίαν (D7-8): The high-sounding and insouciant doublet embodies, in turn, the language of the φιλότιμος who is making the judgment, as ἡγεῖσθαι referred to an opinion that the φιλότιμος feels safe to believe and as φορτικός is his colorful but inarticulate term to express disapproval. As for the way that learning might bring honor, think of the reduced use the timocrat finds for the λογιστικόν—to trick people in peacetime (548A1-2) when he can’t simply beat them, once and for all, in war. By using such language Socrates depicts the style and manner by which the thumoeidetic part of the soul would wield its rule (ἀρχή) over the other two parts.

4469

Reading the mss. τῆς ἡδονῆς; οὐ πάνυ πόρρω (E2), adopting the punctuation of Adam. ἡδονῆς completes the question by expressing the noun that τήν (E1) had only alluded to. ἐν τοιούτῳ τινὶ asserts that the pleasure of learning is akin to that of knowing. The loving elaboration of the object of knowledge depicts the thinking and the attitude of the philosopher.

4470

ἐν τοιούτῳ τινὶ ἀεὶ εἶναι μανθάνοντα (E2) represents the other meaning of Solon’s famous and ambiguous epigram, γηράσκω δ’ αἰεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος! Contrast its use at 536D1-3.

4471

τῷ ὄντι (E3), as often, denotes a new sense that was always obvious. We had above condoned some pleasures as ἀναγκαῖαι because we need them to live; but the φρόνιμος now ignores them until they force themselves upon him.

4472

For ὡς οὐδέν … δεόμενον (E3-4) cf. 579A2-3: “have nothing to do with them,” but now for external necessity, as at 579A2-3. ὡς (plus participle) announces that the expression depicts his sense of superiority.

4473

εἰ μὴ ἀνάγκη ἦν (E4): The philosopher is given his own voice as the others were, and thereby reveals to us the order (ἀρχή) of his soul, imagining an irreal world (imperfect ἦν) in which the necessity might not be there (contrafactual imperfect). His omission of ἄν with δεόμενον may serve as an index of how alien he feels the necessity to be.

4474

εὖ … δεῖ εἰδέναι. (E5) I take it to be a corrective assent to τί οἰωμεθα (D10), supporting the conjecture of Graser there (vs. ποιώμεθα AFDM), and playing back at Socrates’s remark at 578C4-6: οὐκ οἴεσθαι χρή … ἀλλ’ εὖ … σκοπεῖν.

4475

ὅτε δὴ οὖν … ἀμφισβητοῦνται (E6): Note the indicative. The foregoing depiction of the three parts’ attitudes in their own voices shows that disagreement is inevitable; but on whose terms can it be settled? What can serve as a criterion? The λογιστικόν is both asking the question and being asked the question (cf.580D5).

4476

κάλλιον / αἴσχιον // χεῖρον / ἄμεινον (E7): the comparatives of καλόν / αἰσχρόν and κακόν / ἀγαθόν. The constellation is based on καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός, the conventional dyad for “value” (cf. n.1591), here serving as foil to emphasize the unusual attempt to evaluate them sheerly in terms of their pleasure. The chiastic order is common in lists of opposites (e.g., 429C9-D1 [cf.430A6-B2]; and Crito 47C9-10; Gorg.459D1-2, 474D1-2; Leg.714E4-5; Phdrs.277D10-E1).

4477

ἥδιον καὶ ἀλυπότερον (582A1): The chiastic play with the contraries prepares us to notice that elaborating ἥδιον by denying its contrary (ἀλυπότερον) involves the contradictory, a very different animal from the contrary as we shall soon see (583C1ff).

4478

τίνι χρὴ κρίνεσθαι (A4) asks for the method one can be praised for using; δεῖ κρίνεσθαι below (D7) is a different matter.

4479

ἐμπειρίᾳ τε καὶ φρονήσει καὶ λόγῳ (A5): The list as such is unexampled in the corpus as far as I know. It might be a dyad (mental awareness done with the pair φρόνησις καὶ λόγος) and then it would resemble what Socrates imagines to be Protagoras’s sources of knowledge at Prot.320B6-8: ἔμπειρον γεγονέναι / μεμαθηκέναι / αὐτὸν ἐξευρηκέναι (where analogously the last two are mental).

4480

κριτήριον (A6), drawn out of the verbs κρίνεσθαι and κριθήσεσθαι above. To translate with “criterion” loses the etymological connection still very alive in this very new word. Cf. Tht.178B6. Note that in Leg.767B5 it still can mean “tribunal.”

4481

τὴν ἀλήθειαν οἷόν ἐστιν (A10), repeating the loving language of the philosopher from above (581E1).

4482

τῶν ἑτέρων (B2-3): Glaucon’s plural answers about both the pleasures of the φιλότιμος and the φιλοκέρδης together, over against that of the φιλόσοφος, though Socrates is at the moment is asking only about the pleasure of the φιλοκέρδης, thereby easing his segue to the φιλότιμος.

4483

ὅπῃ πέφυκε (B3) and ὡς γλυκεῖά ἐστιν (B4): In an uncharacteristically long-winded answer Glaucon vents his philosophical adoration twice, almost as if it to lord it over the moneyman, imitating the way Socrates imitated the three types of men in their answers, above (581C10-E4).

4484

οὐδέ (B5) illative (cf. n.2702), cashing in the use of taste as a metaphor for empirical experience functioning as criterion.

4485

Reading τί μήν (C4) with ADM (τιμὴν μὲν F : τιμὴ μὲν recc.). The subject of ἕπεται is ἡ ἀπὸ τοῦ τιμᾶσθαι ἡδονή (drawn from C3).

4486

ὥρμηκε (C5) echoes ὡρμῆσθαι (581A10), of the motivations natural (n.b. tense: cf. n.4782) to the several parts of the soul.

4487

πᾶσιν αὐτοῖς (C5), including not only the φιλόσοφος and the φιλότιμος but the φιλοκέρδης as well.

4488

ὑπὸ πολλῶν τιμᾶται (C5-6): Accumulating money draws admiration for the discipline involved: cf. ἐπαινεῖ τὸ πλῆθος, 554B11.

4489

ἀνδρεῖος (C6) now designates the φιλότιμος, slanting his desire in the direction of the cardinal virtue (compare previous characterizations of his desire: κρατεῖν / νικᾶν / εὐδοκιμεῖν [581A9-10]; τιμᾶσθαι [D1]): the use of a single article (reading ὁ σοφὸς καὶ ἀνδρεῖος [AFD] with Burnet rather than ὁ σοφὸς καὶ ὁ ἀνδρεῖος [A2M]) then associates this desire with σοφία as a second cardinal virtue, the virtue of the φιλόσοφος, together preparing for the ranking at 583A4-9.

4490

γεγεῦσθαι (C8): The perfect caps the uses of γεύεσθαι above (B2 and 5) and adds to the notion of an empirical experience of the pleasure of knowing (582A10-B1, B5) an empirical experience of knowing itself (continued at E7). Socrates has often used taste and touch to describe the experience of reality and truth, because they allow him to place the object into the genitive, by which he depicts the participatory, rather than merely intentionalist or “objective” structure of the experience of reality, i.e., its incomplete and partial objectivity. Cf. 581B6 (and n.4459), 572A2 (and n.4262), 511B4 and 7, 496C6, 490B3, 484B5, 411D2. Cf. also 445E1, 517C1 (μόγις ὁρᾶσθαι, ὀφθεῖσα δέ), Phdo.65B9, Phdrs.260E6, and Tht.186D4. Glaucon borrows the metaphor here and mixes the metaphor with an extraordinary synaesthesia of tasting a sight (θέας), in a second uncharacteristically longwinded answer that joins the learning-lover in his enthusiasm.

4491

ἀλλὰ μὴν δι’ ὅ γε (D7) caps καὶ μὴν μετά γε (D4).

4492

δεῖ (D7), depicting a necessity internal to the process of judgment, replaces the χρή (A4) of propriety and conscientiousness.

4493

πλούτῳ καὶ κέρδει (D15): reversion to the dative takes us back to the formulation of the means or “criteria” of judgment listed at A4-6, of which λόγος (just now expressed with δι’ ὅ) was one.

4494

The throwaway example of the φιλοκέρδης (D15-E2), stated contrafactually, allows Socrates to import the implicit premise that the best judgment (ἄριστα, D15) is the one that reaches the truth (ἀληθέστατα, E2), and thus to revert to the original question (A1-2).

4495

ἀνδρείᾳ (E4) cf. C6 above. The next case, the φιλότιμος, is presented without a verb under the guise of abbreviation, leaving it contrafactual by implication only.

4496

φιλότιμός τε καὶ φιλόνικος (E4-5). The designation of the φιλότιμος is expanded with φιλόνικος (E5), in tandem with the dative νίκῃ (E4).

4497

ἐπειδή (E7) replaces εἰ. Though again the abbreviated form of the question has masked the verb, the conjunction (“since” rather than “if”) tells us the verb would have been the present indicative (no longer the irreal imperfect).

4498

φιλόλογος (E8) expands φιλόσοφος in tandem with λόγῳ (E7).

4499

ἀληθέστατα (E9): Glaucon states the conclusion in full dress: best judgment is truest. Only λόγος and φρόνησις can properly use this term: for the φιλοκέρδης the truest pleasures could only be the strongest that it has experienced; and for the φιλότιμος the truest could only be the ones most envied. The notion of “true” pleasures as something more than a term of praise, is adumbrated here and taken up next (παναληθής, 583B3).

4500

With πῶς δὲ οὐ μέλλει (583A4) Glaucon brings forward the notion Socrates advanced at the beginning of this proof of what we are to expect as an expression of conviction (τὰ μέλλοντα καλῶς κριθήσεσθαι, 582A4-5).

4501

ὁ κριτής (A7), i.e., the κύριος ἐπαινέτης (A4). It was our job to become able judges (577B6-8) and our deployment of dialectic (cf. n.4398 on ἀποκρίνεται, 577B8) has enabled us to prove the φρόνιμος qualified to be our judge. On the other hand this judge is not anyone other than ourselves (cf. ἐν ᾧ ἡμῶν, A2) since it was exactly by our own experience (knowing how the money-man and the honor-man think: cf. nn.4466, 4467, 4468, 4472, and 4473), mindfulness (expressed exactly by the confidence we have placed in the dialectical method), and logic (the application one by one of the three criteria) that we achieved the proof.

4502

αὐτοῦ (A9): sc. τῆς αὐτοῦ ἡδονῆς, a compression soon relieved by the fuller statement of the alternative, ἡ τοῦ χρηματιστοῦ. This relative “closeness” (ἐγγυτέρω) has not been mentioned or argued for explicitly. The idea was perhaps broached by characterizing the φιλότιμος as ἀνδρεῖος (582C6 [cf. n.4489], underlined at E4). J.-C.’s theory that the antecedent of αὐτοῦ is the κριτής (rather than the φιλότιμος) and that this κριτής is “not Glaucon or one of ourselves” (ad loc.) would have called for αὑτοῦ if Plato felt it made the difference J.-C. feel it makes. The methodological preliminaries introduced when Glaucon re-entered the discussion, with the strong allusions to and criticism of the κρίσις set up by Glaucon in Book Two (576D6-577B8 and nn.4378, 4380, 4384, 4385, and 4395), trumps J.-C.’s concern about drawing such a distinction. If anything Glaucon’s own thinking (and ours) has been elevated to the philosophical level by this proof (witness his long answers), so as to prepare him (and us) to participate as a partner equal to the κριτής in the next one.

4503

τῷ σωτῆρί τε καὶ τῷ Ὀλυμπίῳ Διί (B2-3): Charm.167A, Phlb.66D (and scholia ad locc.); Leg.692A; and Pind.Isth.6.7 (and schol.). The full allusion is uncertain (the Olympics must have to do with the wrestling metaphor below) but presumably indicates the coming proof will need, or will have, nothing topping it. In any event Socrates is announcing that this is the end (“last but not least”).

4504

ἡ τῶν ἄλλων ἡδονὴ πλὴν τῆς τοῦ φρονίμου (B3-4). The others (ἄλλων), in typical proleptic position, receive their gender from ὁ φρόνιμος.

4505

οὐδὲ παναληθής (B3): The dialectical development finally allows for a penetrating critique of pleasure itself, which the philosopher had hitherto acquiesced in treating doxically (581D10-E4). παναληθής, an enthusiastic colloquialism like ὑπέρπλουτος (562B4), apologizes for the inconsistency.

4506

οὐδὲ παναληθής / οὐδὲ καθαρά / ἐσκιαγραφημένη τις (B3-5): The program is set: the attributes to be revealed are three: falseness, impurity, and illusion.

4507

τῶν σοφῶν τινος ἀκηκοέναι (B5-6): The indefiniteness is dismissive (cf. n.523), apologizing for the metaphor until it can be explained. It is not meant to send us on a wild goose chase tracking down who the σοφός τις might be: cf. Meno 81C, Phlb.44B.

4508

πτωμάτων (B7). The idea of a wrestling match with “falls” was prepared by the reference to Olympus above; and the metaphor recalls the remark Socrates made between the first and second falls that justice underwent at the hands of the brothers in Book Two (ἱκανά... καταπαλαῖσαι, 362D8). Perhaps an allusion to winning the whole match by winning three falls in a row (cf. Aesch.Eum.59 with Paley and Blaydes ad loc.)

4509

σοῦ ἀποκρινομένου ζητῶν ἅμα (C1), another formula for the σκέψις ἐν κοινῷ of dialectic (cf. 577B8), embedded in another preliminary by-play of question and answer (B8-C3: πῶς λέγεις / ὧδε / ἐρώτα δή / λέγε δή: cf.580D1-7). Cf. n.3418. J.-C. append two long notes telling us what the argument will be and condemning it as obsolete “in modern times” (426,7); but what they say it will say it does not say (that the relativeness of pleasure and pain imply they are illusory and unsatisfying): it is rather that believing our experiences requires us to embrace the contradiction that the neutral is not neutral but both positive and negative (583E4-584A10). Moreover what anybody outside the dialogue thinks about the argument, whether a creature of modern times or ancient, besides ourselves of course assuming we have grasped it, is an idle question.

4510

οὐκ ἐναντίον φαμὲν (C3): The purer dialectic often begins with the simple assertion of abstract opposites or identities: 436B5-C1; 475E6-476A2, 523B9-D6. The final proof of the soul's immortality in the Phaedo (103C10-5E6), like the present proof about pleasure, will stand or fall by the thinker's refusal to the core that opposites may be the same.

4511

μεταξὺ τούτοιν ἀμφοῖν ἐν μέσῳ ὄν (C7): ἐν μέσῳ is not a pleonastic synonym for μεταξύ (Adam ad loc.). As before it designates a balance point in the center, at which countervailing forces are neutralized or cancelled (κατέστη εἰς μέσον, 572D1; εἰς τὸ μέσον … ἦλθε, 550B4-5; εἰς μέσον ὡμολόγησαν, 547B8; cf. below ἐν μέσῳ στάντα, 584D7). As such, with ὄν it gives the grounds for the inference that the state is a sort of ἡσυχία. This in turn justifies the use of παύεσθαι for the cessation of pain and pleasure (D4, E1), and justifies the inference that the λυπηρόν and the ἡδύ are, conversely, κινήσεις (E10)—not vice-versa as Adam says.

4512

σφᾶς (C13), reflexive, guarantees that their having failed to notice the truth about being healthy is part of what they testify to: in short, they are aware of their error.

4513

αἰσθάνῃ γιγνομένους τοὺς ἀνθρώπους (D6): The participle is noteworthy. Again Socrates is not asking whether we know or believe something on the testimony of the persons, but only whether we perceive the persons undergoing something (γιγνομένους). What happens to them is that they find themselves praising the painless state as a thing pleasurable, while they are in pain. Compare ἀκούεις λεγόντων, D3-4. These are participles of perception.

4514

ἡδὺ ἴσως καὶ ἀγαπητὸν γίγνεται ἡσυχία (D10): ἴσως goes with ἡδύ, and Glaucon virtually means, “It changes into something ‘pleasurable’ perhaps, because it is welcome, though it is quiescence.” He is suggesting the reason why ἡσυχία at that moment (τότε) becomes (γίγνεται) something it is not, in the mind of the person in pain. He is not offering a theory that Socrates refutes, as Adam (ad 583D) says.

4515

ἄρα (E1) indicates Socrates is drawing an inference. However, all that truly can be inferred is that the man will dispraise the cessation as painful, not that it will be (let alone become) painful; yet this is what Socrates asserts. He is now quoting the praise of the γιγνόμενος ἄνθρωπος. Glaucon’s moderated assent ἴσως echoes his own assertion ἡδὺ ἴσως above, which itself was an interpretation of that praise.

4516

With ἄρα (E4) Socrates continues to over-infer; and with ποτε (E5) he answers Glaucon’s τότε at D10. It is chopping logic to cavil that the moment it seems painful (when one is experiencing pleasure) cannot be the same moment it seems pleasurable (the moment one is experiencing pain). All that Glaucon’s temporal restriction meant was that the seeming is due to conditions: the assertion that the seeming leads the feeling person to make (whether praise or blame) will not so qualify itself.

4517

τὸ μηδέτερον ὄν (E7): μή indicates that the participle (ὄν) is conditional. The assertion presumes a strong distinction between being and becoming that has quietly operated through the whole argument (εἶναί τι, C5; ὄν, C7 and D1; γιγνομένους, D7; γίγνεται, D10) but was disregarded at E2 and E5 in order to produce the paradoxical conclusion.

4518

τό γε … γιγνόμενον … ἔστον (E9-10): The distinction between being and becoming is now restored.

4519

κίνησίς τις (E10), a new notion, its unexpected appearance mitigated by τις. The notion is inferred from the contrast with ἡσυχία. The noun, by making change into a thing, makes possible, in this context of γένεσις vs. οὐσία, that the verb ἔστον be used of it. Their real essence is not to be but, such as their essence is, to be in flux.

4520

ἐφάνη ἄρτι (584A2) sc. ὄν. The subject is τὸ μήτε λυπηρὸν μήτε ἡδύ. ἐφάνη is “dialectical” (n.205) and means “as became clear a moment ago in our discussion,” (i.e., at C7-8, for the interpretation of which cf. n. ad loc.). Mere appearance entered the conversation just after (C10ff). The late μέντοι stresses ἡσυχία with a force similar to that of the γε after τό, both adducing the logical vis termini: It would not be poised in the middle if it were in motion.

4521

ὀρθῶς ἔστι … ἡγεῖσθαι (A4), not ὀρθόν: i.e., πῶς ἔστι τὸ ἡγεῖσθαι Χ ὀρθῶς ἡγεῖσθαι; “How can adopting that position X really be correct if doing so would be to adopt incorrectly the position?” Glaucon notices the special adverbial expression in his reply (οὐδαμῶς, A6).

4522

ἀλγεῖν / ἀνιαρόν (A4-5) The point having been made the terminology can change (ἀλγεῖν for λυπεῖσθαι; ἀνιαρόν for λυπηρόν). ἄλγος can be synonymous with λύπη (ἀλγηδών / ἡδονή, Rep.464D2, Phdo.65C6-7), but from Crat.419Bff, Leg.727C4-5 and 792B6, Rep.578A7-8, and Polit.293B2-3, ἄλγος (and in Crat. ἀνιαρόν also) are specific or colorful where λύπη is general or drab. Striking specificity, like a clinching added example, has a dismissive, and therefore transitional, force.

4523

ἔστιν (A7) paroxytone, relying on the ἔστιν at A4.

4524

ἡ ἡσυχία (A8): The article is “referential” or quasi-demonstrative, pointing back to the ἡσυχία spoken of at 583D10-E2 (where the was no article). Indeed the whole sentence rehearses that passage, with its proleptic τοῦτο (A7: cf. 583D10) and its relativizing τότε (A8: cf. 583D10 and ὅταν, E1), in order to assert the opposite position as being implied (ἄρα) by the intervening argument.

4525

φαντασμάτων (A9) replaces φαίνεται (A6). The English “appearances” turns these false things into objects more than the Greek φαντάσματα does, which retains their debt to the verb. “Appearings” would be closer but bad English, but in either case nominalizing the problem that appears in experience (like nominalizing the idea of change in the noun, κίνησις, above) is a large and indispensable step toward theorization.

4526

πρὸς ἡδονῆς ἀλήθειαν ἀλλὰ γοητεία τις (A9-10): Absence of the article with ἀλήθεια and with γοητεία is striking, and makes them predicative.

4527

ὡς γοῦν ὁ λόγος σημαίνει (A11): Glaucon acknowledges that what Socrates is saying is being said by a mind to a mind, and with γοῦν reveals a trace of vertigo (cf. Polemarchus at 334A9). There is no need to call this “metaphysics” (Adam ad 583Bff), a deadly and desiccating thing: it is closer to Phänomenologie. One of the virtues of the second proof above (580D3-583A11) was that it (like the argument from opposites in Book Four) aroused and encouraged the mind to acknowledge and assume its hegemony as judge. Cf. τὸ λογιστικόν (580D4) and τῷ γε λογιστικῷ (587D11).

4528

ἐν τῷ παρόντι οὕτω (B2): construe οὕτω with ἐν τῷ παρόντι (it is unneeded with τοῦτο πεφυκέναι). The participle never (pace Adam) points to the immediate future (as “presently” can in English) but always to the already present context. Tht.158B9-10, οὕτως ἐν τῷ παρόντι, is an exact parallel. For this οὕτως cf. 530C7; Euthyph.3B1; Gorg.478A2; Leg.712D3; Phdrs.235C2, 272C6; Phdo.62B1.

4529

ποῦ (B4) responds to οὐκ ἐκ λυπῶν (B1) which only tells where they are not to be found (pace Adam who connects the spatial interrogative with temporal ἐν τῷ παρόντι, which he misinterprets to refer to a comment Socrates is about to make: see prev. n.), and ποίας refers to αἵ which came before it (B1).

4530

ἐξαίφνης (B7) nods to Glaucon’s τότε (583D10). That a remote access or cessation would cause an attenuated reaction and a near cessation or access an enhanced one, is a natural corollary to the principle lately revealed, here added to make the argument a fortiori.

4531

ἡδονή / λύπη (B1-3): The boiler-plate vocabulary returns for the new development.

4532

καθαράν (C1): cf. παναληθής announced as demonstrandum and immediately elaborated by καθαρά, 583B4: the term arrives in the wake of Glaucon’s answer, ἀληθέστατα (B9), an expression not otiose.

4533

τείνουσαι (C5) recalling the speculative psychophysiology of 462C10-D5 (n.b., τεταμένη [C12] and 464D4). The suggestion is that pleasures that combine the somatic and psychic natures are impure by the involvement of body as a second element.

4534

λεγόμεναι (C5) in contrast with καθαράν (C1), πεφυκέναι (B2), and ἀληθέστατα (B9).

4535

προησθήσεις τε καὶ προλυπήσεις (C10): Both nouns appear to be coinages (προλυπεῖσθαι, Phdrs.258E3, Phlb.39D4 [and προχαίρειν, ibid.]), and mean the experience of pleasure and pain in advance, not just the anticipation of pleasure and pain. Although they are feelings that occur solely within the medium of the soul, they are inferred to be impure by a commutation of the principle of temporal sequence in ἀπαλλαγαί.

4536

ᾧ μάλιστα ἐοίκασιν (D1), μάλιστα suggesting the image is wonderfully accurate. Cf. 586A2.

4537

ἐν τῇ φύσει (D3): this modality is used also at Parm.132D2, of the way the “forms” stand, unmoving, in nature (ἑστάναι ἐν τῇ φύσει). Cf. ἀληθῶς below (D9).

4538

μὴ ἑωρακότα (D9): μή is conditional. The perfect is “empirical” (so ἔμπειρος, E4; ἄπειρος, E7), for which cf. n.1571; but the “empirical experience” involved is quite a different thing from the feelings of pleasure and pain described at 583C10-E2!

4539

Μὰ Δί’ οὐκ ἔγωγε (D10): The asseveration is as strong as it can be. Compare 585A6 below.

4540

οἶμαι οἰηθῆναι ἄν (D10). In the analysis of the example he thinks that they think (cf. οἴεσθαι bis, 584D6-7), just as before he perceived them to perceive (αἰσθάνῃ, 583D6; cf. n.4513).

4541

πάσχοι (E4): again the logical contents, the thoughts, are made the result of raw perception (cf. γιγνομένους, 583D6 and n.4513).

4542

τοῦ ἀληθινῶς … ὄντος (E5): ὄντος and ἀληθινῶς replace ἐν τῇ φύσει above (D3), both going with all three “locations” (ἄνω, ἐν μέσῳ, and κάτω). The reader’s mind strains to understand the distinct meaning and contribution of each term, though we have seen both (εἶναι, D3; ἀληθῶς, D9).

4543

οἱ ἄπειροι ἀληθείας (E7): That there should in the first place even be a direct experience of truth, so alien to the thoughtworld of empiricism, had been broached above, in the argument about the relative authority of the parts of soul (cf. n.4490).

4544

περὶ πολλῶν τε ἄλλων … πρός τε ἡδονὴν καὶ λύπην καὶ τὸ μεταξὺ τούτων (E7-9): An ἄλλως τε καί construction linking, virtually, major and minor premise, the former a generalization of the case of up and down just studied and the latter the specific case of pleasure that is the target of the investigation.

4545

ἀληθῆ τε οἴονται (585A1), sc. λυπηθῆναι, the expression relying on a parallelism in thought with κάτω τ’ ἂν οἴοιτο φέρεσθαι καὶ ἀληθῆ οἴοιτο, above (584E1-2) where the infinitive could more easily be supplied in retrospect, and (as here) its coming was announced by τε.

4546

σφόδρα (A2) echoes ἐξαίφνης ἀμήχανοι (584B7) and goes with (προσ)γίγνεσθαι, not οἴονται, which, as at 584D7 and E1-2, does not need strengthening.

4547

πρός (A3) is in virtual tmesis with γίγνεσθαι.

4548

πληρώσει τε καὶ ἡδονῃ (A3): For the pairing cf. 439D8 and Gorg.496E1-2. Fullness is a new idea in this context constituting a “proleptic skewing” (n.1591) of pleasure that will make a berth for the mechanism of κένωσις just below. The notion that pleasure is a filling is a commonplace flatly stated at 442A7, Gorg.492A2, and Phlb.31E8 and partially theorized at Phlb.34E9-36C2; and is palpable in the phenomenology of satiation.

4549

καί (A4) links ἀπατῶνται (A5) with οἴονται (A2); μέν is “solitarium” with οἴονται, leaving implicit an unstated contrast with the correct belief: cf. Denniston, 382(§ iii).

4550

Μὰ Δία (A6): The repeated asseveration serves as an index of the surprise or amazement (θαυμάζειν: A6 and 584E7) at how easily we are deceived by appearances or at how great a discrepancy there is between truth and appearance, or both, to the extent that sometimes our pleasures and pains are true but at other times they are false! We still know the surprise when we contemplate how the earth is round and people on the other side are standing “upside down.”

4551

εἰ μὴ οὕτως ἔχει (A7) virtually telescopes εἰ μὴ ἔχοι ὡς ἔχει. Cf. Prot.315E2-3.

4552

ὧδε γ’οὖν (A8): γε goes with ὧδε only; γ’οὖν is not γοῦν (Stallb. ad loc). Denniston (449) compares H.Maj.292E4, εὖ γ’οὖν and the separation in ἔγωγε οὖν. Slings again disfigures the text with a lacuna to make way for what he sees as something lacking in the logic (cf.nn.4211, 3256).

4553

κενώσεις (B1), prepared for by πλήρωσις as κίνησις had been prepared for by ἡσυχία above (cf. n.4519). πεῖνα καὶ δίψα (A8) is the usual pair by which to designate bodily needs or desires.

4554

ἄγνοια καὶ ἀφροσύνη are amalgamated into one, by the singular number of the predicate, κενότης (B3: contrast κενώσεις, B1). κενότης replaces κένωσις as state rather than process; moreover it is the privative alpha’s in ἄγνοια and ἀφροσύνη that warrant the inference that they are emptinesses, quite a different thing from the full and empty stomach.

4555

νοῦν ἴσχων (B6-7): for the expression cf. 511D1.

4556

ὅ τε τροφῆς μεταλαμβάνων καὶ ὁ νοῦν ἴσχων (B6-7): while τε … καί (as well as the singular πληροῖτο) asks us to compare them, the repeated article ensures we will keep them in their separate categories. For τε … καί linking opposites or complements cf. n.92.

4557

τοῦ ἧττον ἢ τοῦ μᾶλλον ὄντος (B9-10): The genitives with πλήρωσις may be subjective or objective (the filler or the filled). Truth and reality are again paired (584E5). This time their degrees are correlated (compare the similar corollary regarding degrees at 584B6-8: cf. n.4530): the degree of realness of the filler (or of thing being filled) is the basis or cause of the relative “trueness” of the event of filling.

4558

μᾶλλον καθαρᾶς οὐσίας (B12) purports to spell out what μᾶλλον ὄν meant (B9-10). The question now becomes, if the measure of truth is reality (ὄν, οὐσία), what is the measure of reality? Socrates will provide Glaucon with criteria so that he can be the judge (ὧδε δὲ κρῖνε, C1).

4559

With these genitives (B13-C1) Socrates reveals that the genitive above (B9-10) was subjective (cf. n.4557): the food that fills the body and knowledge that fills the soul (still, we will get the objective sense next, D5). He is scrupulous, now in conversation with Glaucon, to continue including ὄψον in the category of true nutrition (B13) as he had with Adeimantus—the so-called necessary thing. After all, it is otherwise uncalled for once as here we are given the polar doublet σῖτος / ποτός (B13: cf. 585A8 and 559B1 with n.4016).

4560

τὸ δόξης τε ἀληθοῦς εἶδος καὶ ἐπιστήμης καὶ νοῦ καὶ συλλήβδην αὖ πάσης ἀρετῆς (B14-C1): In order for ἀρετή to be the genus (συλλήβδην πάσης) of δόξα τε ἀληθὴς καὶ ἐπιστήμη καὶ νοῦς we need to supply the intermediate term σοφία (the traditional virtue) as the entity that the triad represents (for a parallel cf. Leg.688B2-4). In the immediate context this complex of terms is being compared with food generalized as nourishment (there is no “transition from plural to singular,” pace J.-C.), so that we are led to supply the terms body and soul, recognizing food as the filling of the former and virtue as the filling of the latter, guided by the pairing that came before, ὅ τε τροφῆς μεταλαμβάνων καὶ ὁ νοῦν ἴσχων (B6-7). Adam’s edifying comment that knowledge is here conceived to be the τροφή of the soul, comparing Phdo.84B, is as inappropriately loose in this context as it would be to say that food is the “virtue” of body. That σοφία should be allowed to stand for virtue in general is neither unusual (again cf. Leg.688B2-4, and Gorg.467E4-5 vs. 477C2-5) nor strange, given the identification of knowledge and virtue that always lies behind the scenes in Socrates’s mind.

4561

ὧδε δὲ κρῖνε (C1): Again the issue of judgment is raised (cf. nn.4501, 4480, 4396, 4378); the way to judge is again being stipulated—otherwise put, another “criterion” is being introduced.

4562

ἐχόμενον (C2) varies the metaphor of μετέχειν (B12) with a vaguer expression.

4563

τοῦ ἀεὶ ὁμοίου … καὶ ἀθανάτου καὶ ἀληθείας (C1-2): The triad consists of the basic term ἀεί ὅμοιον and its elaboration by two terms connected with soul (ἀθάνατος) and its virtue, σοφία (ἀλήθεια). Thus the measure of truth is reality and the measure of reality is the invariant, but the invariant in turn is connected with the true. The sequel (C7-13) makes the commutativity of these relations explicit.

4564

γιγνόμενον (C3), semantically general (as at Tim.52A6-7), is specified by being paired with ὄν and by the predicative ἐν. The thing that in itself (αὐτό) is of such and such a nature (τοιοῦτον ὄν, i.e., more or less invariant), arises or changes or moves in something of such and such a nature (i.e., something more or less invariant). This general formulation will be specified, presently.

4565

εἶναι μᾶλλον (C3): the participle (ὄν), the abstract noun (οὐσία), and the infinitive (εἶναι)—all three—have now been used for the same idea.

4566

τὸ τοῦ ἀεὶ ὁμοίου (C6). The first list (C1-3) had five terms (ἀεὶ ὁμοίου, ἀθανάτου, ἀληθείας [ἐχόμενον], αὐτὸ τοιοῦτον, ἐν τοιούτῳ); the second (C4-5) had four (μηδέποτε ὁμοίου, θνητοῦ [ἐχόμενον], αὐτὸ τοιοῦτον, ἐν τοιούτῳ). Glaucon’s answer here reveals that the principle term of both lists is the first one, invariance vs. variability (ἀεὶ ὁμοίου [C1-2], μηδέποτε ὁμοίου [C4]).

4567

ἀνάγκη (C13), of logical necessity. The sequence of questions (C7-13) removes what is at first unclear in the first question (C7-8). That the invariant can be realer than it can be knowable is a contradiction in terms, if the criterion of knowability (as opposed to opinability: cf. 478A12-D12) is invariance or truth. Hence the contradictory of the contrapositive (C12), that if the invariant were less really true it would also be less really real, is logically necessary. Emendation of ἀεὶ ὁμοίου (C7) is unnecessary.

4568

τὰ περὶ τὴν … θεραπείαν (D1) redoes τὸ ἐχόμενον ... (C1-2), the first of the three parts of the general formula above (C1-2 [and C4-5, τὸ … θνητοῦ]). The things that “help” the soul have more “truth and reality” than those that help the body.

4569

σῶμα αὐτό (D5) places body qua body (rather than qua ἔμψυχον) into the place of the second term of the general formula above (αὐτό, C2, C4). Soul has more “reality” (as invariant) than body.

4570

πληρούμενον (D7): The notion of filling and being filled gives a specific and concrete instance ἐν τοιούτῳ γιγνόμενον, the third term of the general formula above (C3). Becoming full (or empty) is the γένεσις the soul or body undergoes “in” the realm of food (nourishment) or intelligence (virtue). Knowledge, being of the truth of reality, is a realer (as true and invariant) thing than food. If both the filler (i.e., knowledge) is μᾶλλον ὄν (μᾶλλον ὄντων, D7) and the filled (i.e., soul) is μᾶλλον ὄν (D8), then the event that connects them, filling, is itself more real (ὄντως μᾶλλον πληροῦται, D8). Note that πληροῦται is not repeated with the second limb (ἢ τὸ τῶν ἧττον … ὄν, D8-9), nor did it need to be.

4571

τὸ πληροῦσθαι τῶν φύσει προσηκόντων ἡδύ ἐστι (D11): That being filled is eo ipso pleasurable was implicitly assumed at A3, in the phrase πληρώσει τε καὶ ἡδονῃ (cf. n.975) which in turn introduced, or prepared for, the notion of κένωσις. The specification that the fillings be φύσει προσηκόντων (D11) has no precedent beyond the distinction drawn above according to which the soul undergoes κένωσις and πληρώσις on analogy with the body, each with its own filling (A8-B7) but this stipulation is not needed for the present conclusion (D12-E4).

4572

τὸ τῷ ὄντι καὶ τῶν ὄντων πληρούμενον μᾶλλον (D12): τῷ ὄντι and τῶν ὄντων are parallel descriptors of πληρούμενον, and μᾶλλον goes with both of them. Note chiasm around μᾶλλον, a chiasm of cause and effect or principle and inference parallel to the chiasm around εἶναι above (μᾶλλον ὂν ὄντως μᾶλλον, D8).

4573

μεταλαμβάνον (E2) has the sense it had at B6. It was weaker than its parallel there (i.e., ἴσχων); and it is weaker than its parallel here (i.e., πληρούμενον): even the description of “filling up” is being withheld from the lesser real things (we have come further than the non-repetition just noted at D8-9: n.4570)

4574

ἀναγκαιότατα (E5), of superlative logical necessity, is climactic.

4575

With ἄρα (586A1), Socrates indicates he is drawing a conclusion, and ἄπειροι (A1) and ὡς ἔοικεν (A2) indicate the conclusion consists of a re-application of the likeness (ἐοίκασι, 584D1,ff) of the three regions and the inference he drew from it at 584E7-5A5 (n.b. ἄπειροι, E7).

4576

Species (σοφία) and genus (ἀρετή) again (cf.585B14-15), using a different sub-species for the species (i.e., φρόνησις [cf. Leg.688B2-4] rather than the subspecies δόξα ἀληθής, ἐπιστήμη, and νοῦς [585B14]). The ἄρα indicates an inference and with ἄπειροι recalls the general or major premise from which the inference is being drawn (εἰ καὶ οἱ ἄπειροι ἀληθείας περὶ πολλῶν τε ἄλλων μὴ ὑγιείας δόξας ἔχουσιν, 584E7-8): it is inexperience of the truth about something specific that Socrates is now interested in.

4577

εὐωχίαις (A1): It was εὐωχεῖσθαι that the original citizens enjoyed in their simple homes each night, according to Socrates (372B6)—which term elicited Glaucon’s strong reaction (ἄνευ ὄψου … ποιεῖς τοὺς ἀνδρὰς ἑστιωμένους (C2-3).

4578

ὡς ἔοικε (A2) is not just “as it seems” but refers to the introduction of the εἰκών of up and down at 584D1.

4579

πλανῶνται (A3), the metaphor used in the same sense it was in describing the φιλοθεάμονες at 484B6: cf. πλανητόν (479D9) and n.2780, where again the objective variation is connected with the variation and unreliability of subjective understanding.

4580

οὐδέ (A5) illative after οὔτε, as at 475C4 (cf. n.2702).

4581

οὐδέ (A6) again illative: the pleasure accompanies the process of being filled.

4582

οὐδὲ τοῦ ὄντος … οὐδὲ βεβαίου τε καὶ καθαρᾶς ἡδονῆς (A5-6). The terminology approaches the three demonstranda announced at 583B3-5 (οὐ παναληθής, οὐ καθαρά, ἐσκιαγραφημένη), but there is more below.

4583

εἰς τραπέζας βόσκονται (A8), an impossible image that is meant thereby to turn the tables on the tables Glaucon asked for at 372D8! With εἰς (in place of ἀπό, ibi) Socrates reminds Glaucon, and us, of the semantic spats in their exchange there (παραβαλλόμενοι, B4 vs. παραθήσομεν, C7; κατακλινέντες, B5 vs. κατακεῖσθαι, D7; ἑστιωμένους, C3 vs. κατεσκεύαζες, D4). The present metaphor would after all be envisaging the impossible with Glaucon's ἀπὸ τραπέζων δειπνεῖν unless they put their hoofs on the table!

4584

χορταζόμενοι (A8): Socrates retrieves Glaucon's choice metaphor of feeding pigs in a pen (ἐχόρταζες, 372D5).

4585

ἕνεκα τῆς τούτων πλεονεξίας (B1): Socrates had likewise described the process rapidly at 372E2-3E7. The τρυφαίνουσα πόλις had been purified λόγῳ (399E5); but now more importantly the cause of the problem—the forces within Glaucon that led to it—have been understood and healed: these βοσκήματα are what Glaucon embodied at 372C2-E1, and Glaucon was who these βοσκήματα are, here.

4586

ὁπλαῖς (B2) suggests ὅπλοις of course. The chiasm closes the metaphorical patch. The transition from lust to war telescopes the admonition spelled out by Socrates at 373A1-374A2, but the metaphorical imagery indiscriminately blends voracious eating, sexual lust, and armed conflict (cf.452C1 and n.2423) in the manner of the epithumetic list (on which cf. n.465).

4587

Reading οὔτε (B3) with D against οὐδέ (mss.AFM): the power to control and contain the self is presented in close epexegetical apposition to the subjective part (τὸ ὄν), which itself had been paired with the objective (τοῖς οὖσιν) in a polar doublet of alternatives, by οὐδέ. The demonstrandum οὐ παναληθής (583B3) has been proved.

4588

τὸ στέγον (B3): cf. Gorg.493B2 (οὐ στεγανόν, elaborated with the image of the sieve), Leg.714A5, and the inversion of the concept in connection with the River Ameles in the Plain of Lethe (621A6 with n.5390).

4589

The paragraph broke into a heightened elegance that attracted the attention of Longinus, who quoted it in extenso (de subl.§13). The ideas that all creatures desire pleasure, and that pleasure consists of fulfillment, are assumed; and now a new inference can be drawn, that “unreal” fulfillment, which had been elaborated with the ancillary notions of security (βεβαίως [585E3, 586A6], objective) and untrustworthiness (ἀπιστοτέρας [585E3], subjective) will not only be less real and less satisfying, but positively unsatisfying. The ancillary notion of purity (καθαρά, A6, cf. 585B12, 584C1) is dealt with next (B7-C5).

4590

χρησμῳδεῖς (B6): Glaucon grasps that Socrates's parable describes the feelings he had had many hours ago, including the irrationality and violence that underlay them. Adam accounts for the oracular reference by comparing the completely transparent metaphor of metal κέραί τε καὶ ὁπλαῖς with the riddling wooden wall in the oracle to the Athenians (Hdt.7.141-4), but χρησμῳδεῖν invokes more than stylistic play. Subjectively it includes saying more than one can really know or understand (Apol.39BC; Meno 99); objectively it is an utterance that is true whatever it means and can be ignored only at one’s peril (e.g., Leg.712A, Rep.419): Socrates could not ignore it (Apol.22) and knew the Athenians could not ignore him (Apol.39). When, as here, one person says the other is speaking in an “oracular” way, he is therefore averring that what the other person says is ineluctably true even if the other person cannot be held responsible for knowing it. Glaucon does not explicitly acknowledge the close connection in language and thought between what Socrates here says and what he felt and said at 372C2-3E1, but he remembers it well enough to feel the truth in Socrates’s remarks. We should compare his remark to Adeimantus's two proverbial remarks before and after Socrates describes the equalization of man and beast at 563C1-D3. Shorey (ad loc.) as usual glides by with the suave comment that “Plato laughs at himself,” claiming to hear Plato rather than the two persons who are speaking and what they are saying, sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly, to each other.

4591

καί (B7) indicates a continuation of the new conclusion. μεμειγμέναις (~ οὐ καθαραῖς) and εἰδώλοις … καὶ ἐσκιαγραφημέναις are the second and third demonstranda from 583B. We have reached the climax of the climax.

4592

τὸ τῆς Ἑλένης εἴδωλον (C3-4): That Helen did not after all go to Troy is the argument of the famous Palinode Socrates attributes to Steisichorus at Phdrs.243A (cf. fr.15 Page [=PMG 192]). An early papyrological section of the Palinode that includes the story that an εἴδωλον of her was brought to Troy while she herself stayed with Proteus in Egypt, is printed by Page (fr.16 [=PMG 193]). For the story cf. also E.Hel.605ff, El.1282-3. The realization that “the face that launched a thousand ships” might just as well have been only a picture is perhaps the strongest way a Greek can express “making a mountain out of a molehill,” which it is the first purpose of the example to illustrate, but there is more. The animals' insatiable desire turned them to rape each other and then to commit mayhem and murder (A8-B3); but only a human animal could allow his insatiable desire to focus so intensely on illusory details (ὑπὸ τῆς παρ’ἀλλήλας θέσεως ἀποχραινομέναις) and thereby be driven into a mindless slaughterfest in which the fighters don't even care whether the thing they are fighting over is really real.

4593

περὶ τὸ θυμοειδές (C7): Conversely, he has been speaking of the ἐπιθυμητικόν, or the person ruled by it; but the demonstrandum announced at 583B included all types of men or parts of the soul (τῶν ἄλλων, 583B4).

4594

ἕτερα τοιαῦτα (C7), derogatorily dismissive (cf. n.4308). The sameness consists in the fact that the objects pursued have an illusory worth so that reaching them is unsatisfying.

4595

αὐτὸ τοῦτο διαπράττεται (C8): the present tense is conative (as at 411E1). For the verb used of willful machination, cf. that passage, 440D2, and n.1173. αὐτὸ τοῦτο isolates the section of the soul, as if it could be.

4596

δυσκολία (C9) is a new characterization of the θυμοειδές, designating its extreme tendencies in the absence of moderating mind: cf. (with Adam) 411C9-E2, with δυσ- striking a strong contrast with the φιλο- compounds before.

4597

θαρροῦντες (D4): Yes, it is another self-instantiation to place alongside the appearance of the λογιστικόν at 580D4: Socrates calls on the θυμοειδές to be his ally in affirming the truth reason has reached about itself as well as the ἐπιθυμητικόν.

4598

ἐξηγῆται (D7): ostendat et monstret (Stallb.). The notion that reason chooses the pleasures to be pursued is strictly new, and is an inference from the explicit assertion that true pleasure derives from being filled by the φύσει προσήκοντα (585D11) and the idea that reason is required to determine what is προσῆκον, which is inherent in φρόνησις καὶ ἀρετή (A1).

4599

τὰς ἀληθεστάτας τε … καὶ τὰς ἑαυτῶν οἰκείας (D8-E1) Again (cf.A6 and n.4582) the language approaches that of the original demonstranda: οὐδὲ παναληθής … οὐδὲ καθαρὰ ἀλλ’ ἐσκιαγραφημένη τις (583B3-5). The special sense of οἰκεῖον here is a notion extended, by inference, from the notions of purity and what is really there—i.e., the non-illusory.

4600

τὸ βέλτιστον ἑκάστῳ (E2): it is the special operation of reason to choose what is βέλτιστον in each situation. τὸ βέλτιστον is the proper term for the goal of deliberation.

4601

τοῦτο καὶ οἰκειότατον (E2): The assertion, and the avowal in response, that what is best for a thing is what is most akin to it, makes no sense without the axiom that things are the way they truly are because it is good for them to be that way. Thus, we may conclude, the account of τὸ ἀγαθόν (509B6-8) is brought forward to enhance the present conclusion about soul and happiness.

4602

ὑπάρχει (E5): The basis for the claim about what “lies in store” for the soul, is the discovery of the inner order of the soul in Book Four, which revealed the power of its unity as well reaching the controversial definition of justice as the soul’s inner order (441D-444A).

4603

ἑκάστῳ (E5), a predicative dative with ὑπάρχει and continued by δικαίῳ (E6). The shift from the dative of the leading construction to the accusative within the noun phrase (ἕκαστον [E7], a subject accusative with the infinitive that is also the subject of ὑπάρχει) is not uncommon with verbs that have a dative construction, like ὑπάρχει or ἔξεστι (Stallb., citing Euthyph.5A3-5 [μοι / λέγοντα]; Xen.Cyrop.2.1.15 [ὑμῖν / λαβόντας], Aeschin.adv.Ctes.2 [πρεσβυτάτῳ / τὸν βουλόμενον]). Cf. also schol. ad Euthyphr.5A, Rep.606E4-5 (ἀναλαβόντι / κατασκευασμένον), Crito 51D4 ᾧ / λαβόντα).

4604

τὰς ἀληθεστάτας (587A1). The first demonstrandum (παναληθής) is now redeemed in a reduced form (εἰς τὸ δύνατον, E7) as relying, through the guidance of reason (τὰς βελτίστας), on the second demonstrandum (τὰς ἑαυτοῦ ~ τὰς οἰκείας ~ μὴ ἐσκιαγραφημένας): what pleasures the other parts can have are not opposed by, but achieved for them by, the good and friendly services of the rational part.

4605

μέν in μὲν οὖν (A2) limiting assent to what has been a μέν clause (586D5) so as to invite the speaker to move on to his δέ clause—a use Denniston does not note.

4606

ἄρα (A3) acknowledging Glaucon’s invitation to tell the other part. For ἄρα with the back-up alternative that comes second to the mind, cf. 361A1 and n.743.

4607

κρατεῖν (A3), rather than ἐξηγεῖσθαι (D7), of course—since the other parts, lacking the orientation of truth and virtue (586D1) cannot truly lead or rule, which it is the burden of this passage to show.

4608

τά τ’ ἄλλα (A4) after οὔτε τὴν ἑαυτοῦ is almost an ἄλλως τε καί construction in reverse, standing in chiasm with the alternative presented just above (586E5-587A1).

4609

ἀναγκάζειν ἀλλοτρίαν καὶ μὴ ἀληθῆ ἡδονὴν διώκειν (A4-5). The usurping part forces or requires the other parts not only to seek pleasures akin to the usurping part and alien to themselves (ἀλλοτρίαν), but also to enjoy them although not truly pleasurable (μὴ ἀληθῆ). Again the claim about what lies in store relies on what has been stored up in previous argumentation, this time the example of the ἐπιθυμητικόν of the timocrat’s son dethroning reason and honor within his soul (553D1-7).

4610

ἀφέστηκεν (A7): The metaphor of distance was introduced at 581E2-3 (reading τῆς ἡδονῆς), and the perfect tense represents the essential structure of things (cf. n.4782). Compare οὕτω πόρρω που … ἐσκήνηται, 610E3.

4611

ἐφάνησαν (A13) dialectical: the point came into view at 573A8-C9.

4612

αἱ βασιλικαί τε καὶ κόσμιαι (B3) a chiasm of alternatives with αἱ ἐρωτικαί τε καὶ τυραννικαί (A13-B1). The distinction between the best and worst man was articulated by Socrates as a choice between king and tyrant at 580C1-4, following suit with Glaucon's remark at the beginning of the whole passage on judgment (576E3-5).

4613

ὁ δέ (B6): The other man is of course the king: cf.580B8-C4.

4614

ἂν εἴπῃς (B13). For this reply cf.573D1, 408D6. Again the broaching of a topic is announced by a reference to the back and forth method of dialectic.

4615

γνησίας and νόθαιν (B14-C1) indicate that the three pleasures are those belonging to the three parts of the soul as just now analyzed, the θυμοειδές and ἐπιθυμητικόν having to rely on the guidance of the λογιστικόν to ensure their pleasures are “legitimate” (γνήσιον an inference from οἰκεῖον, 586D4-E2); but the reference to the tyrant suddenly reveals the presupposition that the three parts of soul are to be associated with the political types of Book Eight (aristocratic king, timocratic type, oligarchic type), something that remained attenuated there (cf.547B3-7 if connected with 550B4-7; and cf. 553C1-D7). The demotic type is left out of the present scheme (as noted below, C7) since he is merely the precursor to the tyrant, no longer devoted to any of the three pleasures (561A6-8, B1-5: and note that 561C6-D5 has him pursuing each of them), but not yet having been carried “beyond” (561A8-9 and 572C7-9 vs. 572E4-7B4).

4616

ὑπερβάς (C1) in the sense of going beyond what is right (e.g., ὑπερβήῃ cited from Homer at 364E2). Characterizing the tyrannical man and his pleasure as a fourth to these three by means of saying he “goes beyond them” requires us to bring together three things: (1) the depiction of the “paranomic” pleasures by the device of the sick dream at the beginning of Book Nine (571C3-D4); (2) the analysis of these pleasures as relying on a profound disorder among the three parts of soul as evinced in the description of the healthy man’s dreams that follows this, in which the proper operation of the parts becomes explicit (571D6-572B1); and (3) the identification of the tyrannical man as a person whose soul in waking life undergoes at every moment what a normal man might undergo only in a sick dream. The swiftness with which the previous agreements are being accumulated is arresting while the focus intensifies.

4617

νόμον τε καὶ λόγον (C2): τε καί draws together the notion of the παράνομοι ἡδοναί from 571B4-C1 and the description of the tyrannical man as a lawless monarch (ἀνομία, 575A1-2), with the theory of reason ruling soul and guiding its pleasures, lately recovered from Book Four.

4618

δούλαις τισὶ δοροφόροις ἡδοναῖς (C2): The image of the bodyguard of pleasures of course refers to the fateful takeover of the soul by Eros, which these lesser pleasures had arranged (573A4-B5), and to Eros’s subsequent hegemony over them (573E3-574A1) as if they were slaves, manumitted to rove within the soul, freed from the constraint of childhood beliefs about what is right and good (574D5-8). What is new here is the appallingly forceful image of the tyrant’s household (συνοικεῖ, C3 and C10: cf. 577A6 and n.4390).

4619

καὶ … οὐδέ (C3) is καί … δέ (with οὐ), announcing that whereas the point just made is clear the next question is hard, so as to justify introducing the arcane calculation proposed to answer it.

4620

ἀφειστήκει (C6), pluperfect standing for an imperfect of citation (the perfect of ἀφίστημι in the sense of being at a distance describing an essential relationship, as at A7), parallel with ἦν (C7).

4621

τρίτῳ εἰδώλῳ (C9). If τρίτον as above (C6) means the “third after the original” then τρίτον εἴδωλον, a “third image,” is an image of an image of an original, an essentially geometrical relation (f[f{x}] or f2[x])). Hence the ranking of the images is two-dimensional or “planar” (ἐπίπεδον, D6), the relation between the first and third pleasures (tyrant to oligarch) being 32, which is re-iterated (from oligarch to king), giving another 32. The total ratio of the king’s pleasures-to-be-enjoyed to those of the tyrant—the ratio of their truth or purity—is therefore 34. Though J.-C. easily speak of a shadow of a shadow, which is unmeaning, the sense in which the pleasure of the oligarch is a “shadow” of the timocrat’s and the timocrat’s in turn a “shadow” of the aristocrat’s, was shown in extenso in the “decline,” though the point was there not explicitly made.

4622

τριπλασίου ἄρα … τριπλάσιον (D3): The intervening step, that the oligarch’s pleasure is third in rank after that of the kingly man (pari passu with C9-10, the timocratic man this time standing in between), is assumed. τριπλάσιον τριπλασίου means three times three, the arithmetical gap between the men being duplicated. Thus the ratio of the best and worst men—their ability to enjoy pleasure—is 3x3 = 32.

4623

ἀληθοῦς ἠδονῆς (D3-4): Without the intervening dialectical development it would have been tendentious to speak of ἀληθὴς ἡδονή at 581E2 (pace Campbell ad loc.); by now, however, we have of course earned the warrant to do so.

4624

τρίτην αὔξην (D9): The men multiplied (arithmetically) by each other gave 32; the pleasures multiplied geometrically by each other gave 34; third (τρίτην), we multiply (αὔξην) the men by the pleasures, and the final product is 36 = 729. This is my guess, for what it is worth; we should be remembering the dilemma we were forced into by the narrative on the nuptial number at the start of this treatise on the best and worst man!

4625

δῆλον δή (D9) in this late position is a bluffing overstatement as Glaucon notes (D11).

4626

δῆλον τῷ γε λογιστικῷ (D11): Commentators have assumed Glaucon’s expression corroborates their own difficulty understanding Socrates’s calculation; but in case he has found the simple sense of it that I have suggested above, then the purport of his affirmation is parallel to that at 584A11 (ὡς γοῦν ὁ λόγος σημαίνει), namely, that the inference is hyperlogical, and τῷ λογιστικῷ refers back to τὸ λογιστικόν at 580D4.

4627

καταπεφόρηκας (E5): Cf. Stephanus s.v. καταφορεῖν, notes Adam quoting Schneider ad loc., and Dio Chrysost.10.386C.

4628

ἡμέραι καὶ νύκτες καὶ μῆνες καὶ ἐνιαυτοί (588A4-5) is the conventional list for measures of time (cf. Leg.809D1-2; Tim.37E1), and therefore constitute the more normal ways (προσήκοντα, A3) to quantify life, much easier to apply than the measures presently invented. The wonderful coincidence that 729 is very nearly the number of days and nights in one year is the motive for the arithmetical sleight-of-hand, corroborating the idea that the tyrant’s daytime is plagued by nightmares (a notion that underlies Ar.EN 1102B57). There is no need to continue the numerology beyond days and nights.

4629

τοῦ τε δικαίου καὶ τοῦ ἀδίκου (A1): Glaucon correctly projects the relation of king and tyrant onto the true investiganda, the just man and the unjust man.

4630

εὐσχημοσύνῃ τε καὶ κάλλει καὶ ἀρετῇ (A9-10). The list looks back to 581E7-582A1 (βίου answering to ζῆν), where Socrates had imposed on himself the task, now complete, of comparing their lives in terms of pleasure alone (αὐτὸ τὸ ἥδιον καὶ ἀλυπότερον), without the support of their relative fineness and goodness (traditional καλοκἀγαθία: cf. n.4476). εὐσχημοσύνη may add the reminder that καλοκἀγαθία can be faked, as Adeimantus had imagined (εὐσχημοσύνη κίβδηλος, 366B4 [cf.365C3-4]) and as the case of the oligarch actually showed (554E3), just as in a rather different context εὐσχημοσύνη is dispensable for the erotic man (as are τὰ νόμιμα: Phdrs.252A4-5). Alternatively it is a climactic term that stands to καλοκἀγαθία as μάκαρ stands to εὐδαίμων, answering the hyperbolic ἀμηχάνῳ, and then broken down into the two components we had expected (κάλλος / ἀρετή). From the list at 589C1-2 below we would be led to think both interpretations apply at the same time (! cf. n.4657).

For the constellation A τε καὶ b1 καὶ b2 with the unusual positioning of τε, cf. 411D3-4 (ἀσθενές τε καὶ κωφὸν καὶ τυφλόν) and n.1826, 528A4-5 (λέγειν τε καὶ ἐρωτᾶν καὶ ἀποκρίνεσθαι), Soph.260C8-9. Cf. nn.2544, 3496).

4631

λεγόμενον (B3): Socrates tactfully describes the position in the passive in order to adduce it without attribution (compare his tactful recall of Adeimantus’s objection [419A], at 465E4-5). It is not the position of Thrasymachus but that of the brothers, since only Glaucon and Adeimantus included the desideratum of a reputation for justice (360E6-361B5, 362A3-C6): It is of course in response to their challenge that the entire investigation was framed. As to Thrasymachus, in boundless adulation of his own rhetoric he had imagined, in Book One, the unjust man was admired by persons fully aware of his complete wickedness, and that such admiration could even be incited by a mere reputation for it (344B6-C2: cf. 348D8 and n.546).

4632

Reading αὐτῷ (B6), with all mss., Euseb., and Stob. Socrates’s understatement is stunning and seldom preserved in translation. Bloom alone to my knowledge, with the miraculous “accuracy” that characterizes his translation (perhaps too literal now and then: cf. n.618), reproduces the bare pronoun [“him”]; and Schleiermacher comes close [“diesem”]. All others overtranslate: “its proponent” [Shorey]; “the author of this remark” [D.-V.]; “the author of this statement” [Cornford]; “its author” [Lee]; “the person who made the claim” [Griffith]; “the one who made that assertion” [Sterling-Scott]; “l’auteur de cette assertion” [Chambry]; “l’homme qui a parlé de la sorte” [Baccou]; “celui qui prétend cela” [Pachet]; “celui qui parle ainsi” [Leroux]; “dem Vertreter dieser Meinung” [Rufener]; “dem der dies behauptete” [Apelt]; “con chi la sostiene” [apud Vegetti]; Jowett, Grube and Waterfield make λεγόμενον or ἐλέχθη in the previous sentence active and add “someone” there so as to provide an antecedent, and then translate αὐτῷ “him.” In the next question the advocate of the position is assumed (ὁ ἐκεῖνα λέγων, B10-11), since the essential predication is there being carried by the remote demonstrative (ἐκεῖνα), which asserts that according to the intervening words his position has been refuted. αὐτῷ must already have conceived of its antecedent as the agent implied by the passives λεγόμενον and ἐλέχθη (B3,4). For the subtlety and power of the inchoate expression I would compare the absence of a direct object in 565E4-566A1 (cf. n.4172). For the rhetoric of the pronoun compare the two Phaedruses Socrates addresses at Phdrs.228C3-5. The underlying idea is that the status of the position has changed but that the identity of the man has remained the same (αὐτός always carries a hint of “sameness” in each of its three “great uses”): Has Glaucon changed? Will he join Socrates and go back to the person he was and tell him? Also, to the extent that Socrates’s use of the singular suggests to Glaucon that he is referring to Glaucon himself, the use also excludes Adeimantus. Glaucon can only answer for himself, after all; and Adeimantus is out of the conversation.

4633

With δύναμιν (B8) Socrates recalls the way that Adeimantus framed the question at the end on behalf of himself and Glaucon (366E5-6: cf. δύναμις, 367A7; and τί ποιοῦσα, B4 and E3; cf. also Glaucon’s expression τίνα ἔχει δύναμιν at 358B5, so as to indicate to them that the agreements they have reached have now answered that question.

4634

With ὁ ἐκεῖνα λέγων (B10-11) Socrates continues to distance Glaucon from his own (and Adeimantus’s) position, as Glaucon had already done above (cf. χρησμῳδεῖς, 586B5-6 and n.4590) with respect to the remarks he had made about ὄψον at 372C. Things have changed over the course of the conversation, for Glaucon at least.

4635

οἷα (B1) again suggests monstrosity (cf. nn.77 and 1491). It has been vivid depiction (372AB, 416D-417B) or the desire for it (in the case of Polemarchus, Book Five init.) that has elicited the interruptions that have so fatefully determined the course of the conversation and required it to be a treatment so complete and thorough, dealing as it has both with the initial problem and also the feelings or underlying motives that occupied the interlocutors at the outset and affected them along the way. Now Socrates presents a vivid image that nobody will gainsay, since it is an “objective” statement (in the sense that the subjects of the verbs are changed into the third person) of the actual but unintended disaster that the position they had then found irresistible would have entailed for themselves. The last time an image was “needed” was in the wake of Adeimantus’s objection at 487B-D (n.b., δεομένου, 487E4); but to the astute reader Socrates’s proposal to project the question of justice onto an imaginary city was another instance. It is not only the doctrine but also the man that Socrates seeks to rectify.

4636

With ποίαν τινά (C1) Glaucon responds to the suggestion of monstrosity (cf. n.1491).

4637

φύσεις (C3) stressing the (fictional) realness. For the use cf. 473D4, Phdrs.229E1-2.

4638

With παλαιαί (C2) Socrates stresses not the antiquity of the conception as if to give it a credential, but its familiarity from the previous discourse (cf. n.1414), in order to deflect responsibility for the monstrosity of his own conception.

4639

Chimaera (C3) is a lion in front and a dragon behind (Iliad 6.181); Scylla has the face and breast of a woman but beneath has six dog heads and twelve feet (Od.12.85ff); Cerberus is a dog with three heads and the tail of a dragon, and down along its back the heads of many snakes (Hes.Theog.311). Cf. schol.ad loc., from Apoll.Bib.2.3.1, 2.5.12. We need not list, with Stallb., the subsequent imitators, but should note this is the first time the mythological creatures were placed within a man, an idea Socrates uses near the beginning of the Phdrs. (229E4-30A6).

4640

ἀνθρώπου (D3): We are meant to envision the man who ranks above animals and below gods, not as an individual among men (for which ἀνήρ: cf. n.753). As such he is threatened from below and dwarfed from above. Adam (ad loc.) dreams when he sees this man as a compound of the immortal and the mortal.

4641

The superlative μέγιστον (D4) suggests there is a third, as do πρῶτον (a superlative) and δεύτερον. The implication is that the λογιστικόν is smallest, here figured as an inner man (ἄνθρωπος), the element that in Aristotle will become the differentia specifica of man in comparison with other animals. Though this element is later called “perhaps divine” (ἴσως … θεῖον, 589D1), in the figure it is a very small and quiet thing, which symbolizes the fragile relation we have with the good, upon which our identity as humans, after all, relies. We might reconcile the two ideas by thinking of the “still, small voice.”

4642

ὥστε τῷ μὴ δυναμένῳ τὰ ἐντὸς ὁρᾶν, ἀλλὰ τὸ ἔξω μόνον ἔλυτρον ὁρῶντι ἓν ζῷον φαίνεσθαι, ἄνθρωπον (D11-E1): there is a slight inconsequence in saying that “the covering makes it appear, to a person who is unable to see what is within, that there is only one animal there,” since it is the covering that makes the man unable to see. It is not uncommon to present the leading idea (μὴ δυναμένῳ) in a subordinate construction (especially in the dative participle: Smyth §1497). The brief pause we are given will bring to mind the fundamental methodological requirement Socrates and Glaucon have adopted in the present version of the κρίσις, that we must have the ability to look inside the men (ὃς δύναται τῇ διανοίᾳ εἰς ἀνδρὸς ἦθος ἐνδὺς διιδεῖν καὶ μὴ καθάπερ παῖς ἔξωθεν ὁρῶν ἐκπλήττεται, 577A3 and n.4388: contrast μὴ δυναμένῳ here), in contrast with Glaucon’s method of adding false outer appearance in Book Two.

Moreover, the notion of a decent but beleaguered “man within” set in comparison with the impassive mask-of-a-man that hides him from without, evokes in us the feelings that made the invisibility of Gyges so attractive—the prospect, that is, that we might be able to experience ourselves as persons experience us from the outside, so that if we were invisible we might have as much trouble seeing ourselves sin as they would; and the prospect that the inner man who is by nature invisible will stay invisible. That is, this Image (and henceforth I shall use the capital for it) threatens to arouse the conscience from the latency into which it was lulled by the spell of Gyges’ ring, and to explode the delusion that the self can sin unravaged merely because unobserved. It is to the inner man after all that the Image is addressed, and ineluctably he will see himself in it.

4643

λέγοντι (E3), the present participle representing an imperfect of citation (cf. n.582).

4644

This reductionist formula was used by Thrasymachus in Book One (338C2 and n.312) to contrast what his audience had always complacently believed with what he now meant to make them see in its naked truth. Socrates can now turn the tables and use it against Thrasymachus, but truly it is Glaucon and Adeimantus upon whom he is imposing this response, and they whom he forces see the heartlessness of Thrasymachus’s thrilling and fearsome “thesis.”

4645

τὰ περὶ τὸν λέοντα (E6) denotes the tissues that connect that hold the three parts together (the lion being in the middle). The purpose of the expression is to outnumber the human part still further.

4646

φαίη ἄν (589A6): Socrates now abandons the harsh οὐδὲν ἄλλο formulation and adopts the milder ideal-inferential formulation Glaucon had used in answer (ταῦτ’ ἂν λέγοι, A5).

4647

ταῦτα πράττειν καὶ ταῦτα λέγειν (A7): To “act in word and deed.” For the pairing of the verbs cf. n.4146. Anaphora of ταῦτα stresses his scrupulous resolve. For the spatial relative (ὅθεν) with nominal antecedent (ταῦτα) to express purpose (like ἵνα which is also spatial), compare τοῦτο ὁπόθεν (445B2), used there also of selecting behaviors with a view to their effect on soul (444E7-5B4), and cf. Phdrs.239B3.

4648

ἐγκρατέστατος (B1), rather than κύριος or κράτιστος, denotes temperance in the whole man (σωφροσύνη) achieved by the hegemony or power (ἐγκρατεία) of the inner man over the other parts of himself. The term therefore recalls the paradox of 430E6-431B2.

4649

τιθασεύων (B3): Cf. ἄρδοντός τε καὶ αὔξοντος (550B2) of the just father nurturing his son.

4650

σύμμαχον ποιησάμενος (B3-4): Cf. 440B3-4; for φύσιν cf. 441A2-3.

4651

πάντων (B4) amalgamates the many headed beast and the lion.

4652

As the rulers did their guards and the masses (417A6-B6, 423A1-5; cf.463A10-B9) and as justice along with the other virtues did for the soul (442B5-D1, 443C9-444A2).

4653

οὕτω (B5) semi-redundant (cf. n.953).

4654

θρέψει (B6), rather than be eaten up (ἐσθίειν ἄλληλα, A4).

4655

λέγει (B7): the truth of the vision inspires him to replace the optative (A5) with an indicative.

4656

With κατὰ πάντα τρόπον δή (B8) Socrates uses the same oratorical move Adeimantus did at 366B3 (κατὰ τίνα ἂν λόγον: cf. n.873).

4657

ἡδονή and εὐδοξία + ὠφελία (C1-2) redoes the constellation consisting of ἡδονή and εὐσχημοσύνη + κάλλος καὶ ἀρετή, above (588A7-10), while it continues to allude to Adeimantus’s peroration. εὐδοξία replaces εὐσχημοσύνη under the influence of the notions of praise and blame in the present context, the praiser of justice now being found to be conferring true praise.

4658

οὐδ’ εἰδώς (C3): both his praise and his blame don’t see (but ignore or are ignorant of) the effect on the inner man that has been revealed in the Image (cf. εἰδῇ, 588B10).

4659

πρᾴως (C6), because persuasion is directed toward the θυμός: it is this part that switched sides in the two accounts above (588E6 vs. 589B3). Compare Socrates and Glaucon’s attempt to persuade the φιλοθεάμων (πείθειν ἠρέμα, 476D8-E6), and Socrates and Adeimantus’s attempt to tell the bright young man he is a fool (ἠρέμα προσελθὼν τἀληθῆ λέγῃ, 494D4). The truth is not always welcome just because it is true. The real measure is whether a certain silent member of the audience will or can be tamed (contrast ὥσπερ θηρίον ..., 336B), or whether again he will accuse Socrates and his interlocutor of ὑποκατακλινόμενοι ἀλλήλοις (336C1-2); but Socrates’s task will be complete if he can help the brothers, or Glaucon at least, to tame the Thrasymachus within himself.

4660

οὐ γὰρ ἑκὼν ἁμαρτάνει (C6): The Image has revealed or made clear an unintended implication of his thought (C3). If he were aware he would need κόλασις rather than πειθώ. We again have the converse of the Socratic paradox alluded to above in the observation that the tyrant οὐ ποιεῖ ὃ βούλεται (557D10-11, cf.357B4), namely, that οὐδεὶς ἁμαρτάνει ἑκών. And at the same time we have the presumptuous hunch of Adeimantus that Socrates would “forgive” the erroneous outlook about justice (366C5-6), come true.

4661

ὦ μακάριε (C7): thus did Socrates address Thrasymachus in Book One (345B2, 346A9, 354A8). Cf. n.3407 ad 522B3.

4662

καλά / αἰσχρά here (C7) represent not beauty/ugliness within a list of goods including (say) virtue and wealth, nor do they represent one third of the triad καλόν / ἀγαθόν / δίκαιον, but simply denote the range of praise and blame, as ψέγεσθαι below confirms (590A6: cf. ψέγεται, A9). Cf. καλὴν, 443E5.

4663

διὰ τὰ τοιαῦτα (C8): points backwards to the Image of the soul’s components, aspects of which the participles (ποιοῦντα / δουλούμενα) now flesh out (so also διὰ τοιαῦτα and ἐν τῷ τοιούτῳ at 590A5-6). The asyndeton (τὰ μὲν καλά) does not force τοιαῦτα to point forward; indeed the entire assertion in which it occurs is pregnant for explanation.

4664

τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ (D1): the article indicates he is referring to the Image; and now that Glaucon’s sympathy for the best element in himself (the humble ἄνθρωπος) has brought him to accept the Just Argument for himself (B8-C5), the superhuman importance of this element can be acknowledged—μᾶλλον δὲ ἴσως τὰ ὑπὸ τῷ θείῳ (it is an adumbration of 611A10-612A6).

4665

νόμιμα / φύσεως (C7, D2): having exploded the charm of Gyges’s ring with the Image, Socrates now presents, under the rubric of supplementary persuasion that will “save the phenomena” of conventional morality, a response to the thesis that Glaucon had brought in Gyges’s ring to prove: that injustice is good by nature and that our conventions are merely a contrivance by which we try to hide this fact from ourselves (359E3 vs.359A2-4, C5-6).

4666

δουλούμενα (D3): The hegemony of the best element over the lowest, within the Image, was the careful tendance of a farmer over his crops and fields (B2-3, where n.b. ἐπιμέλεια). Conversely the hegemony of the lower element can only be δουλεία, a term he uses here and just below (D7, E5: cf. also 442B1). The redesignation of the “divine element” (D1) as τὸ ἥμερον (D2) suggests that the hegemony of the beast is violent. Cf. the expression τὸ ἥμερον ἐλευθεροῦται, 591B3).

4667

συμφήσει ἢ πῶς; (Soc.) | ἐάν μοι πείθηται (Glauc.) (D4-5): Both of them maintain the fiction Socrates introduced with αὐτῷ (588B6), that the man who asserted the doctrine being refuted is a “third person,” not Glaucon. In a deep sense he is not the same man, just as he never was the same as Thrasymachus merely because he began Book Two as the spokesman for his thesis. The question whether Glaucon is or is not the same man is tantamount to the question whether his mind has really been changed. Here, Glaucon says that the then-Glaucon will agree with Socrates (συμφήσει) if only he obeys or is persuaded by (πείθηται) the now-Glaucon.

4668

λυσιτελεῖ … χρυσίον λαμβάνειν ἀδίκως (D5-6) replaces the general and colorless formulation (ἀδικεῖν, 588E3) with a vivid example (in fact the example nearest at hand, according to Mr Karabatsos, since λυσιτελεῖν inherently envisions monetary gain); and the prospect of harming oneself in so acting is now given great emotional force by the argumentum ex contrariis or a fortiori that catches us up by comparing the (invisible) abuse of the fragile man within, which we pitilessly tolerate (καὶ μηδὲν ἐλεεῖ, E5), to the abuse of a son or daughter (which only because it is visible to others immediately evokes the sense of shame). The argument reveals to θυμός the limits of its indignation, how its sense of shame relies on visibility; and how it needs reason as its ally.

4669

ὑὸν ἢ θυγατέρα ἐδουλοῦτο (E1-2): The observation that the duty we feel to protect our children is perhaps the strongest sense of duty we have, and yet should not be, adds still more power to the image of the man within: he would not be a man, we think, if he allowed his children to become enslaved. Conversely, the decline of the personality (Book Eight) was driven by the son’s attempt to save or redeem or repair his father’s errors in his own life; but it is only because the son feels, mutatis mutandis, that the little man within himself is his father that he falls prey to the belief that he will become a happy man or a good man when he fixes him.

4670

θειότατον (E4), though superlative, confesses to a lower grade of divinity than the positive grade of the adjective had claimed, above (D1)! The contrast between gold and the health of the soul was Socrates’s first riposte to Thrasymachus, at 336E2-9, a riposte Thrasymachus recalls against him in a taunt, in Book Five (450B3-4).

4671

καὶ μηδὲν ἐλεεῖ (E5): The significance of his perfidy escapes his own notice, quite apart from that of men and gods.

4672

ἄρα (E5) marking an argumentum a fortiori: cf. 374B6 and n.1104.

4673

For Eriphyle cf. Od.11.326. Family relations are more important than money but less important than the freedom of the little man within, the λογιστικόν.

4674

οὐκοῦν καί (590A5): Socrates continues his “archeology” of convention (cf. νόμιμα … γεγονέναι, 589C7-8). πάλαι (A5) merely points to a time before we had the insight provided by the newly coined Image (cf. n.1414), in order to compare what we have always believed with what we now have learned.

4675

τὸ μέγα ἐκεῖνο καὶ πολυειδὲς θρέμμα (A6-7): The lingering appositive accords to the beast a prudent measure of awe, which is then put in its proper place by the reference to τὸ δέον: this argument is being made to the λογιστικόν in us.

4676

ψέγεται οὐχ (A9): The late placement of οὐ in the ordinate clause (repeated below, B3) makes the Greek word order seem like the English order of the question (οὐχ almost needs an accent), but in truth the hyperbaton is dialectical pacing, and an index of Socrates’s confidence in the wide scope and import of the position they have reached.

4677

ὅταν (A9) is variation for ὅτι (A6): the occasion (when) is allowed to stand in for the cause (because).

4678

τὸ λεοντῶδές τε καὶ ὀφεῶδες (A9-B1): Given αὐτοῦ τούτου (B3), ὀφεῶδές must be construed in hendiadys with λεοντῶδες: together they designate the θυμός. The snakelike element must be the “limbs” by which the lion is attached to the man on one side and the manyheaded beast on the other (cf. τὰ περὶ τὸν λέοντα, 588E6). The relevance of this characterization is that it is the job of this element to mediate between the two extremes: whereas the one of them cannot be too strong and the other cannot be too weak, this central element can be either. Cf. 387C4-5 and n.1350.

4679

συντείνηται ἀναρμόστως (B1) is almost an oxymoron: the point is that the willful power of the θυμός to marshal its energies, absent the hegemony of the λογιστικόν, will spoil the marshalling of the entire soul: cf. 410D3-5, 411C4-E2. For ἀναρμόστως cf. ἡρμοσμένου, 410E10.

4680

χαλάσει τε καὶ ἀνέσει (B3-4): reverse καί (cf. n.440), the new term placed before the old (from ἀνίεται, A6) since ἀνιέναι now has an opposite valence, a debilitating slackening rather than uncontrolled robustness (cf. ἀνεθέντος, 410E2, 412A1). For this, and for the oxymoron above, the λογιστικόν is being relied upon to supply needed sense to the words.

4681

αὐτοῦ τούτου (B3), more emphatic than τούτου or αὐτοῦ alone, to indicate that whereas the link between the previous two steps was the strengthening of one and then the other inferior element, in this case the element stays the same and it is the opposite of strengthening that is being considered. Only this middle element can be both too strong and too weak. For δειλίαν cf. 411A3.

4682

κολακεία … καὶ ἀνελευθερία (B6): the pairing of terms of conventional moral opprobrium continues (cf. B3, A9). The parallelism of the pair allows Socrates to omit ψέγεται; but immediately he varies the ὅταν clause as having τις rather than the respective vice(s) as its subject; and it is no longer the slackening or the over-stimulation of a single element that is the problem (A5-B4, of the lower two parts) but, as in the first case (589C8-D3), the improper subordination of a superior element to its inferior (with the language of ποιεῖν τι ὑπό τινι bought forward from D1-2), a new tack continued in the sequel (C2-6, including repetition of the ὅταν τις formulation).

4683

προπηλακιζόμενον (B8): “being put forward to receive mudslinging,” despite its pride. The psychology of the term and its connection with the θυμοειδές, is revealed at 536C. The lion in us is being roused to defend itself out of shame.

4684

ἐκ νέου ἀντὶ λέοντος (B9): I take the phrase to refer to τὴν τοῦ λέοντος φύσιν (589B4) and to mean ἀντὶ λέοντος κατὰ φύσιν or ἀντὶ λέοντος νέου ὄντος. The θυμός is notoriously strong in a young person, stronger indeed than the reason (441A7-B1).

4685

πίθηκον (B9): the ridiculous image plus the shameful treatment (προπηλακιζόμενον) that leads to it, arouse the indignation of the lion in us rather than the reason. We may compare the proverb that compares lion to ape in Luc.Philopseud.5 ὑπὸ τῇ λεοντῇ γέλοιόν τινα πίθηκον περιστέλλων, of a speaker that makes something ridiculous seem serious; but more pertinent is the proverb that “imitation (i.e., aping) is the sincerest form of flattery;” and the ape as a mimic then calls to mind the ratio of Heraclitus quoted by Socrates at Hipp.Maj.289B: ἀνθρώπων ὁ σοφώτατος πρὸς θεὸν πίθηκος φανεῖται.

4686

βαναυσία καὶ χειροτεχνία (C2) another pair that is a virtual hendiadys. For the effect of βαναυσία on the rational element cf. 495D4-E2 and n.2988. The man of minor intellectual gifts (φύσει) might, we may guess, strengthen what endowment he has (μελέτη), by an occupation that requires as much thought as he is capable of even if it is merely keeping to a schedule.

4687

ὅταν τις (C3) reverts to the language that was new in the previous example (B6), after the intervening departure into rhetorical questions (διὰ τί οἴει and ἢ δι’ ἄλλο, C2-3).

4688

ἄν (C4): for the potential optative in a ὥστε clause of “natural” result cf. Smyth §2270.

4689

θωπεύματα (C5): the derogatory edge again appeals to the θυμός more than to reason, but asks θυμός to help reason retain its dignity.

4690

ὥστε μὴ ἂν δύνασθαι ἄρχειν … μόνον δύνηται μανθάνειν (C4-6): After the strengthening of what should be weak (the beast: A5-7) and the strengthening (A9-B2) and weakening (B2-5) of what should neither be too strong nor too weak (A9-B4), Socrates has now reverted to the deformations in hierarchy among the parts envisioned at the beginning (589C8-D3): subordination of the spirited lion to the beast turns him into a monkey (B6-9). Subordination of the rational man to the beast turns him into a slavish publican keeping track of his customer’s pints and quarts (C2-6).

4691

δοῦλον (C9) the term is now placed emphatically at the head of the clause, no longer held back as at 589D1-3 in the description of the higher’s rule over the lower (cf. n.4666 ad 589D3). To the degree that he is “advocating slavery,” Socrates is sailing very close to the wind. To argue it is better to be ruled by a better man is a common paradox (Alc.I,135BC, Polit.296BC, Democ.fr.75DK), but that enslavement can be justified thereby is a far more provocative assertion. Phdo.62DE approaches saying so; and clearly Aristotle’s doctrine of the δοῦλος φύσει (Pol.1254B16-20) is a reworking of the language of this passage (cf. also φύσει, 444B4); but within the present work the references to keep in mind are Thrasymachus's vision of the general citizen voluntarily enslaving himself to the tyrant (δουλώσηται, 344B6), and Socrates's remark, delivered from the high vantage at the end of Book Four (445C4), that injustice is the usurping of power by an element that by nature should be enslaved to its superior (444B4-5).

4692

ἔχοντος ἐν αὑτῷ τὸ θεῖον ἄρχον (D1): In the original Image it was a little man within, but subsequently Socrates said “it might better be called divine rather than human” (per 589D1). He proposes to redeem even the horrid dehumanization of slavery by relying on the divinity of the element that qualifies the master to rule, which after all by hypothesis was his master also (ἄρχον); and thus he can go on to propose that the purpose of the “enslavement” is to optimize the community and friendship of the two men (ὅμοιοι … καὶ φιλοί, D6: cf. ὑπὸ ὁμοίου, C8). These assertions are far more “provocative” than all that he will say about poetry and art in Book Ten. The reference to and reliance on the dimension of divinity is absent in Aristotle’s theory of slavery (Pol.A5); but in the present passage, the person who deserves to be a slave is just as rare as the person who is ruled by the divine.

4693

ᾤετο (D3), imperfect of citation (cf.343B1-C1, and βλάβη, C5).

4694

ἔχοντος (D4) and ἐφεστῶτος (D5) might as well be taken as a possessive genitives.

4695

ἵνα … ὅμοιοι (D5-6): cf. ἵνα … ὑπὸ ὁμοίου (C8-9). By a common structure we revert the original point after an intervening explanation that affects the restatement of the original point.

4696

τῷ αὐτῷ (D6). In the end the ruling principle is done with an instrumental dative rather than the genitive of agent with ὑπό, with which he had toyed along the way—making it thereby more a compass than a living personage. If a man’s natural endowment of reason is lacking it would be better that he be the slave of a rational man that can guide him, than externally free but enslaved by the chaotic forces of his desire. It is to distance his thesis from Thrasymachus that Socrates adopts the impersonal formulation of the master’s hegemony.

4697

πᾶσι τοῖς ἐν τῇ πόλει σύμμαχος ὤν (E2): His conclusion supersedes Thrasymachus’s contention that laws are set up by rulers for their own benefit rather than that of the citizens (338E1-9A4), as well as Glaucon’s that law is a contract to forgo harming each other rather than a guide against harming oneself (358E3-9B5). Instead, the law is the ally of all—as we might say, it “knows no favorites.” The final chips are being taken off the table.

4698

ἡ τῶν παίδων ἀρχή (E2-3): “ruling of children” is a semantic stretch (cf. Leg.809A1, which imagines an ἀρχὴ παίδων as an area of law to be enforced by a νομοφύλαξ but then uses the more idiomatic terms, τροφή and ἐπιμέλεια [809AB]). The semantic stretch is a proleptic skew (cf. n.1591) that prepares for the moment when the principles by which a child is “ruled” from without become regnant within him (ἄρχοντα [591A2], cf. 590D1).

4699

ὥσπερ ἐν πόλει πολιτείαν καταστήσωμεν (E8) brings back to the surface the metaphor of a political regime within, an analogy that has animated the entire discussion.

4700

ἐν αὐτῷ (591A2): the singular substitutes for the plural (ἐν αὐτοῖς, E3) under the influence of the (natural) use of the singular in a metaphor (φύλακα). ἐν is not otiose, but means that the ruling force (ἀρχή, E3) which had operated on the child from the outside through his guardians, is finally superseded by an element internal to the young person that has by their fostering of it achieved hegemony over him from within. παρά conversely (A1) conveys the notion that the principle within the guardians (as within the βέλτιστος who rules the slave, supra: ἐν αὑτῷ, D1) can be externalized so as to influence the child: compare the shift from genitive of agent to instrumental dative at 590D6 (and n.4696).

4701

ἐλεύθερον ἀφίεμεν (A2-3), as if it were a manumission. From the notion of the slave and the child he next moves to the notion of the criminal.

4702

πῇ δή (A5) with future, in peroration, to pre-empt any future objection as at 501D1, where also it marks the end of a long and thorough proof and refutation (Shorey there gives parallels from the oratory: Lysias 30.26, 31.24, 53.49, 6.46). Compare also κατὰ πάντα τρόπον (589B8), and Adeimantus’s peroration in Book Two, at 366B3 (κατὰ τίνα … ἔτι λόγον) and C1 (τίς μηχανή).

4703

λυσιτελεῖν ἀδικεῖν ἢ ἀκολασταίνειν ἤ τι αἰσχρὸν ποιεῖν (A6): The list consists of two specifics and a generalization (ἤ τι αἰσχρὸν ποιεῖν), and recounts the items reviewed above in the order of presentation, ἀδικεῖν corresponding to 589D5-590A2 (which was the vivid version of ἀδικεῖν in general, 588E3-589A4); and ἀκολασταίνειν to 590A5-7. The other items are then dismissed with the generalization τι αἰσχρὸν ποιεῖν, borrowed from the formula that introduced the persuasive review of νόμιμα (589C7-8).

4704

πονηρότερος μὲν ἔσται, πλείω δὲ χρήματα … κεκτήσεται; (A7-8). Since μέν is essentially concessive we must imagine the ἐξ ὧν clause belongs to the advocate of injustice, and that the antecedent of ὧν is not the several acts, but the answers to πῇ and κατὰ τίνα λόγον. The tables are turned in the next μέν / δέ construction, infra (B1ff).

4705

εἰς τὴν βελτίστην φύσιν (B4) refers back to τὸ βέλτιστον at 590E4; and φύσις substitutes for what was there a κατάστασις (590E4, 591A1), adding the inference that under this best regime the parts are not deformed against their nature (as at 590B6-C6), an inference drawn from the distinction between the calming hegemony of the best part (ἡμεροῦται, B3) and the enslaving hegemony of the worst part (implied by ἐλευθεροῦται, B3): cf. n.4666 ad 589D3, and κατὰ φύσιν καθιστάναι, 444D4.

4706

τιμιωτέραν (B4): that the better state of soul is more honorable continues the idea introduced by εὐδοξία at 589C2 and the καλά / αἰσχρά of 589C7 and 591A6. The remedial effect of punishment was broached at 380B1-2.

4707

κτωμένη (B6) mocks κτήσεται at A8.

4708

σωφροσύνην τε καὶ δικαιοσύνην μετὰ φρονήσεως (B5): As at Leg.906A7-8, the expression (A καὶ B μετὰ C rather than flat A καὶ B καὶ C) does not separate φρόνησις out from among the other virtues but is part of the ogkos style, as in Leg.661D6-E1, 693D8-E1 (after three καί’s were used above at C7 and B4), 696B2-4 (where ἄνευ means οὐδέ); contrast 630A8-B1. Cf. also Rep.411E2. Compare the logic of the items listed in the mirror list of bodily goods immediately following: ἰσχύν τε καὶ κάλλος μετὰ ὑγιείας (B6).

4709

πάντα … εἰς τοῦτο συντείνας (C1-2): This was already said in a general way above (589A7ff: compare the exact parallel at 445B1ff), but now it will be spelled out in exhaustive detail (exactly as it was by Glaucon at 445A5-B4).

4710

πρῶτον μέν (C2): The ordinal already suggests the same tripartition of goods that underlay the conclusion as it was articulated by Glaucon in the parallel passage at 445AB (σώματος / πλούτου καὶ ἀρχῆς / αὐτοῦ τούτου ᾧ ζῶμεν: cf. n.2357). Hence we can infer that the relative clause in ἅ (C2-3) is “restrictive”—i.e., that we are to understand μαθήματα with τὰ ἄλλα at C3. The same point will be made about worthwhile and worthless studies, at 618C1-E3.

4711

ἀτιμάζων (C3): this strong statement might bother professional students, but Socrates is talking with Glaucon.

4712

θηριώδει καὶ ἀλόγῳ (C6) alludes to the Image, with its rational man and its beastly pleasures.

4713

τοῦτο (C7) as if all too familiar.

4714

ἐὰν μὴ καί (C8-D1): Health and beauty (as well as wealth, below) are not lesser goods but good only if they also help soul: this is the radical, inevitable and universal climax of all sustained Socratic investigation (e.g., 505A1-B3; Apol.30B3-4): those who like Glaucon have undergone the lead-up to it, are edified by the result; for others the climax might appear nothing but puristic or ideological extremism, or as with Adeimantus in Book Six, make one impatient of being ignorant of the soul's good, and the goal of life.

4715

Glaucon notices Socrates’s extended metaphor (ἁρμονία, συμφωνία) and replies by alluding to what they said to each other at 443D-444A.

4716

Mere καί (D6) is sufficient, after πρῶτον μέν (C2) introduced the first category of goods and ἔπειτά γε (C5) the second, to introduce the third (τῇ τοῦ χρημάτων κτήσει). The second καί (D7) is responsive. Note the parallel structure: topic announced in proleptic accusative (C5, D6), what he will not do about it (C5-8, D7-9), and then what he will do about it (C8-D3, E1-4).

4717

σύνταξίν τε καὶ συμφωνίαν (D6-7): the τε καί abbreviates the logic spelled out in the expression above (it is the τε / καί of cause and result): just as the ἁρμονία (attunement) within the body enables it to join in the συμφωνία (“symphony”) with the soul (D1-3), so a σύνταξις or controlled disposition of one’s material possessions—σύνταξις an appropriately physical and spatial term—enables this third and least category of goods to participate in the συμφωνία of the soul, which in both cases is the only value. The idea that the internal arrangement of the lower parts must be such as to enable them to convene with the order of the entire soul, with reason in charge, was negatively broached by the oxymoron συντείνηται ἀναρμόστως (590B1 and n.4679). For the tuning of each component so that it forms an harmonious chord with the others cf., again, 443D5-444A2.

4718

Pleonastic τὸν ὄγκον (D7) makes the quantity visible to concupiscent eyes as a “heap.” Shorey appositely compares Horace’s use of acervus (Od.2.2.24, Ep.1.2.47, etc.).

4719

μακαρισμοῦ (D8) finally names the motive that underlies Thrasymachus’s climactic use of the term, that the tyrant be thought godlike by others (344B7 and n.452).

4720

ἐκπληττόμενος (D8): The term, in the context of our moving from inner psychic goods to bodily goods (C1-D3) leading now to outer goods, suddenly recalls our confrontation with the tyrant’s dazzling outer show (ἔξωθεν ὁρῶν ἐκπλήττεται ὑπὸ τῆς τῶν τυραννικῶν προστάσεως ἣν πρὸς τοὺς ἔξω σχηματίζονται, 577A3-5), to be able to see through which was the first prerequisite to our being able to judge the great question of happiness. As Glaucon asserted in Book Two, we will be able to judge the question if only we set out the κρίσις properly (360E1-3); here we have learned that it is ourselves that must set it out properly.

4721

ἀπέραντα (D9) is something of a pun: what makes the evils boundless is exactly that the desire for money knows no bounds (compare the sense of ἀπαλλαγή … κακῶν, 610D6-7 and n.5151). Another of the early problems (373D10) has been solved.

4722

ἀλλ’ ἀποβλέπων γε (E1): critical contemplation (cf. n.1776)—the converse of ἐκπληττόμενος, as ἀλλά … γε insists—repeated in virtual anaphora at 592A1.

4723

τὴν ἐν αὑτῷ πολιτείαν (E1): The metaphor of a city within now appears as the crowning expression for the order within the soul, which the Image of the soul’s inner structure has made possible (589B3-6, C8-D3; 590C4 [ἄρχειν], C8-D6, E3-591A3, 591B4 [καθισταμένη]). Note that this “city” does not even include a man’s οἰκία and his worldly possessions, which here play the role of a foreign power, let alone his body. Compare the dismissal of the πατρίς below (592A8).

4724

φυλάττων (E2) continues the political metaphor, but the repetition of the reflexive (αὑτοῦ, E2) re-emphasizes that the regime is within even as τῶν ἐκεῖ reveres it as if it were removed to a high place.

4725

διὰ πλήθους οὐσίας ἢ ὀλιγότητα (E2-3): with this phrase Socrates looks back two hundred twenty five pages, through the provision imposed on the guards (μήτε περιεῖναι … μήτε ἐνδεῖν, 416E2-3), to the individual man’s life in the healthy πολίχνιον (εὐλαβούμενοι πενίαν ἢ πόλεμον, 372C1). We may now perhaps understand the wisdom of looking for justice in that idyllic scene of his home life rather than out in the πολίχνιον around him, mere trace of a city as it was.

4726

οὕτως (E3), semi-redundant, allows the means (to which the demonstrative adverb then refers) to be placed before the goal, for the sake of emphasis (cf. n.953).

4727

κυβερνῶν (E3) echoes κυβερνώμενοι (590D6): here as there the term stresses the vulnerability of the internal moral order to external influences that might set it off course.

4728

προσθήσει καὶ ἀναλώσει (E3-4): Compare the simple and sure instruction for managing bodily desire at 571E1-2: μήτε ἐνδείᾳ δοῦς μήτε πλησμονῇ.

4729

ἡγῆται (592A2) recalls ἐξηγῆται, 586D7.

4730

τά γε πολιτικά (A5): γε indicates it is in the nature of political involvement that one’s internal balance is threatened, either eo ipso or because an indiscriminate desire for honor and money is its motive (for the expression πολιτικὰ πράττειν cf. 443E4, the near parallel at 558B7; Apol.31D7, 32E2-3). The last two pages have returned us to the heights reached at the end of Book Four: the order of the soul is the only value, all other putative goods are good only if they foster this. Whereas at that stage the city, as soul written large, had made speculation about the self tolerable (visible: 368D4), at this stage the Image of the inner constitution of the soul corroborates the theory of the self and makes it unforgettable (visible: 588B10). At that point, when the state was discovered to be unnecessary to the attainment of justice, Polemarchus intervened in order to save place for a less conscientious and more mediocre form of existence, by raising the scandalous question about the community of wives; at the present point Glaucon says what Polemarchus thought at that moment: that “politics” is over (note its sudden appearance in the list at 443E2-3, with n.2334). Now Socrates surprises us, not by agreeing that of course he will not participate in that life, but by insisting that he will, once “politics” has been redefined as the life of ordering the city within, a paradoxical utterance he sees fit to repeat at the end of the Gorgias. The soul is so much more important than the city that even the politics of the soul is more important than the politics of the city!

4731

To force a distinction between τῇ ἑαυτοῦ πόλει and τῇ πατρίδι is a riddle, whence Glaucon's μανθάνω in reply (A10).

4732

θεία τις συμβῇ τύχη (A8-9). J.-C. cite 492E, and Adam cites the definite eventuality mentioned at 499B, and they may be right; but the language θεία τις … τύχη is completely general (Shorey compares θεία μοῖρα [493A; Leg.875C, 642C; Meno 99E] and θεῖον at 492E; to which we may add θείᾳ φύσει, 366C7). Such a wholesale dismissal of social participation might, after all, evince a self-esteem unduly high, as Socrates warned Adeimantus at 499D4-500A. God, not man, is the ultimate measure.

4733

ἐπεὶ γῆς γε οὐδαμοῦ (A11). There is no other πόλις in which he might practice politics (πολιτικά) in any normal sense than in his home-city (πατρίς), so Glaucon infers the undermeaning of a “utopian” politics taking place in the inner world of thought. ἐπεί … γε (on which cf. n.703) evinces his self-consciousness and conviction in drawing the inference.

4734

Ἀλλ’ … ἐν οὐρανῷ (B2). Again (cf. A7) Socrates corrects Glaucon, with a new metaphor describing a still higher vision.

4735

ἀνακεῖται (B2) continues Glaucon’s metaphor of κεῖσθαι from ἐν λόγοις κειμένῃ (A11), just as κατοικίζειν continues his metaphor of οἰκίζοντες (A10).

4736

κατοικίζειν (B3): Socrates borrows the term back from Glaucon. There is no question of a pis aller imagined by the commentators (Adam: “If a philosopher is prevented from founding a city after the pattern in the Heavens he can at all events ‘found himself’ ”): the philosopher as such wants nothing else. Heaven is a word for the οὐδαμοῦ where truth is located. The negation designates not a lack of place but the lack of a need for one, since the truly real subsists on its own (καθ’ αὑτό) without the foothold of a medium (the ἕδρα of 516B4-5, elaborated in Tim.52B1).

4737

διαφέρει δ’ οὐδέν (B3-4): The paradoxical conclusions Socrates and Glaucon reached before, that justice is inward (Book Four, 443C9ff) implying that external justice and the state are not needed for its realization, and that for the purposes of choosing justice the issue of the state’s realizability is a red herring so that the need for philosophy to rule must be evaluated on its own merits (472B3-473B3ff: n.b. τό … μετὰ τοῦτο, B4), are herewith reiterated, this time without objection, and the inquiry comes to a peaceful close.

4738

This is the force of the καὶ μήν, with which Book Ten begins (595A1).

4739

αὐτῆς (A1), the antecedent being the “city in heaven” that they have established (592A10-B1), which had just been referred to with ταύτης μόνης and ἄλλης (B4-5). Halliwell, treating Book Ten in isolation from its immediate context, gives the pronoun a general antecedent (ad loc.)—namely, the city developed in Book Three and Four as if nothing had come between. But μόνης (592B4), by restricting the mindful man's politics to the politics of his “city within” (592A7), insists that even participation in the “theoretical city somewhere” is obsolete (making it, too, ἄλλης, B5). That city has now become only an idea and its only worth is as a pattern for the soul. Because the accent has shifted to the “city within” as depicted in the great Image of Book Nine, Socrates's mind is now brought to focus on the psychic effect of poetry. It is only in connection with the elaboration of the tripartition in that Image that the language of mutilation (λώβη, B5) can arise.

4740

The topic is poetry but Adeimantus does not intervene as he did at 376D4-5: (cf. n.1148).

4741

ἐναργέστερον (A6). Here is the justification for going on beyond Book Nine. The critique of poetry (Books Two and Three) was made before the partition and order of the soul was theorized in Book Four, and now that the Decline and the Image of Book Nine have vividly depicted the structure and pathology of that psychic order, prudence dictates that the critique be given the full theoretical foundation that the psychology can provide. To point back to 568AD, 394D, and 392C (with for instance J.-C., 439-40) as if “Plato” meant by those passages to promise he would write Book Ten, only ignores the dramatic development, and neglects the verisimilitude of its outcome.

4742

ὡς μὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς (B3), the first hint of reluctance to bring up a touchy matter: μέν is solitarium. The shift to the plural presumably includes Adeimantus.

4743

κατερεῖτε (B3) already presupposes an environment of contentiousness and recrimination.

4744

λώβη (B5) used pregnantly, of the thing that causes λώβη. The expression is strong, indignant, and inflammatory (cf. Meno 91C for a similar outburst). Such a rash charge would incite great resentment if the poets got wind of it. For διάνοια cf. 395D2-3: καὶ κατὰ σῶμα καὶ φωνὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν διάνοιαν. Socrates uses the same terminology of the damage to the soul (without naming it), done by choosing an unjust course of action, in the Crito (47D4, E8).

4745

τῆς τῶν ἀκουόντων διανοίας (B5-6): in blaming poetry for its telling effect (here, λώβη) on the way people think, Socrates is voicing the position of Adeimantus (e.g., 365A5-B1, 366D5-367A3), and indeed is fulfilling a request to deal with this problem that is only his; and yet Adeimantus, who had intervened the last time poetry came up in order to insist it get a thorough treatment (376D4-E1), here remains silent.

4746

τῶν τραγικῶν (C1): For Homer as tragic poet (here as at 598D and 607A), cf. Tht.152E. It is perhaps explained in Aristotle Po.4.

4747

οὐ … πρό γε τῆς ἀληθείας τιμητέος ἀνήρ (C2-3): The demurral is imitated by Aristotle at EN 1.6, where he places himself in the place of Plato and Plato in the place of Homer: the misrepresentation of Plato’s “doctrine,” in that passage and generally in the writings of Aristotle, vitiate the sincerity of his remark or his standing to make it, or both.

4748

ἄκουε δή, μᾶλλον δὲ ἀποκρίνου (C5). Again the announcement of the dialectical method or procedure of question and answer prefaces the treatment (cf. n.3418).

4749

ἦ που (C9): cf. 450D5, Euthyphr.4A11, Phdo.84D9; Dinarchus 57.

4750

ὀξύτερον βλεπόντων ἀμβλύτερον ὁρῶντες (C10-596A1). It is unlikely Socrates is alluding to their relative age (cf. Soph.232E6-8 versus Leg.715D7-E2). He acknowledges Glaucon’s presumption that he himself should see things more clearly, but replies with the saw that the sharp viewer can miss the forest for the trees. Behind the byplay is the standing joke in praise of shared dialectical search that “two should investigate together since one always sees things before the other” (it being just true that the other sees things later). Cf. 432C1-2 and the proverb he cites from Homer (σύν τε δύ’ ἐρχομένῳ ..., n.3641). The strained word order would then be part of the joke.

4751

προθυμηθῆναι (596A2): One of the elements of dialectical success is that the answerer have the courage to be wrong, as here, and the spirit to try to make his point, as at 533A2. Cf. n.33 on προθυμία and 376B1 on θαρρεῖν.

4752

The preliminary byplay (595B9-596A4), the formal methodological terminology (ἐνθένδε ἀρξώμεθα ἐπισκοποῦντες ἐκ τῆς εἰωθυίας μεθόδου, 596A5-6), the deployment of a method the two may now refer to as their usual and therefore reliable one (εἰωθυίας, A6: cf.475E5ff [n.b.σύ γε, of Glaucon]; 507B2-B8 [with similar preliminaries: 507A1-9]), and the asking of a purely logical question (cf. n.4510) all conspire to indicate that the subject is a serious one and deserves to be treated with the greatest care.

4753

ἕκαστα τὰ πολλά (A7), the usual expression for the plural versions of a distinct character: cf. e.g., 507B6-7, 490B1, 476A7. There is no difference (pace Halliwell) between the way they describe their “way of arguing” here (A6-8) and the way they described it at 507B2-8: the eachness we see in plurality (ἕκαστα, 507B2) relies for its name and its reality on an eachness of certain unique eaches (ἰδέαν μίαν ἑκάστου ὡς μίας οὔσης, 507B6-7; εἶδος … τι ἓν ἕκαστον, A6).

4754

θῶμεν (A10) aorist, of the particular case.

4755

κλῖναι καὶ τράπεζαι (B1). The examples he suggests to Glaucon may as well be the sample items Glaucon asked him to provide at 372D7-E1 (ἐπί τε κλινῶν … καὶ ἀπὸ τραπεζῶν). Socrates recalled them at 586A8 by having the cattle eating off these same tables (though he could hardly have them recline on κλῖναι!). The reason for his choosing artifacts will soon become clear (597B6 and n.4774).

4756

οὕτω (B7), semi-redundant, to emphasize the circumstantial participle (βλέπων): cf. n.953.

4757

πῶς γάρ (B10) casually dismisses the possibility: how after all could he look off toward it, as a δημιουργός does, while he was making it?

4758

τίνα καλεῖς (B12): τίς asks for a one-word answer (cf. 597B3 and D13 below; 374E7; and Gorg.447D1 [and Dodds ad loc.]), and in particular for a professional designation.

4759

δεινόν τινα λέγεις καὶ θαυμαστὸν ἄνδρα (C3): The answer reaches adjectives for ἄνδρα but does not reach a name.

4760

For τάχα μᾶλλον φήσεις (C4) cf. Crat.410E5.

4761

σοφιστήν (D1) now replaces the vague noun ἄνδρα, and πάνυ redoes its adjectives (C3). Glaucon has found a noun to call him by. This is the μᾶλλον φάναι Socrates predicted. Socrates’s response (ἀπιστεῖς, D2) shows he believes Glaucon is skeptical about the professions and pretensions of sophists. The term is almost always embarrassing or troublesome. Cf. Meno 91C (where Socrates’s accuser Anytus calls sophists a λώβη τε καὶ διαφθορά); Prot.312A4; and Aesch.P.V.944, where it is a taunt.

4762

τινὶ ... τρόπῳ (D3) Socrates riddles Glaucon with this vague term which will be clarified in the solution.

4763

The τρόπος is δημιουργούμενος (D8), an ugly stretch of a metaphor that answers the riddle by redefining manufacture (δημιουργία) as the manufacture of a means (τρόπος) of “manufacture:” One must simply “produce” a mirror (as we say of the magician).

4764

τάχιστα (D9): The shift to the superlative indicates there are less quick ways. These, we soon can gather, would be drawing and other kinds of imitation.

4765

φαινόμενα, οὐ μέντοι ὄντα γέ που τῇ ἀληθείᾳ (E4): Glaucon himself resuscitates the association of being and truth over against appearance from the third argument of Book Nine (584A7-10, 585B12-E4).

4766

καλῶς … καὶ εἰς δέον ἔρχῃ τῷ λόγῳ (E5).

4767

γάρ (E6): Socrates promises to apply Glaucon’s distinction between appearance and reality to take the argument further.

4768

Socrates’s τρόπῳ γέ τινι (E10) begins to recede into its usual meaning, “in a sense.”

4769

κλίνην τινά (597A2) now τὶς is added to the “vocabulary” of he “theory:” cf. A4, D2-3 below.

4770

ὂν δὲ οὔ (A5) is parallel with the predicate, τοιοῦτον οἷον τὸ ὄν. For all its likeness, what he makes lacks the quality by virtue of which we can refer to the εἶδος, or to ὅ ἔστι κλίνη, as τὸ ὄν. This predicate it lacks is then immediately clarified as τελέως ὄν (ibid.).

4771

τοιούσδε (A8): With his first person demonstrative (“as we do”), Glaucon acknowledges that he joins Socrates in what he had asserted above (596A5-8, B6-10). In addition to the original “vocabulary” of 596E5-8 (ἕκαστον vs. ἕκαστα / ἕν vs. πολλά) we have since accumulated φαινόμενα vs. ὄντα τῇ ἀληθείᾳ (E4), ὅ ἔστι vs. τὶς (597A4), τὸ ὄν vs. τοιοῦτόν τι (A4-5) and τέλεως ὄν (A5).

4772

ἀμυδρόν τι (A10), primarily optical. What is ἀμυδρόν is the ἕκαστον-identity as embodied in the product, as the term was used in describing the many and the one (cf.596A6-7 and n.4753). In addition (καί) to the object being only οἷον with respect to the ὄν, our perception of the idea in it is fuzzier than the cognition of and the truth of the idea, the ὄν. The distinction between truth as the subjective and being as the objective characteristic of the really real arose in the context from which Glaucon resuscitated the distinction between the φαινόμενον and the ὄν (i.e., Bk.9, 584E5 [and n.4542], 585B9-10 [and n.4557], 586A4-6), whence Socrates’s γάρ at 596E6. Socrates and Glaucon simply understand themselves to be applying what they agreed on before, though by now they both have acknowledged that not everybody talks this way (cf.A8-9 and n.).

4773

τοῦτον (B3) refers to the original question, which was cast in terms of μίμησις not μιμητήν (595C7-8).

4774

ἐν τῇ φύσει (B6): That it exists “in nature” is either a warrant for saying, or merely another way of saying, that god made it—whence the relative clause with potential optative. The figure of a divine maker enables the comparison to be made between and among the three types of couch; nothing more should be made of it, as Socrates suggests with ἤ τιν’ ἄλλον. The metaphor of φύσις is now introduced to draw a contrast between the higher reality of the εἶδος and the output of the craftsman and the painter. We may use the language of creation to convey the metaphor; and the reading ἐν τῇ φύσει in mss. FD comports better with such metaphorical language than does the bare dative (φύσει) found in AM. Cf. D3 below and n.4780.

4775

τρισὶν εἴδεσι (B14), one of which is the εἶδος, in another sense of the term. Dialectical exchange thrives on varying the terminology even at the expense of risking confusion, in order to encourage and reinforce reliance on thought instead of language. Likewise, ἐπιστάτης is not “mock-official” (Halliwell) but struggles to articulate the new idea with a transcategorical common term. We will need it below in our exegesis (ad D13).

4776

μίαν μόνον (C3): cf. 548C6, Apol.25B8, Crit.47B2, Symp.184C2.

4777

δύο δὲ τοιαῦται ἢ πλείους (C4): τοιαῦται is strictly pleonastic, and broaches the problem to come by recalling the use of τοιοῦτον at 597A5, which there stood in contrast with ὄν. Being like is less than being real; resemblance has a weaker foothold on being than self-identity does.

4778

ἐφυτεύθησαν and φυῶσιν (C4-5) continue the metaphor of φύσις from above. φυῶσιν (pres. subj.) is transitive in the apparently intransitive sense noted by LSJ s.v.§A,II. Quite apart from the figure of the divine maker, a “spontaneous generation” of multiple ideas must also be ruled out: this was the reason for the alternative εἴτε τις ἀνάγκη ἐπῆν (above, C1).

4779

ᾗς … τὸ εἶδος ἔχοιεν (C8): So much follows from τοιαῦται (C4), casually added above. Socrates anticipates the core idea of Aristotle’s “third man” argument, though that argument relies on the supplementary error of conflating the orders of being—what the singular something is versus what the plural somethings have (εἴη ἄν [sc. τὸ εἶδος] and ἔχοιεν, C8-9).

4780

ὄντως bis (D1-2): The syntax of ὄντως κλίνης ποιητὴς ὄντως οὔσης is clarified by the denial of the alternative: μὴ κλίνης τινὸς μηδὲ κλινοποιός τις (D2-3), which by employing the new language of τὶς from 597A2 indicates that the first ὄντως goes with ποιητής not κλίνης, and the second with οὔσης. The ensuing main clause μίαν φύσει αὐτὴν ἔφυσεν (D3) then restates what ὄντως denoted by means of the φύσις metaphor (ἔφυσεν formulating ὄντως ποιητής and μίαν φύσει αὐτήν restating ὄντως οὔσης). With the dropping of the preposition ἐν, φύσις and φύσει now enter the special “vocabulary” of the theory. The triadic structure that asserts the positive, denies the negative, and then reasserts the positive in different or stronger terms (D1-3) is a favorite technique in Plato, noted by Riddell (§304). It resembles the triadic order of statement, analogy, and a restatement that borrows terms from the analogy—e.g., 604D2, 605A8-C4 and n.4986. The argumentum ex contrariis or a fortiori often employs this form (e.g., 600C2-E2 and n.4864).

4781

φυτουργόν (D5): The word conveniently brings together the god’s comparable aspect (as a maker: -ουργός) and his contrasting aspect (as creator: φυτ-), per notes above, in the same way that the language of creation already came to our aid above. God is in a sense making a φύσις, not a φυτόν (which is the metaphor that underlies the term); but the language is being stretched to say something there was no way to say, before. The notion of a maker-god is here advanced by Socrates and Glaucon purely for their present dialectical needs (the definition of mimetic ποίησις): it is of a piece with the narrow characterization of art (ποίησις) as painting for the sake of exploiting an analogy between painted likeness to original and likeness of spatio-temporal of things to forms. Neither of these ideas needs to be taken to represent a phase of “Platonic metaphysics.”

4782

φύσει γε (D7): with γε (vi termini), Glaucon notes and accepts the new term into their special vocabulary. His perfect πεποίηκεν also attempts to confer, onto the god’s making, the character of being something that happened outside of (before) time. We shall see more such perfects below (e.g., E7, 598B1: cf. elsewhere, ὡμοίωται, 431E8; τετεύκακεν, 521E4; πέπηγεν, 530D6; τετράφαται, 533B6; τέταται, 581B6, ὥρμηκε, 582C5; ἀφέστηκεν, 587A7; ἐσκήνηται, 610E3), designating the structure of reality as separate and distinct from events that might take place in it.

4783

δημιουργὸν καὶ ποιητὴν τοῦ τοιούτου (D11): Instead of asking whether we should call the painter a δημιουργὸς κλίνης, the expression used of the carpenter, Socrates asks whether he is a ποιητὴς τοῦ τοιούτου. The casual pleonasm with ποιητής neutralizes the question whether δημιουργός per se is appropriate, but by casually substituting τοῦ τοιούτου for κλίνης he also narrows the κλίνη of the carpenter into being a “sort-of” couch, as opposed to the “what is really couch,” which god established in nature; and this in turn pushes the drawn couch into the echelon of a “sort-of sort-of” couch. It is then this stratification of sorts, or the meaningless of a “sort of sort of” (articulated below as a τρίτον γέννημα, E3), that elicits Glaucon’s strong response (οὐδαμῶς, D12).

4784

With ἀλλά (D13) Socrates plays dumb. The genitive (κλίνης) is objective, leaving Glaucon a blank in the dialectical “matrix” (cf.332C9 and n.149) to fill with a verbal noun for the specific ἐπιστάτης, parallel to δημιουργός.

4785

μετριώτατα (E1) bespeaks Glaucon’s reluctance to go too far, just as his δίκαιον (D7) had insisted on going far enough on behalf of the god. Notably the reluctance here is Glaucon’s and not Socrates’s (who is reluctant according to the preamble, 595B9-C3): it is Glaucon as it turns out that has insisted on “demoting” the artist.

4786

ἐκεῖνοι (E2): Glaucon would sooner revert to grouping the god with the carpenter as a fellow δημιουργός of a couch (compare the early formulation, θεὸν ἐργάζεσθαι [B6-7]) than to allow the painter to be grouped with a carpenter, even though both create artifacts.

4787

τὸν τοῦ τρίτου γεννήματος (E3) is the “first” accusative of καλεῖς, answering with its genitive the question τί … κλίνης above (D13): the man who oversees the third couch is to be called an “imitator” thereof.

4788

τρίτος τις ἀπὸ βασιλέως καὶ ἀληθείας (E7): τὶς and the addition of the article to ἀληθείας suggest that τρίτος ἀπὸ βασιλέως is a catchphrase (describing perhaps a position in a board game) introduced as a metaphor (whence τὶς) whose meaning is then added as exegesis (καὶ τῆς ἀληθείας). An allusion to the ranking of the types in Book Nine (587AD, pace J.-C.) is a reach that adds nothing. Adam reviews several suggestions in a separate Appendix (2.464-5).

4789

πεφυκώς (E7) brings to bear both the new use of φύσις in the theory and Glaucon’s special use of the perfect, onto the imitator.

4790

ὡμολογήκαμεν (E10), referring back to B2-3 where they agreed to find out about him. The generalization from painter through dramatist (εἴπερ μιμητής [E6] = qua imitator) to πάντες asserts that they have reached a definition.

4791

ἕκαστον (598A2) is enough to designate the form, and the grammatical plural (τά … ἔργα) enough to designate the ἕκαστα.

4792

τὰ τῶν δημιουργῶν (A4): The answer is a foregone conclusion (it is implicit in the metaphor of the τρίτον γέννημα that Glaucon has already accepted; but it functions to set up the next question as further specification (ἔτι διόρισον, A5) of that position.

4793

διαφέρει αὐτὴ ἑαυτῆς and φαίνεται ἀλλοία (A8-9) almost constitute the language of the theory, to distinguish the manufactured couch from the many ways it appears to observers. Beneath the surface there is something of a continuous analogy (form: artifact :: artifact: painted image), in itself reminiscent of the Line passage (cf. n.3235).

4794

διαφέρει δ’ οὐδέν (A10): In another context the wooden couch will indeed differ from itself, as when it ages and begins to squeak: its self-identity is not that of ὅ ἔστι κλίνη.

4795

πεποίηται (B1) echoes the perfect πεφυκώς (597E7) and πεποίηκεν (597D8): Socrates speaks of the art of painting as existing within the fixed structure of reality, just the sort of outlook modernism always thinks it is overthrowing. For the perfects cf.530D6 and 605A2-4, below.

4796

ἕκαστον (B2) is now allowed to refer to a single particular as it does in normal parlance and can within the loose vocabulary of the theory (cf. 515D4).

4797

ἀληθείας (B3) replaces τὸ ὄν (B2) for which it is a synonym in the language of the theory (e.g. 596E4): what is objectively τὸ ὄν is to cognition ἀλήθεια. Cf. n.4772 ad 597A10.

4798

φαντάσματος ἢ ἀληθείας οὖσα μίμησις (B3-4) re-asks the question πότερα πρὸς τὸ ὄν ὡς ἔχει μιμήσασθαι, ἢ πρὸς τὸ φαινόμενον ὡς φαίνεται (B2-3). To restate the question before waiting for an answer is as common in Plato as in real life, as is placing the restatement in a subordinate construction, as with circumstantial participles here; but adding chiasm to the mix (πρὸς τὸ ὄν / πρὸς τὸ φαινόμενον // φαντάσματος / ἀληθείας) confuses things more than usual, unless of course we are meant to see the answer as a foregone conclusion – which in fact it is. What makes it foregone is the strange mental gymnastic that the last question (A7-9) already put us through. We have never seen, nor been asked to try to see, the physical couch as it is in itself.

4799

σμικρόν τι (B7) adverbial accusative, as is εἴδωλον in exegesis of it, below. The underlying idea is crass but commonsensical: the output of the painter is not infinitely greater than that of the craftsman because he “makes” only only a little of the many things he makes. Their total output would thus be of the same order of magnitude.

4800

ἑκάστου (B7) used here of the essence in things as at 596A8, a sense akin to the sense it has when used of the forms, as at 596A6. Cf. n.3331 ad 515D4.

4801

ζωγράφησει ἡμῖν σκυτότομον (B9) In the context of σμικρόν τι (B7) adverbial accusative, as is εἴδωλον in exegesis of it, below ἀπεργάζεται (B7) we find ourselves speaking as if a shoemaker is the result of the painting; and just by taking it literally we realized in how weak and illusive a sense it is that a shoemaker is being produced.

4802

σκυτότομον, τέκτονα, τοὺς ἄλλους δημιουργούς (B9-C1). Listing items in asyndeton (B9) without special rhetorical purpose or effect is as impossible in English as it is common in Greek. Contrast the rhetorical use of such asyndeton, e.g. at 361E4-2A1 (Glaucon’s “punishments” for the just man), and 373B7-8 and C2-4 (the flood of functionaries necessitated by the acceleration of luxury), and Phdrs.241C1-5 and Rep.580A3-5 (both expressing exasperation), with the present list as well as those at 399C1-3, 434C7-8, 490C10-11, 597B13-14; Crito 51C8-9 (Cf.50E2); Gorg.478B4, 504A2-3 (of δημιουργοί), 517D4-5; H.Maj.291D9-E2; Leg.710C5-6, 797D10-E2, 897A1-3 (and Stallb. ad loc.); Phdo.65D12-14; Phdrs.239A2-4, 240D12-3, 253D4-E1, E1-5, 255E3; Phlb.19D4-5; Prot.319D; Symp.173B2, 197D3 (Agathon), 207E2-3, 211E1; Tht.171E2-3, 186D10-E1, 207A5-7. English allows asyndesis if the final two items are connected, the last often being a generalization (as Leg.649D5-7, Phdrs.240D2-3, 246D8-E1; Polit.260D11-E2; Rep.395C4-5, 580A3-5: cf. Denniston, 104-5) but Greek, as in the present list, does not require terminal syndesis, either (e.g., Gorg.504A2-3, 517D4-5; Symp.186D7-E1; Tht.171E2-3, 178B4-5; and cf. Denniston, xliv). Asyndeton is mitigated or caused by anaphora at Polit.268A7-B5. A list of unconnected items appended in apposition to a general term or in summary should be considered a special use of asyndetic list (Crat.426E2-3; Crito 51C8-9; Leg.710C5-6 (cf.709E7ff), 733E5-6, 964B5-6; Rep.471D3, 487A3-5, 580B3-4; Symp.186D7-E1; Tht.207A5-7) and is not unrelated to the use of asyndeton in the summary recitation of dihairesis (e.g.Soph.223B2-5, 224C10-D2, 226A2-4).

4803

περὶ οὐδενὸς τούτων … τῶν τεχνῶν (C1). Adam’s worry about whether he is ignorant of the men or their arts is insignificant (601A1 below proves what he means here), in comparison with the subtle point being made, that a drawing of a δημιουργός will depict him at work so that the painter needs to know what, for instance, a carpenter does and does not do with a coping saw or any other tool, in order to depict him properly. It is even true that knowledge of the ultimate use of the artifact the depicted artisan is making will help the painter depict him, as witness the extra tight cinching-up you would add if your were imitating a father tightening the lug nuts on a wheel of the family car after changing a flat on the highway. For the meaning cf. n.4885.

4804

παῖδάς γε καὶ ἄφρονας ἀνθρώπους (C2): The case of children is inherently credible and gives a foothold to extend the argument to certain adults if they are foolish enough: the list is therefore metabatic and γε is to be read with ms.D (against τε of AFM).

4805

γράψας (C3): the ζω- prefix is dropped in repetition (n.1567).

4806

τῷ τοιούτῳ (D1-2) masc.: “break in on the man when he is acting this way”: for ὑπολαμβάνειν c. dat. cf. Prot.320C5.

4807

γόητί τινι καὶ μιμητῇ (D3): This is Socrates’s attempt to supply a workable answer to the question that Glaucon baled out on answering above, when he said the δημιουργὸς ἁπάντων must be a σοφιστής (596D1: cf. n.4761).

4808

πάσσοφος (D3) a term of marvelling approbation, of ironic praise (for Socrates: e.g., Lys.216A), or of derogatory resentment (cf. διασόφων, 607C1): with it Socrates acknowledges Glaucon’s reason for baling out at 596D1.

4809

ἐπιστήμην καὶ ἀνεπιστημοσύνην καὶ μίμησιν (D4-5): the first καί links the alternatives and the second represents an inference from or exegesis of the second alternative.

4810

ἐπισκεπτέον (D7), echoing ἐξετάσαι (D5): we have to do it or else we will leave ourselves in the position of the fool.

4811

ἐπειδή τινων ἀκούομεν (D8-E1): the stiff and pedantic style of the ensuing ὅτι clause (including the anaphora of πάντα and the ordering of the list with its γε [=”no less”]) indicate it is either a quotation (double quotes—n.b. ἀκούομεν) or characterization of the τινες (single quotes). The ensuing sentence in γάρ, with its postponed ἄρα clause and its overconfident ἤ (“or else”), is likewise either quotation or pseudo-quotation, giving not Socrates’s explanation why the poets must be omniscient but that of the τινες (note how the tone resembles that of the list at 596C5-9 with its confident anaphora of πάντα). It is less important to speculate about the identity of these persons, a point Socrates himself passes over, than to notice their argument is circular: “The poets know everything, since a good poet will only compose well if he composes with understanding: just think about it (ἄρα)! Otherwise he couldn’t!” The ἄρα hopes to compel assent by depicting as patent exactly the point that needs to be proved. Socrates will explore the contrapositive, namely, if the poet does not know, how can we still believe his poetry to be fine?

4812

καὶ τά γε θεῖα (E2): for γε marking the last item in the list as extreme cf. 329D2 and n.66.

4813

τὸν ἀγαθὸν ποιητήν (E3) continues the parallel with the painter above (εἰ ἀγαθὸς εἴη ζωγράφος, C2): but there what it meant to be good was that he was able to convince fools without himself knowing anything about what he was painting; here his goodness is an inference from the fineness (καλῶς, E4) of his composition.

4814

ἤ (E4) meaning “or else” (cf. n.403).

4815

μιμηταῖς τούτοις (E5): Richards's argument for emending the τούτοις of the mss. to τοιούτοις, ignored until Slings adopted it, was obviated all along by the fact that the demonstrative is anarthrous. The sense is not “these imitators” but “these men, given the fact that they are imitators.”

4816

φαντάσματα γάρ (599A2): The fact their versions engage only the imagination of the audience (φαντάσματα) enables the makers to produce them “easily” (ῥᾴδια ποιεῖν), i.e., even without knowledge (μὴ εἰδότι), since the audience will not perceive their unreality or falseness.

4817

φαντάσματα ἀλλ’ οὐκ ὄντα (A2). Here and just above (τοῦ ὄντος, A1), “being” replaces what was done with “truth” in the version about the painter (φαντάσματος ἢ ἀληθείας, 598B3; τοῦ ἀληθοῦς, B6). Cf. n. ad 598B3.

4818

On this sort of ἢ καί (A3) Denniston (306) quotably says, “ἤ separates two ideas objectively, in point of fact, while καί denotes that, subjectively, both must be kept before the mind.”

4819

Now εὖ (A4), the adverb of ἀγαθός, replaces καλῶς (598E4), the adverb of καλός. Though the judgment may now be more comprehensive rather than purely aesthetic, it is still the verb and not the noun—the writing or speaking and not the content (περὶ ὧν, A4 and 598E3)—on which hoi polloi base their judgment. By adding δοκοῦσιν τοῖς πολλοῖς (A4) Socrates aligns this restatement of the sponsors’ claim about poetry (598E1-5) with the remark he had made above about the “good” painter that can fool the unwary (598B8-C4).

4820

ἐξεσταστέον (A5). By returning Socrates’s ἐπισκεπτέον (598D7) to the ἐξετάσαι it echoed (D5), Glaucon agrees both that the investigation must be made and why it must be made.

4821

τό τε μιμηθησόμενον καὶ τὸ εἴδωλον (A6-7): The original is depicted as a future verbal modification of itself (μιμηθησόμενον: it will have been imitated), whereas the artifactual imitation of it is elevated to the ontological status of a substantive (εἴδωλον)! The syntax and semantics are imitating the error of treating imitations as reals by itself putting the cart before the horse (cf. 510A9-10 and B4-5, and n.3243).

4822

ὡς βέλτιστον ἔχοντα (B1): taking βέλτιστον as a secondary predicate of τοῦτο the (understood) direct object of ἔχοντα. All four terms (ἀφεῖναι, σπουδάζειν, προστήσασθαι, βέλτιστον) cast the person’s choice as a moral decision about his life, in which his θυμός is involved, rather than about art. They do not “anticipate” the point made at 602B8 below (Halliwell), but motivate and imply it.

4823

καί (B4) is “displaced.” It emphasizes ἐπιστήμων but is placed with μιμεῖται. Cf. Denniston, 295-6.

4824

ἔργα (B4), with its moral connotation (vs. λόγοι, a contrast made explicit below with ὁ ἐγκωμιαζόμενος [the doer] vs. ὁ ἐγκωμιάζων [the talker] B7) shades the “action” of the poet’s ποίησις into a μίμησις of action. The paradox is worked another way at Leg.817B1-D8 (ἡμεῖς ἐσμὲν τραγῳδίας αὐτοὶ ποιηταί ...).

4825

πολὺ πρότερον ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις … ἢ ἐπὶ τοῖς μιμήμασι (B4-5): the pair replaces τό τε μιμηθησόμενον καὶ τὸ εἴδωλον (A6-7), and now the semantics and syntax correspond with the order of reality: the ἔργον is real (vs. λόγος, a slap in the face to poetry: see prev. n.) and the εἴδωλον is revealed to be the verbal modification of the original (verbal noun μίμημα replacing εἴδωλον): contrast n.4821. The shift from ἐν (with ἔργα) to ἐπί (with μιμήματα) suggests a fuller participation in the already present (whence πρότερον) surroundings as opposed to a translation of consciousness into an alternative realm.

4826

μνημεῖα (B6) suggests the (imitative) art of statuary and therefore effects the transition to the actor as laudandus and poet as laudator in the next lines. Socrates is not (pace Halliwell) denying all value to the imitator and commemorator of great deeds but only making the comparative point that if one were capable of both he could never find the latter nobler than what it is its job to ennoble. If the poet finds himself more serious than what there is for him to praise he should, and if truly serious will, give up poetry and do something inherently more important, assuming (with Socrates, A6-7) that he is able. If for instance a Pindar is able to discover in a concrete victory at Olympia a larger historical and political significance, even to the point of immortalizing it, then Pindar should be a ruler rather than a poet.

4827

τῶν μὲν τοίνυν ἄλλων πέρι (B9), that ἄλλος is proleptic (as in ἄλλως τε καί) is acknowledged by the anastrophe.

4828

ἦν (C2): the imperfect quietly intimates that the premise is irreal.

4829

τίνας ὑγιεῖς ποιητής τις … λέγεται πεποιηκέναι (C2-3). The periphrasis ποιεῖν ὑγιεῖς (for ἀκεῖσθαι or ἰᾶσθαι) has a satirical edge: ‘who ever got his poetry to heal somebody?’

4830

μαθητὰς ἰακτρικῆς κατελίπετο (C4-5), a group for which he could be said to be ἡγεμών in the way Homer is said to be the ἡγεμών and πρῶτος διδάσκαλος of tragedy (598D8, 595C1-2).

4831

ἐκεῖνος τοὺς ἑκγόνους (C5). Mentioning Homer’s “progeny” (which consists of poets—see prev. n.) allusively grants him greatness as a poet (pace Halliwell, passim) at the same time that it denies him competence in any matter he writes about (cf. the adverbs εὖ and καλῶς [599A4, 598E4] versus περὶ ὧν of [599A4, 598E3]).

4832

τέχνας (C6), after the single example of medicine, articulates what the “other” subjects are (τῶν ἄλλων, B9) whose credentials we are not interested in challenging (ἀπαιτεῖν λόγον, B9), as being insignificant in comparison with the subject matters involved in important deeds of the sort poetry sees fit to recount (B3-7). The techniques of composing poetry would of course be among these former τέχναι, but Halliwell faults “Plato” for ignoring to accord praise to Homer for teaching it, nevertheless.

4833

περὶ δὲ ὧν μεγίστων τε καὶ καλλίστων (C7) the two (nominal) adjectives designate the περὶ ὧν and match (as superlatives) with the grounds on which audiences praise the “manner” of poetry (εὖ and καλῶς being the positive grade) so as to throw down the gauntlet. The two adjectives represent the superlative grade of the commonplace expression, ἀγαθὸν καὶ καλόν. Cf. n.1591.

4834

δίκαιόν που (D1) picks up the notion of warrant implicit in ἀπαιτεῖν above (B9) and continues to indicate that the question tempts confrontation (cf. κατερεῖτε, 595B3 and n.4743).

4835

ἀρετῆς πέρι (D3): hazards a category for τὰ μέγιστά τε καὶ κάλλιστα, which have been said to include war, generalships, governance, and education.

4836

The appositive (εἰδώλου δημιουργός, D3) is an exegesis of τρίτος, since δημιουργός brings him down to the second level (cf. κλινοποιός, 597D1-3 leading to δημιουργός, D10) and εἰδώλου brings him down to the third (597E3-8, fleshed out at 598B1-4 and summarized with εἴδωλον at B8).

4837

ἦσθα (D4) shifts from the present indicative of a simple protasis (εἰ, D3) to an imperfect that again shades the protasis toward irreality (cf. ἦν, C2).

4838

πυνθανομένους (D1) invited him to take the floor, and the present λέγε (D6) asks for a story (such as we might expect from Homer), not just a name.

4839

With ἐπιτηδεύματα and ᾤκησεν (D5-6) Socrates is looking back toward his list of the μέγιστά τε καὶ καλά and sees παιδεία and διοικήσεις (C8-D1).

4840

That Solon wrote poetry as well as laws hardly (pace Halliwell) vitiates “Plato’s” argument that a man who could act would take action more seriously than writing about it, even without the remark attributed to Critias at Tim.21C, which has to do only with the reason the story Solon told Critias is incomplete.

4841

εἰπεῖν (E4): As Homer’s prospects slim, the present λέγε yields to an aorist. Contrast λέγεται in the next line.

4842

Ὁμηριδῶν (E6). “Homer-lovers” (cf. Ion 530E7, Phdrs.252B4), identical to the Ὁμήρου ἐπαινέται of 606E1, and perhaps the προστάται ποιήσεως of 607D6. The patronymic recalls the metaphor of Asclepius’s ἔκγονοι (599C5), which in turn recalls the metaphor of Homer as ἡγεμών (595C2). αὐτῶν stresses their intimate connection with him. Together, these lay an insinuation that they, if anyone, could well have made up such a tale, which οὔκουν … γε then emphatically denies.

4843

Ἀλλὰ δή τις πόλεμος (600A1): Socrates takes a further step backwards in the list (πολέμων τε πέρι καὶ στρατηγιῶν, C8) and as he does the prospect of truth gently becomes stranger than fiction.

4844

ἐπὶ Ὁμήρου (A1) as opposed to the wars he sings about, which took place before he could have served. Socrates is looking for action not talk (ἄρχοντος), but of course allows the talk of strategizing (συμβουλεύοντος).

4845

μνημονεύεται (A2): again Socrates leans over backwards to include the “record” of lore.

4846

With his second ἀλλὰ δή (A4: cf.A1) and then his third (A9) Socrates appears to be pleading on Homer’s behalf against the implacable severity of Glaucon. For the collocation cf. Denniston, 242; and compare 365D6, Crito 54A1, Prot.338C1, Tim.21A4.

4847

With ἐπίνοιαι (A4) Socrates reaches the bottom of the barrel, scraping for thoughts that might have occurred to Homer about “something” (περί τινος). This expression implicitly acknowledges the topic to be unimportant, and we are asked to conceive some serendipity by which some “thought” might have an unforeseen benefit in a practical area! It must not be technical knowledge—this has been excluded (599C9-C6)—but the casual insight of a “particularly talented man” (σοφοῦ ἀνδρός). The conception is illogical but absolutely commonplace and underlies the potent advertising device of the “celebrity-spokesman.” We might compare the great and wise legislator, Benjamin Franklin, inventor of bifocals and the lightning rod.

4848

For Thales’s practical abilities, cf. Hdt.1.75,170; A.Av.1009; at the same time he is the “poster boy” for the skygazing dreamer out of touch with practical things: cf. his ἀστρονομεῖν in Tht.174A.

4849

D.L. has Anacharsis inventing the anchor and the potter’s wheel (1.105) but his credentials as a σοφός are less sterling.

4850

οὐδαμῶς τοιοῦτον οὐδέν (A8): Glaucon’s answers become more severe and more unforgiving. Cf.B6.

4851

ἰδίᾳ τισὶν ἡγεμὼν παιδείας (A9): More grasping at straws, certainly less than μέγιστα, even if κάλλιστα; and ἡγεμών (A9) is a stretch. The idea is broached that perhaps we know of no achievements because they were private (ἰδίᾳ).

4852

διαφανεῖς πῃ δοκοῦσιν (B4): πῃ finesses the need to be specific, while δοκοῦσιν makes tracking things down a waste of time. Likewise τοῖς ἄλλοις includes everything by leaving it out.

4853

Κρεώφυλος (B6): Call.Epig.6 apud Strabo 14.638-9 and S.E. Adv.Math.1.48; Paus.4.2.2; Souda s.v.κρέωφυλος. He appears to have entertained Homer (i.e., fed him meat, whence the joke about his name) and received from him a poem which he then claimed he wrote himself (Call. Ep.6.4 notwithstanding). Whatever the joke, the comparison with Pythagoras makes Homer look ridiculous.

4854

λεγόμενα (B8): Worse than the lack of stories to corroborate or commemorate Homer’s importance there are some λεγόμενα about him that diminish it. Perhaps at least they are merely λεγόμενα, and aren’t true!

4855

ἐπ’ αὐτοῦ ἐκείνου (C1): i.e., ἐπ’ αὐτοῦ τοῦ χρόνου ἐκείνου with ἐκείνου referring to the time envisioned in Socrates’s question (αὐτὸς ζῶν, A10), the time while there was an opportunity for a συνουσία that could have a lasting and beneficial effect (A10-B5): He would a fortiori have no posthumous following as others did. Glaucon’s extended answer (B6-C1) creates a closure of the survey, and now Socrates will sum up the results (C2-E2).

4856

ἄρα indicates (C5) and then (in repetition with both μέν, C7, and δέ, D5) reminds us, that the outer structure is an argumentum ex contrariis (cf. n.1104).

4857

ἑταίρους ἐποιήσατο καὶ ἐτιμᾶτο καὶ ἠγαπᾶτο (C5-6) digests the account of Pythagoras, with ἠγαπᾶτο a direct repetition (A10), ἐτιμᾶτο digesting the autonomasia (Πυθαγόρειον, B3), and ἑταίρους coming from the enjoyment of συνουσία (B1), which had been digested into ἑταῖρος at B7.

4858

Πρωταγόρας … καὶ Πρόδικος (C6-7): Socrates now supplements the historical examples with contemporaries, and dubious ones at that, laced with irony.

4859

οὔτε οἰκίαν οὔτε πόλιν τὴν αὑτῶν διοικεῖν (D1). The ἐπάγγελμα to teach both private and public management (διοίκησις) is a commonplace: cf. Gorg.520E3-4 (τὴν αὑτοῦ οἰκίαν διοικεῖν ἢ πόλιν), Meno 91A3-4, Prot.318E5-319A2. τὴν αὑτῶν, emphatic in hyperbaton, stands in contrast to the fact that these experts come from elsewhere (Abdera and Cos, C7). Cf. περιιόντας (D6), which applies as much to the sophists as the rhapsodes with whom they are being compared.

4860

σφόδρα (D3) suggests amorous attraction: cf. Thompson ad Meno 70B.

4861

οἴκοι (E1) creates the image of lectures on how to manage the household (διοικεῖν, D1) being given them within the households.

4862

αὐτοὶ ἐπαιδαγώγουν (E1-2): If the teachers will not visit them at their homes but insist on teaching in their schools, then these eager men would themselves stoop to the slave’s job of παιδαγωγός and escort children there so as to eavesdrop on their lessons, as Socrates proposes to Crito at Euthyd.272D2-3.

4863

παιδείας (E2): the παῖς in παιδεία is ultimately the same as the παῖς in παιδαγωγεῖν: this is Socrates’s (and Plato’s) criticism of the “professional student.”

4864

Another version of the triadic structure (n.4780 ad 597D3) is the argumentun ex contrariis, which denies A (C2-6), asserts B (C6-D4), and re-denies A (D5-E2) in new terms borrowed from the assertion of B (e.g., σφίσιν οἴκοι ~ διοικεῖν).

4865

παντάπασιν … ἀληθῆ (E3): that is, the premise that leads to the impossible conclusion must be entirely false: Glaucon recognizes the foregoing to be an argumentum ex contrariis.

4866

τοὺς ποιητικούς (E4-5), not ποιητάς.

4867

ἀπὸ Ὁμήρου πάντας τοὺς ποιητικούς (E4-5) echoes the language of Adeimantus’s challenge in Book Two: πάντων ὑμῶν ὅσοι ἐπαινέται φατὲ δικαιοσύνης εἶναι ἀπὸ τῶν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἡρώων ἀρξάμενοι (366D7-E2), as does the agreement of ἀρξαμένους with ποιητικούς rather than (per the reading of Aristides and Eusebius) with the subject of τιθῶμεν.

4868

μιμητὰς εἰδώλων ἀρετῆς (E5): he cannot simply say they produce imitations of virtue, since the imitations are oriented to the way virtue appears, not the way it is (cf. 598B1-5). As the painter paints the bed in the context of the space it appears in and perforce from a certain angle, the poet imitates virtue operating in a concrete context such as the battlefield or the courtroom. He therefore imitates an “appearance” of virtue.

4869

τῆς δ’ ἀληθείας οὐχ ἅπτεσθαι (E6) repeats the metaphor ἐφάπτεσθαι (598B8) introduced in connection with the poet’s orientation to appearance rather than truth (598B2-4).

4870

ὥσπερ νυνδὴ ἐλέγομεν (E6-7): referring to 598B8-C4, which the present restatement clarifies (answering Adam's worry: cf. n.4803). For the reason he envisions the painter painting the craftsman instead of the artifact, cf. n.4885.

4871

αὐτός (601A1), “as such”—that is, as painter. Cf. αὐτόν, A6. I've taken the liberty to translate him into a dative parallel to that of the audience.

4872

αὐτός τε οὐκ ἐπαΐων … καὶ τοῖς μὴ ἐπαΐουσιν (601A1-2): a rare instance of τε / καί linking items semantically but not syntactically parallel (ἐπαΐων / ἐπαΐουσιν).

4873

ἐκ τῶν χρωμάτων δέ (A2): such a postponement of δέ is not unexampled: cf.417A1, 571E1; Denniston, 186.

4874

τοῖς ὀνόμασιν καὶ ῥήμασιν (A5) a doublet to match and balance σχήματα / χρώματα: a technical distinction between the terms is not needed.

4875

ἑτέροις τοιούτοις (A6-7), i.e., οὐκ ἐπαΐουσι, the correlation referred to by ἑτέροις having been created with τε / καί above. One can see from this passage how the use of ἕτερος in mild aposiopesis (n.1224) comes about.

4876

πάνυ εὖ δοκεῖν λέγεσθαι (A8-9): their judgment (δοκεῖν) is fervent (πάνυ) at the same time that it is vague (εὖ λέγεσθαι). Halliwell’s “think ... his words are those of a real expert” over-specifies their evaluation: they are very pleased by the sayings but not by their expertise or accuracy. The vagueness expresses their confusion, as at 598D8-E1 (where cf. n.4811) and it should not be translated out.

4877

With the single example of στρατηγία (A9) the merely illustrative case of shoemaking is replaced by a subject of greater moment (cf. μεγίστων τε καὶ καλλίστων … πολέμων τε πέρι καὶ στρατηγιῶν καὶ διοικήσεων πόλεων, 599C7-8), and with the addition of ὁτουοῦν the power of poetical charm is shown to be both more and less than it seems. There is no “blatant irony” (pace Halliwell) in the transitional use of shoemaking.

4878

αὐτὰ ταῦτα (B1) refers to the musical elements of poetry as separable, and separate, from the content of the poem.

4879

For the perfect τεθέασαι (B4) cf. 400A6 and n.1571. It is hard to imagine why Socrates can be so sure Glaucon has witnessed poetry stripped down unless he is referring to the exercise he performed for Adeimantus at 393D-4A. Few of us are lucky enough to have had the eye-opening experience he describes; Socrates makes it palpable, especially to the erotic Glaucon, with the metaphor that follows.

4880

ἡμίσεως (C3), adverbial: changing the accent (with Stephanus) is perhaps easier than positing a “genitive used adverbially” (with J.-C.).

4881

In δέ γε (C8) Shorey rightly notes a tinge of retort: cf. 407A9, 487E6 and n.2851.

4882

σκυτότομος (C8). The “cobbler” according to the Greek idiom was a “leather-cutter” from the start, and only therefore cobbled shoes (cf. n.2004).

4883

οἵας δεῖ ἡνίας εἶναι (C10): οἵας (of the qualia) now has a very different sense from above (B4, B7), where the poet, with τὰ χρώματα τῆς μουσικῆς, produced only the qualia (ἐκ τῶν χρωμάτων δὲ καὶ σχημάτων θεωροῦσιν, A2) of things. There the qualia were pleasing (καλά [?], but called good: n.b. εὖ, A8); now the quale is ἀγαθὰ ἢ κακά (D9) in the sense χρηστὸν καὶ πονηρόν (E4).

4884

γραφεύς … χαλκεύς … σκυτεύς (C11): placing all three makers all in a homoioteleuton with -εύς (γραφεύς replacing ζωγράφος and σκυτεύς replacing σκυτοτόμος) helps make the new point that the true master of all, the user, belongs to an entirely different category (-ικός, for which cf. 374B2 and n.1088).

4885

Finally (601C10-602A1), we revert to the argument of 374B6-D7 where the absurdity of the contrary, that “tools make the man,” dashed Glaucon’s hopes that we would not need to staff an army. The peculiar notion that the painter paints the shoemaker rather than the shoes (600E7, 598B8-C1) turns out to have been an adumbration of this notion of the sovereignty of use (χρᾶσθαι). The conception of a craftsman using a hammer to tighten a screw, which a painter ignorant of carpentry could just as easily paint as not, sets into strong relief the practical involvement of the craftsman in comparison with that of the painter.

4886

ἀρετὴ καὶ κάλλος καὶ ὀρθότης (D4): the first two items represent the dyad of value, ἀγαθὸν καὶ καλόν (n.1591). For the sense of κάλλος here bringing it into the semantic field of ἀρετή, cf. 353A4. After these, ὀρθότης selects a very specific value, close to the notion of usefulness, that helps to clinch the idea that utility is the genus they all fall under.

4887

ἑκάστου σκεύους καὶ ζῴου καὶ πράξεως (D4-5). Listing “all there is” tends to be done with a triad cf. 510A5-6, Gorg.506D5-6, H.Min.292D1-3, Tht.155E5-6. The element that unifies the triad is unstated—it is man as the user or actor.

4888

γίγνεσθαι (D9), as the result of ἐμπειρότατον εἶναι.

4889

ποιητής (D9) is now taken away from the “poet” and given its literal meaning (with ποιεῖ, D10).

4890

ἀγαθὰ καὶ κακά (D9) alludes compendiously to the three criteria enunciated at D4 (ἀρετὴ καὶ κάλλος καὶ ὀρθότης) by turning its first term into a polar doublet of adjectives.

4891

The antecedent of ᾧ (D10) is ἑκάστῳ; the subject of ποιεῖ is the ποιότης (see n.4889).

4892

οἳ ἂν ὑπηρετῶσιν (E1) is a constructio praegnans describing which αὐλοποιοί he will employ, namely, the ones who will act as his subordinates (as described below, 601E8-602A1 and A5-6). The flute is not his subordinate but his instrument. ὑπηρετεῖν does not (pace J.-C.) undergo a remarkable “shift of connexion.” The clause, rather gratuitous, is a proleptic skew (n.1591) for the sake of introducing this hierarchical idea.

4893

ἐξαγγέλλει (E4): the maker is not even present to witness the use of the flute! Both participles are circumstantial; ὁ μέν and ὁ δέ are nouns.

4894

χρηστῶν καὶ πονηρῶν (E4) redoes ἀγαθὰ ἢ κακά above (D9), under the force of the intervening repetition of the cognates χρῆσθαι and χρεία (D10).

4895

πιστεύων (E5): Now πιστεύειν is added to ὑπηρετεῖν. We are accumulating a set of terms for a dialectical matrix.

4896

πίστις here enters the argument as a specification of ὑπηρεσία, the deference the servant accords to his master – quite a different conception than the πίστις of the Line passage.

4897

περὶ κάλλους καὶ πονηρίας (E8): overlapping substitution (n.155) repeats πονηρῶν from E4 and κάλλος from D4.

4898

εἰδότος (602A1) emphatic in repetition after τῷ εἰδότι (601E8).

4899

καλὰ καὶ ὀρθά (A4): ὀρθά in exegesis of καλά prevents it from sliding out of the semantic field it was put into at 601D4 (prevented also by ἀγαθά and χρηστά along the way) and into its purely aesthetic sense.

4900

πότερον … ἤ (A3-4) suggests it will be one or the other, as it was for the user and the maker above: anything besides these is “outside the loop.”

4901

δόξαν ὀρθήν (A4-5), Plato’s more usual expression, reached by a slight shift from πίστιν ὀρθήν (601E7) which itself was drawn out of πιστεύων at E5.

4902

All the language of 602A3-6 imitates the language used above of the maker (601D8-602A1), with minor dialectical variations to avoid slavish parallelism.

4903

πρὸς κάλλος ἢ πονηρίαν (A9) the pair repeated from the conclusion about the maker (E8).

4904

σοφίαν (A11) mordantly plays the ignorant sense of the multitude that the poet is wise, against the notion of understanding or knowledge, all forms of which have now been denied to him as mere imitator.

4905

χαριείς (A10) as at 426A1 and A6-B4, where the folly of a person’s behavior might afford a laugh, or else a scolding (οὐ πάνυ, A13: cf. 426B3, οὐ πάνυ χαριέν). We will see him acting with purpose without knowing the purpose of his actions! The asyndeton marks it as a sudden insight of Socrates.

4906

ἀλλ’ οὖν δὴ ὅμως γε μιμήσεται (B1): the particles express the corollary awareness that the poet would not even understand Socrates’s objection.

4907

πονηρὸν καὶ χρηστόν (B2): The chiastic order in comparison with the pairs above suggests that we have turned the corner on the proof and are now applying the results. The overlapping substitution (retaining πονηρόν but substituting χρηστόν for καλόν) now lets go of the question of aesthetics and insists on moral value.

4908

οἷον φαίνεται καλόν (B3): καλόν now exposes what had always underlain the appreciation of the masses, though they were not aware of it and easily dubbed it “goodness” (cf. εὖ δοκεῖν λέγεσθαι, 601A8-9, and n.4876).

4909

μηδὲν εἴδοσιν (B3) echoes οὐκ εἰδώς (B1) as the μὴ ἐπαΐουσιν had echoed οὐκ ἐπαΐων at 601A1-2.

4910

ἀλλ’ εἶναι παιδιάν τινα καὶ οὐ σπουδὴν τὴν μίμησιν (B8): subject and predicate are reversed in the assertion of what is true, after the denial of what is false (τόν τε μιμητικὸν μηδὲν εἰδέναι ... B7), in a chiasm of the contrapositive (cf. 451A1, 612D7-9, and 410C8-10 with n.1797 and 2820).

4911

ἐν ἰαμβείοις καὶ ἐν ἔπεσι (B9-10): Reference to the meters suggests that he finds poetry especially mimetic because of the spellbinding effect that the musical element adds to words (601A7-B4).

4912

Πρὸς Δίος … τὸ δὲ δή (C1): The oath is strong enough to postpone δέ: With his abject πρός plus genitive Socrates still feigns diffidence as to the results he is reaching about poetry.

4913

δὲ δή (C1) focusses, after μὲν δή (B6), on the relation of imitating to reality, after the comparison of the imitator to other makers. The focus is expressed with the preposition περί.

4914

πρὸς δε δὴ ποῖόν τι (C4) responding to περὶ τρίτον μέν τι (C2) so that the degree of remove (τρίτον) “about” which (περί) mimesis works is being compared with a part in or aspect of man (ποῖόν τι) it operates “on” (πρός).

4915

τῶν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (C4): The question is impossibly unclear (n.b. τῶν AD : τῶ F : τὸ A2M), as Glaucon recognizes, because we do not know what kind of aspect or possession of man ποῖον is asking for. All we have to go on, if we have perceived it at all, is a syntactical matrix that suggests an analogy, to-wit: περί : πρός :: τρίτον : Χ :: ἀλήθεια : ἄνθρωπος. We must wait for Socrates to clarify his meaning, with an idea that he acknowledges, with τοιοῦδε (C7), he cannot expect his interlocutor to have anticipated. We have seen Socrates ask unanswerable questions or make obscure remarks to buy an opportunity to expatiate, before (557D1-2), and have seen cases where the question lays out a matrix whose blanks we cannot fill in (e.g., at 382A7-9, κυριωτάτῳ dative and κυριώτατα object of πρός: cf. nn.1286 and 149). The matter is resolved at 603A10ff (cf. n.4934).

4916

τοῦ ποίου τινὸς πέρι (C6): The article and the anastrophe express Glaucon’s bewilderment.

4917

τοῦ τοιοῦδε (C7): By the “first person” character of the pronoun Socrates acknowledges what he is saying is unclear and new; by its case he pretends to be answering Glaucon’s question directly (περὶ τίνος) but in fact interposes an extended treatment about cognition (602C7-603A9) that will lead to an answer περὶ τίνος.

4918

τε / καί (C10, C11) both times meaning either/or.

4919

μέγεθος and καμπύλα / εὐθέα (C7, C10) had to do with line (σχῆμα); now we move on to the other aspect of the visible, χρῶμα (C12: cf.373B6 and n.1062), whence αὖ (C12) which conspires with proleptic δή. The preceding τε / καί’s disambiguate what would have been unclear in the collocation καὶ Α τε δὴ καὶ ~Α.

4920

πλάνην (C12): the metaphor can be used suddenly and without apology because it has appeared several times before (e.g., 586A3 and n.4579, 505C7 and n.3149, 484B6, 479D9 and n.2780, 444B7 and n.2344). It is a favorite of Plato's for the way it brings together into one phenomenologically accurate description the very wide spectrum of characteristics that are associated with degraded levels of truth and reality, from subjective uncertainty and anxiety to objective indistinctness or variability.

4921

Reading καὶ ἄλλαι πολλαί (D3) with mss. FD rather than καὶ αἱ ἄλλαι πολλαί (AM) with its redundant αἱ.

4922

ἐφάνησαν (D7): cf. φανῆναι, 528C8.

4923

ἄρχειν ἐν ἡμῖν (D7): the language recalls both the second great argument of Book Nine (580C9-583A10) and the “hegemony” of reason in the disquisition on slaves children and criminals near the end of that Book (590C8-591A3).

4924

Note the minor variations in repetition (D9): μετρεῖν / ἀριθμεῖν / ἱστάναι (D6) = A,B,C; μεῖζον – ἔλαττον / πλέον / βαρύτερον (D8) = A1A2, B, C; λογισάμενον / μετρῆσαν / στῆσαν (D9) = B,A,C. The connectives are varied from καί to ἤ and then in the third list connective καί is varied with ἢ καί. Such minor variations avoid slavish parallelism at the same time that they assist in closure.

4925

ἀλλὰ μήν … γε (E1) introducing the minor premise: the parts of soul and their hegemonic relations from Book Nine, alluded to just above with ἄρχειν (D7, cf. n.4923), and which Socrates mentioned at the beginning of Book Ten as providing new implications about the effects of poetry (595A7-8), are finally coming into play.

4926

πολλάκις (E4) has its adventitious meaning (stressing the unreliability of senses) rather than its quantitative one (in which case it would be making a needlessly statistical sort of argument).

4927

τἀναντία (E5) sc. τοῖς ὑπ’ ὄψεως θεωμένοις: the measuring self reaches results quite contrary to what the seeing self has seen even as it sees it. The rigor in the formulation (ἅμα περὶ ταὐτά) prepares the logical basis for the radical conclusion, as in the argument about pleasure at 583C3-584A10 (cf. concurrent notes).

4928

Alluding to the λογιστικόν reiterates an agreement they have reached (584A4-11), but also re-invokes the level of judgment that that agreement ushered in, namely the very “metaphysical” third argument of Book Nine. Behind these lies the role of non-contradiction in the discovery of the tripartite soul in Book Four (436AC), the importance of which discovery to the critique of poetry was announced at the beginning of this Book (595A7-B1) and now comes into play.

4929

ἀλλὰ μήν … γε (603A4) of the minor premise, again.

4930

λογισμός (A4) designating the genus of all species of measurement rather than being a mere restatement of the arithmetical measurement that we saw at 602D9.

4931

Calling the λογιστικόν the βέλτιστον (sc. τῆς ψυχῆς, 603A4) again relies on and brings forward the last set of arguments in Book Nine and their concern for the health of the soul.

4932

ἐναντιούμενον (A7) suggests the logic. As in English, what “opposes” would be the “opposite.”

4933

Throughout the argument (602E1-603A8) a noun (corresponding to “elements,” which I have added in tr.) has scrupulously been avoided: the aspects or elements or parts of soul here being distinguished are designated with the definite article and adjective (τοῦ λογιστικοῦ, 602E1; τούτῳ, E4; τῷ αὐτῷ, E8; τό … δοξάζον, 603A1; τό … πιστεῦον, A4; τὸ ἐναντιούμενον, A7), an idiom much more limited in English than Greek. I have reproduced the indeterminacy by using several nouns. Cf. n.5203, and compare nn.2223 and 2227.

4934

τοῦτο (A10) refers to what he was “arguing” (ἔλεγον) at 602C1-5, with his μέν / δέ construction culminating in the indecipherable question, πρὸς ποῖον τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (cf. n.4915), and ὅτι restates it. Now that he has clarified that question by the description of τὰ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (i.e., τὰ τῆς ψυχῆς) and their relative ποιότης (βέλτιστον and φαῦλον, A4-8), and has secured Glaucon’s agreement that it is the φαῦλον part that visual art works on (602D1-4 combined with 603A7-8), he now has the license to assert the argument as agreed upon, and does so with the ὅτι clause in μέν / δέ. With διομολογήσασθαι βουλόμενος (its object unexpressed) he apologizes for the question at C4-5, acknowledging that it was indecipherable, by saying he wanted to be sure to secure Glaucon’s agreement, i.e., to remind him that they are proceeding dialectically. In a sense what has happened is that he asked the question before setting it up. This is exactly what happened at 382A7-10. Cf. also 557D1-2.

4935

μέν (A11) is concessive, parallel to the μέν of 602C2, for they had already agreed to this (602A1-3). The anaphora of πόρρω is not “for the sake of emphasis” (J.-C.) but is the pivot of the argument: just as mimesis makes something (the περί τι of 602C1) far from truth, it also (δ’ αὖ) engages a part of oneself (the πρός τι of C4: cf. n.4914) that by dint of the tripartition, itself is far from truth.

4936

προσομιλεῖν replaces the συνεῖναι of consultation we have been hearing about (602A5, 601E8)—in which the artist was instructed (ἐπιτάττειν [602E5, 601E2] cf. ἀκούειν [602A1]) how to produce his art and thereby learned how best to serve (ὑπηρετεῖν 601E1-2)—into something more casual: a sexual under-meaning comes into play.

4937

ἐπ’ οὐδενὶ ὑγιεῖ (B1-2) cf. 584A9, 523B3 and n.3421.

4938

δή (B7): draws attention to the fact that the name for ἡ κατὰ τὴν ἀκοήν (sc. ποίησις) is called by the generic term itself (as also the term “poetry,” in English).

4939

ἐπ’ αὐτὸ τῆς διάνοιας … τοῦτο (B10). διάνοια, echoed from 595B6 where it was salient for its vagueness, announces we have finally reached the topic of the λώβη διανοίας, announced at the beginning of the Book. αὐτό and ἐπελθεῖν add the sense of confrontation the problem and “facing the music.” For διάνοια as the most general term for what goes on in one’s head, clearly including more than φρόνησις (A12), compare 395D3, 400E3, 455B9, 476D5, 503C4, 511A1, and cf. n.3411 ad 522C8. The “likeliness” that their argument pertains to poetry as well as painting. because of the alikeness of hearing to seeing, both being forms of perception (B6-7), is a joke by which Socrates effects a segue to the treatment of poetry and the λώβη it wreaks on the ἀκούοντες, which is the stated purpose of this entire argument (cf. λώβη … τῆς τῶν ἀκουόντων διανοίας, 595B5-6).

4940

ἡ τῆς ποιήσεως μιμητική (C1): Rather than arguing “laterally,” from one species of mimetic art (ἐκ τῆς γραφικῆς, B9-10) to another (poetry) through the likely method of analogy based on the senses (sight: hearing : : painting : poetry), we will argue vertically from the species poetry to its generic nature as mimetic, leaving the (specious) analogy based on the sense faculties behind, and considering it now in immediate reference to the aspect of thought (ἐπ’ αὐτὸ ἔλθωμεν, B10, i.e., unmediated by sense) with which it communes.

4941

φαῦλον ἢ σπουδαῖον (C2). Pairing these as opposites relies on “overlap substitution:” παιδιά / σπουδή (602B8) describing mimetic art, and βέλτιστον / φαῦλον (603A4-8) describing the parts of soul to which it fails and succeeds to appeal.

4942

ἀλλὰ χρή (C3): the expression voices not only consent but that the interlocutor thinks, for his own reasons, it is the right thing to do (e.g., 376E1).

4943

προθώμεθα (C4), of the orienting goal, as at 562B3, 555B9-10, 413C8, 375D4. It is the deliberate setting of the “problem,” in contrast to a problem in the true sense, which imposes itself on thought (cf. Bk.7, 530B6 and n.3530).

4944

πράττοντας (C4). The formulation is consistent with 599B4-5, but φαμέν points elsewhere. See next n.

4945

βιαίους / ἑκουσίας (C5) immediately recalls the balanced simplicity of the description of legitimate poetic topics at 399A6-B6, and thereby explains the reference of φαμέν.

4946

For ἐκ τοῦ πράττειν (C5-6) cf. ἐκ τούτων πράξαντα, 399B7.

4947

For λυπουμένους / χαίροντας (C7) cf. παρατεταγμένως καὶ καρτερούντως (399B2) and σωφρόνως τε καὶ μετρίως (399B9).

4948

ἦν (C7): imperfect of citation (n.582), restored by Ast (ῇ AM : ἢ FD). The categories here said to exhaust the scope of human action, do indeed underlie the scope of proper human action that Socrates deployed in conversation with Glaucon at 399A5-C4, while they were determining which musical modes should be retained. The present passage sets out the spectra on which human action can be evaluated; the previous passage presented only the successful terminus or pole of the spectra. It is the back-citation that explains why Glaucon agrees (οὐδέν, C9).

4949

ἅμα περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν (D2): as at 602E8-9, the thoroughness with which the opposition is spelled out already suggests the “logical impossibility” that all the opinions are true.

4950

διομολογεῖσθαι (D4), used of reaching a conclusion through the step by step (δια-) method of question and answer, exactly as at 603A10 above (cf. n.4934).

4951

ἱκανῶς (D5) the criterion of dialectical truth as always (cf. 344D7 and n.482).

4952

ἐν γὰρ τοῖς ἄνω λόγοις (D5): The notion of self-contradiction that he has so carefully framed (n.b., ἐναντιώματα, D6), as well as his shift away from ἄνθρωπος (C10) to ψυχή (D7), are sufficient to indicate that he is referring to their conversation at 439C2-441C3, and corroborated by D9 below (cf. n.4953). Still, it is uncharacteristic that the strikingly specific language used here (γέμειν, μυρίων) is not matched there; back-references are usually clinched by linguistic details (cf. n.359). We might supply the interpretation that the soul can be said to be full (γέμει, D7) of such contradictions because it was exactly by virtue of discovering the various types of contradictory tension, in Book Four, that we deduced the contents (the parts or distinct aspects) of the soul: once we had found all of these (πάντα, D5) we had found all its parts or aspects or elements. On the other hand the corroboration of the Image by the review of conventional moral attitudes in Book Nine did produce an elaborate variety of specific tensions among the parts (589C6-590C6).

4953

ὃ τότε ἀπελίπομεν (D9): that the current discussion of the deleterious effect of poetry on one's διάνοια should consist of developing the tripartition of Book Four, was in effect the promise with which this Book began (595A5-B1).

4954

ἐπιεικής (E3) immediately reveals that the present reference is to Socrates’s discussion of the ἐπιεικής with Adeimantus, at the beginning of Book Three (387D4-E7: n.b. ἐπιεικής, D5).

4955

μετριάσει (E8) quotes μετρίως at 399B8; but the strikingly rare verb (only twice elsewhere, both in Laws) also suggests, and even adduces, the operation of the soul’s logical aspect as described above (602D6-603A8).

4956

τολμήσει (604A6), αἰσχύνοιτο, and δέξαιτο describe feelings and actions of the θυμοειδές.

4957

δρῶντα (A8) refers, pace J.-C., to himself not to τινα, which is the subject of ἰδεῖν. The parallel construction allows the reflexive pronoun to be omitted, just as the participle φθεγγομένου could be omitted in the first limb. The mild anacoluthon is psychologically accurate, since the person’s point of view shifts from that of a subject wailing to that of a subject watching himself wail, as object, alongside his peer. Compare Socrates's preference for the accusative over the nominative at Phdrs.230A1 in order to generalize beyond himself. πολλὰ φθέγξασθαι / πολλὰ ποιεῖν (A6-7) represent λέγειν and πράττειν, and πολλά is derogatory (n.2088), more language coming from the θυμός, illustrating its natural, unspoken, and crucial alliance with the λογιστικόν.

4958

λόγος καὶ νόμος (A10): Compare the way the relation between the two terms is climactically spelled out at 607A7-8: νόμου τε και τοῦ κοινῇ ἀεὶ δόξαντος εἶναι βελτίστου λόγου. Much more than mere custom (Halliwell), it is the νόμος of 590E1 (Book Nine), the ally of everyone in the city which fosters peaceable order among the citizens.

4959

αὐτὸ τὸ πάθος (B1): The pain so dominates the baser aspect as to make it its conduit or agent, and the pain itself (αὐτὸ τὸ πάθος) is in charge.

4960

Reading αὐτῷ (B4) with mss. ADM, as a dative upon which the necessity impinges (cf. θεῷ, 381C7). The man is and is not two, of course. Chambry reports and adopts ἐν αὐτῷ as the reading of Monac. but Burnet reports it to be a scribitur while Slings reports ἐν αὐτῷ as a correction in its exemplar, Laur.80.19. Morgenstern’s conj. αὐτὼ (read by Burnet) adds unneeded polish.

4961

λέγει (B9): “decrees” (Halliwell) misses the truth and the spirit of the passage. These sentences are persuasive exhortation, in the manner of the Laws speaking to Crito.

4962

κάλλιστον (B9): the law is speaking paraenetically, encouraging the person to act in a praiseworthy (καλόν) way.

4963

The construction (B10-C3) consists of four participial phrases joined by οὔτε and τε, the first being genitive absolute (ὄντος, B11) and the other three being nominatival periphastic constructions with ἐστὶ understood (προβαῖνον, B12; ὄν, C1; γιγνόμενον, C2). The genitive describes what we cannot know but will sometime learn and therefore cannot now act upon, while the other three tell what we do now know (and would therefore take ἐστὶ) and what can guide our current action. For the shift of case, Stallb. compares Euthyph.4D, Xen.Mem.2.2.13, Thuc.7.25.

4964

αὐτοῖς (C1) stresses the facts of the situation in contrast to our attitude about them.

4965

πεπτωκότα (C6), the perfect echoing γεγονός (C5). Socrates’s point is not at all that life’s vicissitudes are as trivial as a game of dice (Halliwell), but that once the dice have fallen there is no use wishing they had fallen differently.

4966

Reading ὅπῃ ὁ λόγος αἱρεῖ βέλτιστ’ ἔχειν (C7). Burnet’s (and Chambry’s) apparatus has αἱρεῖ int.vers.F Plut. Stob. : ἐρεῖ AM : ἔρρει pr.F D. Slings sees no αἱρεῖ in F but reads it. λόγος αἱρεῖ is an expression from Herodotus (1.132.3, 2.33.2, 3.45.3, 4.127.3*, 6.124.2, 7.41.1; cf. 2.43.3 [ἡ ἐμὴ γνώμη αἱρεῖ]); behind it may lie a metaphor of “adding things up” (cf. Burnet ad Crito 48C6, citing Aeschines 3.59 and Demosthenes’s reply at 18.227). Plato reserves the phrase for describing the dispositive authority of reason over other considerations or criteria (Cleit.407D8, Crit.48C6-7, Leg.663D, Parm.141D6), its sovereignty over the other parts of the soul (Rep.440B5, Phlb.35D6), and a certain vertigo one feels when he acknowledges these truths. Compare ὡς γοῦν ὁ λόγος σημαίνει (584A11, 399D10, 334A9), another formula for acknowledging a radical reliance on reason, and cf. 499B1-2. The expression is echoed below, in the apology for the radical criticism of mimetic poetry (607B3).

4967

Reading Plutarch’s and Stobaeus’s ἰατρικῇ (D2) with Burnet (ἰατρικὴν AM : ἰατρικὴν καὶ FD). Again the triadic structure (n.4780): assertion (C5-7), denial of opposite (C7-9), and reassertion (C9-D1). The metaphor was prepared at 595B6-7 (φάρμακον).

4968

προσφέροιτο (D4), as of the administration of a drug: cf. 403A10, 442E2 and n.2316, 563D6.

4969

ἐθέλει ἕπεσθαι (D6): the language brings us back to the question above (ἕτοιμον πείθεσθαι, B6), as φαμέν announced.

4970

λογισμῷ (D5) acknowledges what is sane though unromantic in the deliberative calculation just described (C5-D2).

4971

ἀναμνήσεις (D8): the plural is derogatory (n.1206).

4972

ἀπλήστως (D9): the language of satiation indicates the operation of the ἐπιθυμητικόν in its pursuit of pleasure (cf. n.2279), continued at 606A4-7.

4973

ἀλόγιστόν τε … καὶ ἀργὸν καὶ δειλίας φίλον (D9-10), an idea prepared at 590B3-5. The first privation designates this part as the opposite or the enemy of the λογιστικόν (cf. τῷ λογισμῷ, D5); the second item in the list is also a privation, and we may associate it with the other part of the soul, the θυμοειδές, which is the “natural ally” of the λογιστικόν. The periphrasis with which the list closes, δειλίας φίλον, then comes into view as the assertion of what the second denies: the ἐπιθυμητικόν is friend of timidity since if the θυμός is weak the ἐπιθυμητικόν will not be stopped by it, unless of course λόγος αἱρεῖ (cf. 440B5). The order of the list is therefore ~A, ~B, ~ ~B. For closure with a pair of opposites. cf. 342E10-11 and n.426. The ideas of laziness and timidity begin to specify the allusion of ἐπ’ οὐδενὶ ὑγιεῖ at 603B1, namely, the area into which consorting with poetry leads the φαῦλον of the soul.

4974

Epanaleptic μιμουμένου (E4) continues with the same voice and subject as μιμήσασθαι (E3), which itself, by the idiom with ῥᾴδιον, may mean that the thing is difficult to imitate (and have a passive sense) even if it says that imitating it is difficult (standing as it does in the middle): the anaphora extends the same ambivalence to the participle. The old question of Schneider, whether μιμεῖσθαι can be used passively in the middle, therefore does not arise. The difference between the accusative and genitive devolves into a choice between a more or less emphatic anaphora, and the genitive emerges as the lectio difficilior.

4975

εὐπετές (E4) of direct or unmediated cognition, as at 369A9. The difficulty of the poet (μιμήσασθαι) is compared with the difficulty of the general audience (καταμαθεῖν).

4976

παντοδαποῖς (E5) suggests that these people do not have trouble understanding (with J.-C.) but make trouble for anyone present who tries to: ἀνθρώποις is a virtual hendiadys with πανηγύρει. For the idea cf. 492B5-C8: the discussion has waded into matters Socrates had discussed with Adeimantus in the aftermath of his critique of the philosopher. Halliwell ad loc. wrongly takes the unruliness of the crowd to disable the artist: but the artist means to please the crowd.

4977

The late τε (605A3) suggests that the second assertion (ἀρέσκειν πέπηγεν) describes the other side of the same coin: what his art enables him to imitate determines what part of his audience's soul he can please. For the perfects cf. 597E7, 598B1 and nn.; and for the pairing cf. A9-B2 below.

4978

σοφία (A3): The use is pointed, as at 602A11. There we saw what his special skill did not suit him to do, but now we learn what it does suit him to do. In the background is the bedazzled use of the term at 596D1 (cf. n.4761).

4979

ὁ δὲ μιμητικὸς ποιήτης … εἰ μέλλει εὐδοκιμήσειν ἐν τοῖς πολλοῖς (A2-3): εἰ μέλλει εὐδοκιμήσειν echoes the quotation from the defenders of poetry (εἰ μέλλει … καλῶς ποιεῖν [598E3-4]), which Socrates had already relativized in that context (περὶ ὧν δοκοῦσιν τοῖς πολλοῖς εὖ λέγειν [599A4 and n.4819]).

4980

οὐκοῦν (A8), pressing for assent, the fourth in a series (604E1, D5, B6).

4981

δικαίως ἂν ἤδη ἐπιλαμβανοίμεθα (A8) is echoed by ἤδη ἂν ἐν δικῇ οὐ παραδεχοίμεθα below (B2-3): ἤδη marks the point at which the old case for censorship from Books Two and Three receives permanent justification from the theory of the soul’s inner division and balances, themes which are then tied together (B2-C4) by the analogy of the notional city of the early books with the psychic city with which the argument culminated in Book Nine. Cf. 348B2, 565C1, and n.152 ad 332D2.

4982

ἕτερον τοιοῦτον (A10-B1): derogatory ἕτερον in dismissive aposiopesis (cf. n.1224).

4983

ὡμοίωται (B2): The perfect continues to describe the objective structure of reality despite appearance and opinion (cf. 605A3, A4: cf. πεποίηται, 598B1; πεποίηκεν, 597D8).

4984

τὸ λογιστικόν (B4-5) implies and imports the tripartite division although the element called φαῦλον rather than βέλτιστον has not been identified. The language of feeding and strengthening the φαῦλον so as to destroy the λογιστικόν recalls the Image of the tripartite soul in Book Nine (588E5-9A1, 589B2-3), bringing all the force of that Image to bear on the current question.

4985

χαριεστέρους (B6) is meant to straddle between human types in society and the noblest part of the soul. An instance of the political event is described in the Decline (where these χαριέστεροι are called κοσμιώτατοι, 564E6-565E4).

4986

πολιτείαν (B7): again the triadic structure (n.4780) consisting of positive statement (about soul, B3-5), supportive analogy (about city, B5-6), and restatement of the point about soul in terms borrowed from the analogy (cf. also χαριεστέρους, B6, and n.4985). At the same time that the “Decline” is adduced from Book Eight, the metaphor connects the present argument with the vivid treatment of soul at the end of Nine, and again attaches this critique of poetry to the very highest and most radical viewpoint reached in the discussion.

4987

Reading εἰδωλοποιοῦντα (C3) with the edd., preserved only in pr. F (εἰδωλοποιοῦντι ADMf): εἴδωλα stands in contrast with τοῦ δὲ ἀληθοῦς, with μέν omitted in the way noticed by Denniston (165: cf. 398A4-5, 601A1-2, 616B5-6), and makes εἰδωλοποιοῦντα parallel with ἀφεστῶτα, obviating any need for the ingenuities of Schneider and J.-C. ad loc.

4988

ἐκτὸς πάνυ τινῶν ὀλίγων (C7-8, cf. 595B6-7): The immediate pertinence of these words as well as καὶ τοὺς ἐπιεικεῖς is not to send the reader looking for who these few might be, in Socrates' or Plato's mind, but to extend the criticism of poetry beyond the effect it has on “the majority” (τοῖς πολλοῖς), 605A4). Halliwell says Socrates “of course” refers to a certain small set of persons mentioned in passing at 498A7, but the entire context of Book Nine with its stress on the vicissitudes of man’s psychic balance and ethical health (590C8-592A4, taken to be enough reason to stay away from politics [A5-6], and cf. δεδιότι, 608B1) already gave the phrase a more edifying and relevant meaning, which is corroborated in turn below (606A7-8) when Socrates imagines that although every man is endowed with reason, which is naturally the noblest element, his nurture and learning may prove inadequate to enable this “man within” (588D3) to keep the beast under control.

4989

τοὺς ἐπιεικεῖς … λωβᾶσθαι (C7): After the re-introduction of διάνοια above (603B10) we now focus in on the other aspect of the thesis announced on the first page of the Book (λώβη … τῆς διανοίας, 595B5-6), which Socrates now calls the “greatest accusation,” reverting to the forensic metaphor he used there (κατερεῖτε, 595B3). The expression is abbreviated (as if it is the persons that are mutilated rather than their διάνοια) in the same manner as the prepositional prefix is dropped in repetition (n.1567). All we have done so far is therefore to be regarded as preliminary. Accordingly, we should anticipate that a large role will continue to be played by the division and order of the soul in this phase of the critique of mimesis.

4990

Both δρᾷ and αὐτό (C9) add a tone that is ominous, on a par with πάνδεινον.

4991

ἀκούων σκόπει (C10) is portentously forceful, as programmatic γάρ now explains: Socrates invites Glaucon to look, with him, into themselves (ἡμῶν) as examples or models of the ἐπιεικεῖς that poetry might harm, just as with the Image in Book Nine he had invited him to look at the effect on his inner self of the attitude toward justice and injustice he had voiced in Book Two (588B6-11, 588E3-589B7, and nn. ad locc.). The reader is indirectly invited to join them.

4992

οἱ γάρ που βέλτιστοι ἡμῶν (C10): He claims to be shifting to the effect it has on the best persons (βέλτιστοι) but the more important shift is that he moves ourselves into the audience (with ἡμῶν). What is happening in truth is that he is shifting the perspective of the criticism to our inward conscience, which is always what he does and is always hazardous to the conversation. It is not about someone else we will be speaking, at this climactic moment in the argument, but ourselves and our own experience in the theatre.

4993

ᾄδοντας (D2) shifts to the plural, perhaps to designate the chorus (J.-C.) responding as with a κομμός to the hero’s ῥῆσις (D1). The juxtaposition of overwrought vocal and choreographic expressions (ἐν τοῖς ὀδυρμοῖς / κοπτομένους) with the contrived and metrically controlled poetic compositions (μακρὰν ῥῆσιν / ᾄδοντας) is ironic and funny.

4994

συμπάσχοντες καὶ σπουδάζοντες (D4): The direct reversal of mood, from following sympathetically to soberly applauding, is portrayed by the chiasm of verb and participle but is not explained: it is just something that happens in us.

4995

ὡς ἀγαθὸν ποιητήν (D4-5) again quotes (with ὡς) the appellation. There is patently no basis in what came before for us to call him ἀγαθός, besides the fact that we suddenly became serious (σπουδάζοντες): the term is merely an index of how much we have been moved. We may compare the way that Wagnerians happily surrender their critical objectivity in the way they refer to Wagner as The Master. Analogously, at 598E3 the admirer of the “good” poet is said simply to presume he must know what he is writing about or else he would not be “good,” but we then learned he does not; and subsequently we learned that the judgment of the poet’s εὖ λέγεσθαι (601A8-9 and n.4876) really boils down to his καλῶς λέγεσθαι (602B3 and n.4908). The true reason for loving poetry, and loving it seriously (σπουδάζοντες) needs to be explored, and this time the explanation will arise out of an analysis of our own subjective experience.

4996

κῆδος (D7) already moves beyond the πάθημα we suffer in the “story” of our own lives, to something we are responsible to repair (ἰᾶσθαί τε καὶ ἐπανορθοῦν, 604D1): compare κήδεται, 596A2. He has already warmed us as to what he is going to say, since he has already argued that poetry depicts behavior that real men would only do in private (603E3-604E6); what is again new is that he has shifted the focus onto ourselves.

4997

τινι ἡμῶν (D7) echoes τινα τῶν ἡρώων (D1) and therefore compares us with the heroes on the stage.

4998

ὡς again (E1), turning ἀνδρός into an appellation. The appellation relies upon what we said two pages ago (603E3-8, where note the prominent position of ἀνήρ, E3).

4999

βδελύττεσθαι (E6) an hapax in Plato (idiomatic βδελυρός [338D3] is mere name-calling), unsurprisingly occurring in Aristophanes ten times (thrice more than νοεῖν, for instance). The forceful language sets shame against pleasure, the θυμοειδές against the ἐπιθυμητικόν.

5000

εὐλόγῳ (E7) suggests irrationality and self-contradiction within the person (cf. n.5021 ad 606C7), but Glaucon's asseverative tone (οὐ μὰ τὸν Δία) is offset by his less than certain ἔοικεν. Socrates notices, as he noticed his slightly reticent εἰκός γε at 602B8 and turned back to him with μὴ τοίνυν τῷ εἰκότι πιστεύσωμεν (B9).

5001

With ἐκείνῃ (606A1) Socrates vaunts the importance of what he has to say, and Glaucon hearkens. γε suggests there will be a special pertinence in Glaucon’s use of the term εὐλόγῳ, to describe which will strengthen Glaucon's resolve. The ensuing statement is one of Socrates’s longer speeches and is of a piece with the magisterial tone he has adopted. On ναί cf. Shilleto’s commentary of Dem.Fals.Leg. (Cambridge 1864), Appendix C: “to strengthen the words coming from the preceding speaker by way of taking an objection to their sufficiency.”

5002

ἐνθυμεῖσθαι (A3): to entertain in the mind a relatively complex set of ideas all at once (whence ἐνθύμημα, with its weighing of relative possibilities), used by Socrates to describe his inner reflections upon hearing the oracle (Apol.21B3). Cf. also Phdo.86B, Phdrs.D1, Prot.327A3, Symp.182D5. ἐννοεῖν can also be so used (e.g., Apol.40C4-41C7). The apodosis is understood, or indefinitely postponed (compare Symp.182D): ‘you would see that the ἔπαινος truly is not reasonable.’ Socrates’s long speech must show the failure in reasoning (cf. λογίζεσθαι, B5).

5003

βίᾳ (A3). Halliwell (ad loc.; cf. also ad 605B4) infers from the language that Socrates is thinking the lower part of the soul has the character of a wild animal; and of course he is right since it was the burden of the Image in Book Nine to make it out to be that way.

5004

τοῦ δακρῦσαί τε καὶ ἀποδύρασθαι ἱκανῶς και ἀποπλησθῆναι (A4-5), a genetic list: two activities leading to satiation. The aorists as well as the expansion of the second activity (ὀδύρασθαι) with ἀπό-, indicate an intention to be done with ὀδυρμοί, corroborated by the ἀπό of ἀποπλησθῆναι, “to be done with filling up,” a depiction of the rational satiation of pleasure. Contrast the presents, πιμπλάμενον καὶ χαῖρον, also genetic, just below (A6-7), with which compare the initial description of the appetitive satiation at 604E9-10: πρὸς τοὺς ὀδυρμοὺς ἄγον καὶ ἀπλήστως ἔχον αὐτῶν.

5005

τὸ δὲ φύσει βέλτιστον ἡμῶν, ἅτε οὐχ ἱκανῶς πεπαιδευμένον λόγῳ, οὐδὲ ἔθει (A7-8): Behind lies the triad, φύσις, μελέτη (here ἔθει), ἐπιστήμη (here λόγῳ).

5006

θεωροῦν (B1), an accusative absolute with ἅτε (cf. Smyth §2078). Its subject is τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν, which the man in his λογιστικόν is allowing to watch. The term invokes the theatre (θέατρον) but also the vicarious semi-participation of an onlooker.

5007

ἑαυτῷ (B1), masc., is the man (and the subject of καταφρονήσας below, B5), in comparison with whom the man on the stage is another man (ἄλλος ἀνήρ). He is thinking and arguing the ἅτε clause with, or in, his λογιστικόν.

5008

κερδαίνειν (B3), “gain,” can in itself with a certain irony connote profitting undeservedly as well as avoiding loss (e.g. Xen.Apol.9). It expresses a claim he is making to himself with his λογιστικόν, to the effect that although it would cost him to indulge the wailing in his own case, it costs him nothing here. But this according to Socrates is a miscalculation (λογίζεσθαι), or a failure of logic.

5009

ἐκεῖνο (B3) pointing to what he had formerly avoided as an evil, during his own misfortunes (A3-6).

5010

ὅλου τοῦ ποιήματος (B5): His desire for the pleasure (in particular the desire of the ἐπιθυμητικόν) requires him to accept the whole poetic apparatus that produces it rather than to shun poetry as a shameful thing (καταφρονεῖν, a function of the θυμοειδές in alliance with the λογιστικόν) because of what it does to him, the way that Leontius’s θυμός cursed his eyes for what they wanted to see (cf. n.2280 ad 440A2-3). Poetry has brought us very close to dissociating the θυμός from the λόγος (440A8-B9), and this is the grave λώβη τῆς διανοίας that Socrates is at pains to reveal to Glaucon. Moreover, this is where the joinder of issue lies for those readers who cannot accept Socrates’s expulsion of mimesis. Halliwell tries to carve out room to appreciate the skill of the poet apart from its effect (ad loc., 146), what I call the “apparatus” above, but that only begs the question why Halliwell wants to make this argument. It is not, after all, Socrates or Plato that need to be corrected but the confusion of the λογιστικόν and the faction in the soul. The last time we saw the λόγος being split from the θυμός was when the personality was taken over by Eros (573BC: cf. n.4297).

5011

ὀλίγοις τισίν (B6), i.e., the πάνυ τινῶν ὀλίγων of 605C7-8. Few retain the rational objectivity needed to calculate correctly the effect that poetry is having on them, the sort of objective ability envisioned at 602D6-603A9 and 603E3-8, but also in the critique of pleasure in Book Nine. κερδαίνειν is all they see in the balance sheet, and even this is only a denial of the cost they know they would inflict on themselves if they indulged the pleasure in their own lives. We may compare, and finally understand in its inner truth, how it is that Glaucon’s story of Gyges might overpower the διάνοια as he said it would (τῇ διανοίᾳ, 359C1), likewise bedazzled by the prospect of not being seen.

5012

ἀπολαύειν … ἀπὸ τῶν ἀλλοτρίων εἰς τὰ οἰκεῖα (B6-7): The expression and the idea is repeated from 395C7-D1 (ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν). There it was a bare assertion; here, and now, it has been explained.

5013

ἐκείνοις (B7) now used of other persons’ misfortunes (contrast ἐκεῖνο, B3) which were pushed outward by ἀλλοτρίων (B5), in order to return the focus to τὰ οἰκεῖα, what is going on inside him.

5014

ἰσχυρόν (B7): the argument “few can reckon” is that allowing the appetitive part of the soul to have its way makes it stronger in its struggle with the rational part. The assertion plainly relies on conclusions expressed in the Image of Book Nine (588E5-589A4 and B1-6: cf. n.4984 ad 605B4-5).

5015

κατέχειν (B8), the last word of this long paragraph, fulfills the promise of showing the illogic (cf. 606A1 and n.5001) by pointing back to the successful κατέχειν with which the paragraph began (A3).

5016

We either need Schneider’s ὅτι, ἃν (C2-3) or Madvig’s ὅταν ἃ, against the ὅτι ἂν of all mss., in order to achieve agreement for πονηρά (C4); but we also need a second ἄν for the coming subjunctives (C4) or else view it as a relative subjunctive protasis without ἄν, rare if not unexampled in later prose (cf. Leg.737B3 [emended]; Thuc.4.18, 6.21: cf. GMT §540; Smyth §§2327, 2339). It cannot be “ἄν carried forward” (Smyth §1767 and n.1306), since the optative’s ἄν in apodosis is a different ἄν from the subjunctive’s ἄν in protasis. See Adam’s judicious note. Perhaps read ὅταν τιν’ ἂν. The tenses and moods and parallelism of the argument present much of the sense even without the needed repair: see following notes.

5017

αὐτός (C3): Instead of analyzing the experience in terms of the separable parts of the soul Socrates continues the personal formulation announced above (τίνι ἡμῶν, 605D7, cf. 605C10).

5018

ἐν μιμήσει δὲ κωμῳδικῇ ἢ καὶ ἰδίᾳ ἀκούων (C3-4): ἀκούων goes with both, so we are to imagine attending a public comic performance (μιμήσει) or reading the comedy in private (ἰδίᾳ). This small and passing detail broaches the great problem that our reluctance to be seen doing certain things does not extend to a reluctance to be seen watching and praising those same acts in a large public gathering. Why not?

5019

σφόδρα (C4) describes that extra ingredient of force and confusion attributable to one’s emotional state, as at 585A2 and 586C1.

5020

χαρῇς καὶ μὴ μισῇς (C4): the corrected ms.A is certainly correct, against all others. We have, after δέ (C3), a second protasis qualified by a circumstantial participle (ἀκούων) alternative to the first protasis represented by the optative αἰσχύνοιο, which itself was qualified by the parallel and contrasting circumstantial participle, γελωτοποιῶν. We need the two protases so that ταὐτὸν ποιεῖς (C5) can play the role of the apodosis: otherwise they would have been apodoses to protases represented by the two participles, namely, εἰ γελωτοποιοίης (ideal) and ἐὰν ἀκούῃς (vivid). The punctual aorist subjunctives (χαρῇς καὶ μὴ μισῇς) stand in contrast with the rational resolution of the present optative (αἰσχύνοιο).

5021

Reading ἀνιεῖς (C7) with Burnet (ἂν εἴης AFM : ἀνείης D : ἀνίης recc.). By switching to the second singular (compare the impersonal construction with τὸ λογιστικόν, A8), Socrates makes vivid to Glaucon (and us, if we wish) that his reaction, whether to his own troubles or those of another, is managed by one and the same part of the self, the rational part, the rationality of which makes it φύσει βέλτιστον so that it least of all should contradict itself (cf. εὐλόγῳ, 605E7 and n.5000) and could do so only unconsciously (ἔλαθες, C8): the evolution of this unforeseen outcome is managed by the shift from optative αἰσχύνοιο to subjunctive χαρῇς.

5022

καὶ ἐκεῖ νεανικὸν ποιήσας (C7) parallel to the apodosis above, ταὐτὸν ποιεῖς (C5); νεανικόν plays the role that ἀκαίρως played at B2: the grounds for, if not the very term of, censure.

5023

κωμῳδοποιός (C8), etymologized under the force of nearby ποιήσας (C7) and ποιεῖς (C5).

5024

ἐν τοῖς οἰκείοις (C8), cobbled together out of ἐν τοῖς αὑτοῦ (B8) and εἰς τὰ οἰκεῖα (B7).

5025

ἔλαθες (C8) gnomic, with ἐξενεχθείς, not ποιήσας.

5026

φαμεν πᾶσι πράξει ἡμῖν ἕπεσθαι (D3), as if proverbial. It is prudence to recognize that such feelings are always there to influence us, and must continually be managed. ἕπεσθαι is not as strong as the connection suggested by ἐφάπτεσθαι in Phdo.79C, where the very issue of disconnectability (i.e., death, and the separate survival of the soul) is the subject. After exhausting the realm of fiction (tragedy / comedy) Socrates now generalizes again by discovering fiction's complement, namely, real life situations.

5027

ἐργάζεται (D4) ominous in its vagueness, as δρᾶν can be (604A8 and 377E8), and hence (c.dupl.acc.) usually negative (L.S.J. s.v., § II.2).

5028

ἄρδουσα / αὐχμεῖν (D4-5). That is, mimesis undoes the work of the λογιστικόν: as described in the Image in Book Nine (589B2-3). For the metaphor used of the parts of the soul compare the “good” man's fathering at 550B1-3.

5029

ἵνα βελτίους τε καὶ εὐδαιμονέστεροι ... (D6-7): Generalizing to include the θυμοειδές as well as the ἐπιθυμητικόν (“marginalizing” the θυμός is not a characteristic of Book Ten, pace Halliwell: compare 589C8-D3, which this passage is quoting), and capping the generalization with the precious conclusion reached in Book Nine that psychic order entails happiness and disorder misery, an issue important enough to justify the use of the term λώβη for the effect of mimesis. There is no puritanism: the conception admits of degrees (n.b., the present infinitives with δέον, the comparatives [D6-7], and the present subj. γιγνώμεθα) and these aspects of life are to be governed (ἄρχεσθαι), not eradicated. Assembling all these ideas and images constitutes a climax achieved by Socrates's reference to the ultimate sanction, happiness vs. destitution (cf.344E1-3, 352D5-6, 472B3-473D2, 578C6-7), so that finally, with Glaucon's agreement, Socrates can draw with full force the controversial implication about Homer.

5030

οὐκ ἔχω ἄλλως φάναι (D8): There is no joy but if anything regret in his acceptance of this conclusion. He acquiesces, that is, to the dictates of reason.

5031

οὐκοῦν (E1), the fifth. Socrates, as our narrator, adds emphasis for us by saying εἶπον.

5032

ὅταν … ἐντύχῃς (E1-2): this is the third time we have countenanced this enthusiastic message (cf. 598C7-D5 and 596B12-E4), but this time we are prepared to meet it. Plato (and Socrates) are fully conscious that their audiences will resist the conclusion and that they must prepare them in every way possible and construct the conclusion piecemeal, so that the audiences will at least grant, with Glaucon, that they cannot gainsay it.

5033

Ὁμήρου ἐπαινέταις (E1): For the expression cf. Prot.309A6, and for the popular sense of ἐπαινέτης cf. 426B5-9. Halliwell astutely notices the continuing salience throughout the re-evaluation of poetry of the term and the idea of praise (cf.598D8-9A4, 601A2, 605A4, 605D3-4, E2, E4-6, 606B3), but mistakes its importance. People praise Homer and call him “good” because they like his poems; the problem is what aspect of themselves they are liking him with. The underlying principle, that praise is the unreflective response of the soul’s parts, was introduced in the Second Argument of Book Nine (580C9-583A11, esp.581C8-E4) and is brought back at 602C4-4D11 and 605A8-B2 (stressed by the parenthetical remark at 606A5-6) in accordance with Socrates’s promise at the opening of the Book that he would show how the partition of the soul illuminates the issue of how to judge poetry properly (595A1-B1: cf. 580D3-4 and n.4451). That “contradictions” in what is praised and blamed must be settled by the λογιστικόν was proven there, in Book Nine, and represents the ruling principle in the “devaluation” (or, more exactly, the re-evaluation) of poetry in Book Ten. Halliwell (146-7, ad loc.) tries to carve out a way for the λογιστικόν to praise poetry after all, one that Socrates does not see, but neither saving nor condemning poetry is Socrates’s purpose: it is rather to save the soul, as he has just now said (and reiterates at 608B6-8).

5034

οὗτος ὁ ποιητής (E2-3): Socrates quotes their praise (“this poet”) but their unthinkingly approbative use of the term has now been called into question, unbeknownst.

5035

ἀναλαβόντι (E4), of the written matter itself, as at Apol.22B2, Phdo.95E2. For the shift to the accusative (κατασκευασάμενον [E5] aorist middle) cf. 586E5-6 and n.4603.

5036

διοίκησιν (E3): cf. διοικεῖν, 600D1, and n.4859.

5037

ποιητήν (E5), again emphatic and again dubitative.

5038

φιλεῖν μὲν χρὴ καὶ ἀσπάζεσθαι (607A1): cf. the similar concessive μέν clause done with these verbs at Apol.29D3: ἀσπάζομαι μὲν καὶ φιλῶ, where again he wants to defuse resentment about his higher calling (compare English, “Please don’t take this personally”). It is exactly consonant with the sentiment amicus Homer, maior amicus veritas. The pair of verbs constitute a colloquialism found also in Xenophon but not Demosthenes. For Plato’s uses cf.479E10 (ἀ. τε καὶ φ.: welcoming what is akin), Leg.689A (φ. τε καὶ ἀ.: “welcoming evil!”), Lys.217B4 (ἀ. καὶ φ.: a sick man “appreciates the doctor”). Literally meaning hugs and kisses, it seems to mean “greet with open arms,” usually in a context where one might expect otherwise.

5039

ποιητικώτατον (A2). For the complement cf. ποιητικώτερον (387B4) used there also in παραίτησις (B1-6), but in the present passage it is worse than damning by faint praise because of its patent circularity (cf. ποιητής, E5 and E3). We are, after all, on the verge of deciding that poetry might be a bad thing: the most poetical poet would then be the worst thing one could be. Still, the fans of Homer would not notice the circle, given their approbative use of ποιητής above (E3).

5040

φιλεῖν μὲν χρή … εἰδέναι δέ (A1-8): The gentle but firm treatment of Homer’s sponsors echoes Socrates and Glaucon’s treatment of the mimetic poet imagined to be in their midst at the very end of their discussion of poetry in Book Three (398AB): compare φιλεῖν καὶ ἀσπάζεσθαι here (607A1) with προσκυνοῖμεν (398A4); βελτίστους and ποιητικώτατον (A1-2) with ἱερὸν καὶ θαυμαστὸν καὶ ἡδύν there (A4-5); for ὕμνους and ἐγκώμια (A4) cf. αὐστηροτέρῳ καὶ ἀηδεστέρῳ … ἐπιεικοῦς λέξιν (A8-B2). Again we have an indication of tension just beneath the surface (cf. κατερεῖτε, 595B3 and n. ad loc., and δίκαιόν που, 598D1 and n.), as does ἀπολελογήσθω just below (B1).

5041

παραδεκτέον εἰς πόλιν (A4), anarthrous, means “admit civically.” Socrates diverts the discussion from the rancor of personal disagreement to the “larger” question of the fate of the “city,” for which the sanction was finding personal happiness. Since the last few lines of Book Nine, πόλις can only designate the personal soul, of Glaucon for instance. It is perhaps the indeterminacy of the reference of “city” that accounts for the absence of the definite article, here and below (607C5). Cf. the “personal” use of the public expression, κοινῇ ἀεὶ δόξαντος, below (n.5047).

5042

ὕμνους θεοῖς καὶ ἐγκώμια τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς (A4): This is simply a specification of the “less sweet and more austere” poetry accepted into the city at 398A8-B4. Halliwell’s assertion that it alludes to the evening songs of the idyllic life at 372B7-8 is an overstatement, but the suggestion calls attention to the interesting fact that there is no praise of good men there, only hymns to gods: The idyllic picture of man in the πολίχνιον in fact depicted him in the presence of gods, but not other men!

5043

ἡδυσμένον (A5) points to ἡδονήν (606B4). The verb suggests culinary sweetening: the poet after all adds his pleasing effects (601A4-B4). Contrast τῷ αὐστηροτέρῳ καὶ ἀηδεστέρῳ ποιητῇ (398A8, denying ἱερὸν καὶ θαυμαστὸν καὶ ἡδύν at A4-5).

5044

ἐν μέλεσιν ἢ ἔπεσιν (A5-6): whether short or long: cf. D4 below and 379A8-9.

5045

βασιλεύσετον (A6): the dual emphasizes the fact that pain and pleasure pursued without mind are illusory and behave like a two-headed monster, the one leading to the other in a ridiculous antapodosis of the Ionian type (cf. the truism at 563E9-564A1 and Socrates's remark in the prison [Phdo.60B3-C1]).

5046

σοι (A6) the familiar ethical dative of the theorist (371A8 and n.1004), but homing in also on the intimate connection between the city in heaven and its effect on the constitution (πολιτεία) of Glaucon’s soul (Book Nine sub fin.).

5047

τοῦ κοινῇ ἀεὶ δόξαντος εἶναι βελτίστου λόγου (A7-8), paired with τοῦ νόμου, is an elaboration of λόγος καὶ νόμος at 604A10, and climactic for its dense succinctness. βέλτιστος λόγος is by metonymy a constructio praegnans for ὁ τοῦ βελτίστου λόγος, a notion relied upon just below (B3): cf. 604C7 and n.4966. κοινῇ ἀεί indicates the dialogical equivalent of ongoing public debate (namely the current search for agreement between Glaucon and Socrates, always subject to revision: cf. Crito 49D5-E2).

5048

ἀπολελογήσθω (B1) The juridical term (rather than the accountant’s ἀπολελογίσθω presented in mss.AD) points back to the opening of the Book where Socrates first adopted a defensive posture (595B3, B9-C3, and n.4743). ὁ γὰρ λόγος ἡμᾶς ᾕρει is likewise “apologetic” (that is, it presents the πρόφασις that their behavior was reasonable [εἰκότως]), and is supplemented (regarding προσείπωμεν, cf. n.5051, below) with a countercharge (an αἰτία), namely that poetry started the whole thing (on παλαία cf. n.5052).

5049

ἀπεστέλλομεν (B2), the imperfect of citation, referring specifically to ἀποπέμποιμεν (398A6), just as the beginning of Book Ten referred more generally to the expulsion of poetry.

5050

ὁ γὰρ λόγος ἡμᾶς ᾕρει (B3). If we were able to follow the dictates of reason in our own darkest hours (604C7 and n.4966), our decision to expel Homer on such severely rational grounds should a fortiori (whence γάρ) be immune from a charge of rancor or ill will. But ᾕρει is an imperfect of citation, so the assertion is that the current reasons corroborate the decision we made there.

5051

προσείπωμεν (B3): The prefix pertains to the entire sentence, as at 521D8, per Riddell §129: cf. also Apol.20A2; Gorg.516D8; Phdo.74A6; Soph.250B10; Tht.208E4, 209D4.

5052

παλαιά (B5). There cannot be an “Ancient Quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, since philosophy is new. If Socrates is claiming there was such a standing quarrel this first announcement of it in literature would hardly appear in a concessive μέν-clause; the representatives of poetry would hardly themselves be so σκληρός and ἄγροικος; their charge would pit the important essence of poetry (e.g. as Musically inspired) against philosophical method rather than popular ad hominem cracks; and of course Socrates would have needed to produce counter-volleys from “philosophy” to prove his claim. The term παλαιά only indicates that a falling out had already started so that Socrates’s criticism today is not an opening salvo (cf. n.1414). His proof he did not start it consists of specific poetic citations (whence καὶ γάρ) that and there are no volleys previously launched against poetry by philosophy for him to cite (cf. n.5057 ad τούτων [C3]). Halliwell finds their absence striking and tries along with the others to supply some by citing Xenophanes and any other quotation that criticizes a poet (though none of these criticize poetry per se and themselves are written in verse!). Such citations (e.g. apud Adam, the Pindar fr. quoted at 457B2-3, where cf. n.2492) presume a notion of philosophy expanded far beyond Socrates’s present intention. Nor is antiquity needed in the passages Socrates quotes to justify his use of the term, παλαιά; all that matters to him is the content, and in particular the behaviors for which they have made philosophy and philosophers infamous, with overblown slurs supported by no argumentation. The poetic hemistichs quoted offhand by Callicles in the Gorgias (485E6-486D1) are of a piece with these and corroborate Socrates's claim that “poetry” is readily used to articulate slurs against philosophy.

5053

λακέρυζα πρὸς δεσπόταν κύων (B6), accepting the breakout of D.Page (fr.adesp.69 [=Bergk 135] in PMG 987 [p.524]), who takes ἐκείνη κραυγάζουσα as epexegetical. The slander of poets against cosmological speculators cited at Leg.967C makes a different kind of dogs out of them.

5054

I read διασόφων (C1), with Burnet (Slings ad loc. attributes the conjecture to Wilamowitz [2.386-7]). Burnet’s apparatus reports: δία σοφῶν A : διὰ σοφῶν D : διασοφῶν FM. Stallb. reports that Bekker reports A as capitalizing Δία, and this is what he, J.-C., and Chambry read, construing Δία as accusative object of κρατῶν though it is buried in the attributive position of a partitive genitive qualifying that participle’s subject, ὄχλος! Slings places the quoted phrase in daggers, as did D.Page in PLM (cit.supra). The reading διασόφων, taken as genitive object of κρατῶν, expresses the envious anger of the mob (just as πάσσοφος is uniformly derogatory in Socrates’s ironic uses of it). Cf. διασοφίζεσθαι in Aristoph.Av.1619. Note that merely to be σοφός was sufficient to incite the mob, according to Socrates in his Apology (see note below). ὁ (C1) is not part of the quote but cites the passage by citing its noun (like ἡ, B6 and οἱ, C2; cf. the quotations in Bks.2 and 3; Phdrs.236C4; and passages quoted in Ar.Batr.) and therefore does not force the genitive plural into attributive position. Adam’s emendation of κρατῶν to κράτων (whence his paraphrase, ‘the rabble rout of all-too-sapient heads’) requires an unlikely plurality of wise men: an unruly ὄχλος is after all unanimous in its unruliness, and is unruly only measured against rule and reason.

5055

ἄρα (C2) portrays the critic as snide.

5056

The first charge (B6-7) mischaracterizes the philosopher as an aggressive antilogician like the puppy that tears everything apart (“master” being a metaphor for an elder or for the man in authority: cf. the behavior of his young imitators that Socrates describes at Apol.23C2-D2, and of the σκυλάκια at 539B6). The second (B7-C1) imagines what might appear stately and serious in the demeanor of the philosopher (μέγας) being betrayed by what the critic at least finds to be his empty abstractions (κενεαγορίαισι): cf. Aristoph.Batr.1496-7 ἐπὶ σεμνοῖσιν λόγοισι καὶ σκαριφησμοῖσι λήρων and the dactyl of Timon, ἄνθρωποι κενεῆς οἰήσιος ἔμπλεοι ἀσκοί (apud Euseb.Pr.Ev.14.18.28: To allege from his actual behavior that Socrates is interested in τὰ μετέωρα καὶ τὰ ὑπὸ γῆς [Apol.23D5-6, which he there calls τὰ κατὰ πάντων τῶν φιλοσοφούντων πρόχειρα, D4-5] is one of those lies that betrays what it is trying to hide—the way Socrates made people feel empty within). The third (C1) consoles itself (i.e., ourselves, the mob) by putting these terribly clever types (διασόφων: Socrates reveals the mechanism of the envious term σοφός at Apol.23A3-5 and 38C2-3) in their place, if not by reason at least by main force (κρατῶν: the phrase summarizes his entire trial!). The fourth (C2) complacently asserts that for all their rarified musings they end up poor (a commonplace in Aristophanes; e.g. Batr.1497 διατριβὴν ἀργόν: cf.Apol.23B7-C1, with its biting inversion of σχολή and ἀσχολία, and 31B5-C3). In all, the criticisms resemble the criticism Adeimantus levels against Socrates near the beginning of Book Six (cf. nn.2841 and 2842). Plato is dead serious about the power of poetry to move the mob, and here as elsewhere gives his Socrates every opportunity to foretell the consequences of his own devotion to wisdom and virtue.

5057

τούτων (C3), not αὐτῶν: The antecedent is the poets, not φιλοσοφία τε καὶ ποιητική; and the genitive is subjective. All the quotations constitute evidence of poetry’s opposition to philosophy (more exactly, philosophers); while conversely there is no evidence within this passage, nor before it in this book or outside it, of any philosophical opposition to poetry per se: Heraclitus criticized not poetry but poets alongside others. Poets were nearly all the authors there were and poetry per se had not even been sufficiently distinguished from anything else that it could be criticized. Indeed it is exactly this distinguishing that Socrates understands himself to have performed for the first time in these last pages (n.b., τοιαύτην οὖσαν, B3, referring to the results they have reached, and contrast his uncertainty at the beginning, 595C7-8): it is this present event that he is trying to put into perspective with παλαιά.

5058

ὅμως δέ (C3-4) answers παλαιὰ μέν (B5): despite poetry’s history of mistreating philosophy we will give her a hearing if she has a real case to make. The rueful certainty of his position continues to make itself felt with several γε's in the ensuing lines (C4, C6, D6, E4).

5059

εὐνομουμένῃ (C6) alludes to the rule of νόμος above (A7) and to εὐνομεῖσθαι, 605B4. It is the function of νόμος to preserve order: its provisions should be kept and defended (νομιστέα, 608B2: cf. 451A4-B1) until something better is found through reason (λόγον, C4: cf. D7 and 608A3) but since poetry by its nature uses effects and undermines reason, our very giving it a hearing must be controlled.

5060

καταδεχοίμεθα (C6): of restoration after exile. By imagining poetry being able to produce a λόγος on its own behalf despite its devotion to the emotions (for the severity of the alternatives cf. 607A5-8), he gives an instance of reason’s openness to modify policy in accordance with continuing discussion and deliberation, the method he proposed above (ὁ κοινῇ ἀεὶ δόξας εἶναι βέλτιστος λόγος, A7-8).

5061

σύνισμέν γε (C6). The prefix (cf.συνειδέναι at Apol.21B4 and Phdrs.235C7) evinces the experience of conflict within the soul felt by Socrates and Glaucon as “founders of the city,” which few can reason their way through. It is sincere enough that Socrates needs to give Glaucon a confirmation that he feels it, too (C8-D2).

5062

τὸ δοκοῦν (C7) relying, along with the previous line, on the expression at A7-8 (δόξαντος). The aorist there alluded to a decision reached by the δῆμος (note κοινῇ and the expression, ἔδοξε τῷ δήμῳ) whereas here it is the continuing openness of reason in the individual that is needed so that the present is used.

5063

ἦ γάρ (C8): The combination requests confirmation of the interlocutor’s previous agreement rather than silently presuming it, at a crucial point in the argument, as often. Regularly ἦ γάρ follows an assertion, turning it into a question at the last minute (Crat.390A2, 421C7; Euthyphr.10E, 13A; Gorg.449D3, 468C7, D4; Parm.153B1; Phdo.93D4; at Rep.475C8 Socrates is brought up short by Glaucon disagreeing). Sometimes it appears in the middle as if the speaker finds himself asserting something that he meant to be asking (Euthyd.286C7, Phdr.266D9, Tht.160E2 [with vocative]). When it appears at the beginning, as here and at Gorg.494E9, it challenges assent. The collocation ἦ γὰρ ἄν (=alioquin), e.g. Euthyd.280A8, is an idiom quite distinct: cf. Hoogeveen Doct.partic. (Leipzig, 1806) 256-258. The vocative ὦ φίλε acknowledges again that the experience of κήλησις is shared (cf. σύνισμεν, C6, and cf. 607A2-3, 605C10-D5). Halliwell (ad loc. and ad 605C7) recognizes the “confessional” tone but infers they are “diffident” about their decision to censor poetry when they express only regret.

5064

οὐκοῦν (D3) six.

5065

οὕτω (D3), i.e., if she can make an argument (C4-6) it is irrelevant what meter it is in. There is neither irony nor humor, just even-handedness (cf. 607A5-6), based on a distinction available only to reason since poetry as such cannot speak until it has chosen a meter.

5066

Reading ἀπολογησαμένη (D3), in the original hand of A (ἀπολογισαμένη FD : ἀπολογησομένη A2M). The point is not to force poetry to change but require it to take responsibility for its effect: until it does it must be kept at a distance. Contrast the prose arguments of its sponsors (D6ff).

5067

προστάται (D6) recalls the ἐπαινέται of 606E1 and the Ὁμηρίδαι of 599E6, but now casts them, as Schleiermacher saw (apud Stallb. ad loc.: cf. LSJ s.v., III.2), as persons with citizenship who represent the metic’s interests, in this case the interests of Poetry which has since been sent into exile (ἀπεστέλλομεν, B2: the metaphor is continued with καταδεχοίμεθα [C6] and κατιέναι [D3]), and held there. The point of the metaphor is that discussion and debate about poetry may be allowed to take place in the city since such would lack the mimetic magic; and even the mimetic magic would be permissible if it were used in a rational apology (D3-4). The prophylactic measures evince not some puristic horror of Plato’s: the measure and scope of its magical powers are intimately known and remembered by the interlocutors, too (C8-D2: n.b. σύνισμέν γε ἡμῖν, C6), as also by any reader who has ears and will allow his personal experience to affect his interpretation of the passage.

5068

τὰς πολιτείας καὶ τὸν βίον τὸν ἀνθρώπινον (D8-9): The pair varies διοίκησίν τε καὶ παιδείαν τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων πραγμάτων, 606E3-4.

5069

κερδανοῦμεν (E1) comments on κερδαίνειν at 606B3, by correcting it. The vivid condition is sanguine and not an indirect dismissal. With the overall sentiment Horace (Ars Poet.343) will famously agree: omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. Cf. Gorg.502AB.

5070

ὦ φίλε ἑταῖρε (E4), indicating strong asseveration: cf. n.3407 and 608B4 below.

5071

του (E4) may be presumed to be masculine by the specific sense that ἔρως tends to have: cf. n.2810.

5072

For the telescoped expression βίᾳ μέν, ὅμως δέ cf., with Shorey, Ep.3.316E Ep.7.325A; and parallel brachylogies from drama, e.g., A.Nub.1363; E.Phoen.1421; S.Antig.1105.

5073

ἐγγεγονότα (E6) stresses that the feelings we have for poetry were inserted into us before we could think: cf. 377B1-9 (n.b. ἐνσημήνασθαι) and 378D7-E1 (n.b. δυσέκνιπτα).

5074

καλῶν (E7) is “ironic.” He is speaking empirically, of how the men's unexamined admiration of the poets has unquestioningly led them to include their works in the nurture of the young.

5075

μέν (608A1), extenuating the μέν-clause (begun at E7) into the apodosis, in order to hold in suspension the inherently apodotic transition to the δέ clause (at ἕως δέ, A2).

5076

φανῆναι (A1).

5077

ὡς βελτίστην καὶ ἀληθεστάτην (A1-2): Again the lover's willingness, whether an ability or a weakness, to overlook flaws: cf.474D7-475A2.

5078

ἀπολογήσασθαι (A2): Socrates imagines poetry actually making the ἀπολογία he made room for above (607C3-7).

5079

ἐπᾴδοντες ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς (A3). The understanding we have reached about poetry (λόγος, A3) will provide us an ἐπῳδή (A4): that is, the line between surrendering to κήλησις and protecting oneself by ἐπῳδαί (cf. Phdo.77E; Charm.155DE, 157A) is to be drawn by the λογιστικόν, whose proper role—the role of the φάρμακον mentioned at 595B6—is being described in the present λόγος. The metaphor of an inward incantation (ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς) gives concrete content to the abstract act of “knowing” we were meant to do at 607A3.

5080

τόν παιδικόν τε καὶ τὸν τῶν πολλῶν ἔρωτα (A5), a genetic list (cf.375A5-7 and n.1116), referring to the stamp poetry makes on the unwitting child (cf. ἐγγεγονότα above), which the majority of youth will not be educated out of, given the prejudices of our fine institutions (καλῶν above), so that most of the population continues to feel ἔρως for poetry. Cf. παισὶ καὶ ἀνδράσιν, 387B4.

5081

Reading αἰσθόμεθα δ’οὖν (A6) with all mss., a form of the present indicative not unexampled. Madvig emends into ᾀσόμεθα (read by Burnet); but δ’οὖν cannot introduce the content of the incantation. Instead it presents the prudential justification for closing our ears. Adam’s emendation ἀκροασόμεθα is impossible since it ignores this prudential resolution to delimit the participation of listening. With αἰσθάνεσθαι Socrates refers to the bewitching experience he and Glaucon have undergone (he compared notes with him at about it at 607D1-2) as the empirical warrant (δ’οὖν) for the incantation. It is constructed ἀπὸ κοινοῦ, with ὡς for the intellectual perception inferred (οὐ σπουδαστέον [sc.ἐστί]) and with the participle for the empirical basis of the inference (εὐλαβητέον ὄν). The δεδιότι clause tells what is at stake and thereby calls for the verbal adjectives.

5082

τοιαύτῃ (A6) “poetry such as we have seen it to be” (cf. τοιαύτην οὖσαν, 607B3: for the expression cf. Charm.171D2): the demonstrative does not imply (pace Adam) that there is another kind: the participle is circumstantial, not attributive. This kind is quite enough!

5083

τῆς ἐν αὑτῷ πολιτείας (B1): With the metaphor he refers back to the analogy between the psychic and civil effects of mimesis that he drew at 605B2-C4, and through that passage back to the climactic close of Book Nine (592A5-B6).

5084

νομιστέα (B2): to keep on the safe course and disallow mimetic poetry to enter into the city of our soul (607C3-8 and n.5059).

5085

ὦ φίλε Γλαύκων (B4): again cf. n.3407.

5086

μέγας … ὁ ἀγών … μέγας (B4). Such anadiplosis is rare (cf. Leg.624A3; Phdrs.228B7, 242D4); the emphasis Socrates seeks by continuing by his ampliative denial of the opposite, is extreme. It is notable, for all that, that the outcome of the struggle—turning out good and bad (B5)—requires no rhetorical auxesis or amplification. For the expression ἀγὼν μέγας (vel μέγιστος), cf. LSJ s.v.III.5; Gorg.526C3, A.Nub.958 (adjacent to ἅπας κίνδυνος, 955-6, for which cf. 618B7 below), Pax 276; Eur.Hec.229, Hipp.496 (both of a life-or-death matter), Med.235-6 (ἢ κακὸν λαβεῖν | ἢ χρηστόν), Ph.860; Soph.OC 587; Thuc.2.89.10 (in a speech); and compare Phdrs.247B5. It is always a spoken admonition.

5087

ὥστε (B5) introduces a correlative clause of result: “So great is it that … .” The οὕτως that would be the antecedent to ὥστε is suggested by ὅσος.

5088

ἐπαρθέντα (B6): the dangerous psychic force represented by this verb and the need to avert or pre-empt its operation, were brought up twice before in similarly emphatic passages (416D1, 434B1). At 416B8-D1 (at the end of Book Three) it is to avert this force that Socrates warns Glaucon (who was less worried about its arousal [B6], but himself had been aroused to object to the simplicity of their beds at 372C2-3 [cf.nn. ad 415E3-416A1]) that the guards must adopt the severe regimen that distinguishes them from the others, a regime that includes the prohibition against a personal ταμιεῖον (416D6-7), which policy immediately aroused the spirited objection of Adeimantus (419A, Book Four init.); and the subsequent repeal of which, moreover, was the first step onto the path of decline for the πολιτεία (548A7-8). In the second passage where the verb was used (434B1-2) it is just this “arousal” that might lead a lesser man to arrogate to himself the prerogatives of a greater one, and by this act of injustice to effect nothing less than the destruction of the city (ὄλεθρον, B7). The present passage alludes to the latter passage by means of its parallel list of stimulants: cf. ἐπαιρόμενος ἢ πλούτῳ ἢ πλήθει ἰσχύι ἢ ἄλλῳ τῳ τοιούτῳ there (434B1-2: cf. n.2185), with οὔτε τιμῇ ἐπαρθέντα οὔτε χρήμασιν οὔτε ἀρχῇ οὐδεμιᾷ οὐδέ γε ποιητικῇ ἄξιον ἀμελῆσαι δικαιοσύνης here. Compare the list at Leg.716A5-7, where the leader warns the colony against being ἐξαρθεὶς ὑπὸ μεγαλαυχίας, ἢ χρήμασιν ἐπαιρόμενος ἢ τιμαῖς, ἢ καὶ σώματος εὐμορφίᾳ ἅμα νεότητι καὶ ἀνοίᾳ φλέγεται τὴν ψυχὴν μεθ’ ὕβρεως, where φλέγεται takes us back to the φλεγμαίνουσα πόλις of 372E8 and indicates that Glaucon’s behavior at 372CD is itself that of an ἐξαρθείς.

5089

οὔτε χρήμασιν οὔτε ἀρχῇ οὐδεμιᾷ οὐδέ γε ποιητικῇ (B6-7): The list brings forward the last page of Book Nine (591CE) in which the goodness of all traditional goods was made to be conditional on their contributing to the order of the soul. By pointing back in order now to include poetry among such putative goods, adding an otherwise incongruous item to the usual list, Socrates announces the close of the treatment of poetry, evincing once again the intimate connection of that theme to the health of the soul, and in turn the connection of this Book with the previous one (against those who would “separate” it). The list moves from a vaguely generalizing plural to a definitive denial of any counterexample (ἀρχῇ οὐδεμιᾷ) of the complementary item (money and office standing for “external goods”), and then to a climactic and unexpected item (ποιητικῇ), which we may now view as a source of bodily pleasure (for which cf. 606D1-4, 607A5-6, 607C4-5). The shift from οὔτε to οὐδέ and the addition of γε acknowledge the unexpected turn and then insist on it. For such a shift highlighting the ultimate item one may compare 492E3 and 499B2, and distinguish on the other hand the shift to δέ in connection with closing a list by adding not an additional item but an amplification of the penultimate term by the inclusion of its opposite (e.g., Phdo.65C7, Polit.305B8-C1, Rep.382E9-11, cf.Leg.840A).

5090

σύμφημί σοι (B9): The reason he agrees is the arguing they have gone through. His statement that anybody else would likewise agree is a means by which he seeks to warrant that that agreement seems to him “objectively” true. That is, while the criterion of dialectical truth and success is ὁμολογία and nothing more, Glaucon strengthens his already strong previous statement (παντάπασιν σύμφημι, B3) by asserting that his experience of going through the argument has endowed the resulting agreement with what seems to him to be a universally valid warrant. Dramatically, his remark provides an opening for the others present to voice whether they agree or disagree. Adeimantus who is already of greater dramatic importance than all the others, remains silent, all the more conspicuously since it was poetry and its effect on the young that his speech particularly focussed on, whether in confession as to its effect on himself or in complaint as to Socrates’s failure to correct the poetic tradition, or both; yet both have now been dealt with.

5091

τά γε μέγιστα ἐπίχειρα ἀρετῆς καὶ προκείμενα ἆθλα (C1-2): Now that Glaucon has agreed, on the basis of the argument they have gone through (διεληλύθαμεν, B9), that neglecting virtue for the sake of external goods would have a catastrophic effect on how a person turns out in life, it becomes safe to go through (διεληλύθαμεν, C2) the question of what rewards virtue does entail. ἐπίχειρα is an hapax in Plato (as in several other authors. A.PV.319, S.Ant.820, Ar.Sph.581, Antiph.1.20, Dem.Ep.2.38: cf. Hesych., τὰ ὑπὲρ τὸν μισθὸν διδόμενα τοῖς χειροτέχναις). Paley (ad A.PV.319) claims that ἐπι- denotes reciprocation (contrast ἐπι- in ἐπιχειρεῖν). I take the word to be virtually adjectival, contrasted with προκείμενα, to designate rewards (ἆθλα) ready to hand as opposed to those that await us later (cf. 460B2 and n.2517). This is the division actually followed below at 613E6-614).

The question of rewards as formulated by the brothers (363A6-E4; 364A5-365A3; 368B7-366B2) could be designated by the former term, but hardly by the latter (let alone νικητήρια, 613B6), so Socrates's doublet begins to draw an important distinction. ἆθλα are honorific privileges accorded to the living, and monuments are accorded to the dead, by means of which the rest of us, or the gods, commemorate their behavior and achievements as exemplary: cf. 414A2-4, 465D8-E2, 503A6-7, 516C8-9. Here ἆθλα denotes the trophy for winning the ἀγὼν ἀρετῆς (cf. Phdo.114C8). The closest Adeimantus had come to this sort of reward is the blandly abstract εὐδοκιμήσεις (363A2), which are conceived not as an end in themselves but as a means to greater power and wealth (cf. 358A5 and n.1057, 554C12 and n.3905).

5092

ἀμήχανόν τι (C3) echoes the language Glaucon used, and Socrates copied, during their comparison of the just man’s and the unjust man’s happiness (587E5-588A10: n.b. ἀμήχανον, E5; ἀμηχάνῳ, A8). Glaucon's μέγεθος responds to Socrates's superlative, μέγιστα. How, after all, could any effect be greater than the 729 times greater happiness that virtue was discovered, in Book Nine, to confer on a man?

5093

τί … ἐν ὀλίγῳ γε χρόνῳ μέγα (C5): Socrates continues the play on μέγα by adding the dimension of time. The scale of a whole human life now reappears, in transition, as it did at the beginning of Book Five introducing the discussion of radical ideals with Glaucon (450B5-7), and again in the conversation with Adeimantus in Book Six (498D1-6) on the occasion of their radical agreement about the scope of education. This topic has ultimately to do with the paradox that coming to understand life is an event that takes place within the life that comes to be understood, and therefore always involves the tantalizing question, How much of that life should be spent in this way? Even the byplay of question and answer in the latter passage (εἰς μικρόν γε … || εἰς οὐδὲν μὲν οὖν ... , 498D5-6) is reproduced here (for μὲν οὖν cf. Denniston, 476).

5094

With τί οὖν (C9) Socrates requires Glaucon to take the next step after his own μὲν οὖν. What was a transitional topic has now become the topic of conversation!

5095

πράγματι (C9): The sense as well as the syntax is strange and obscure, and provokes Glaucon’s question (cf. next n.).

5096

οἶμαι ἔγωγε (D2): Glaucon says yes when he means no: Instead of answering the question per se his οἶμαι ἔγωγε grants what he knows, from the logic of the last two questions, that Socrates wants him to grant (that it would be for the sake of all time that one would consider the ἀθάνατον πρᾶγμα) because he is in a hurry (note his ἀλλά) to ask a question about Socrates's question, namely, what does Socrates mean by “πρᾶγμα”?

5097

ᾔσθησαι (D3): The verb and its tense treat the deathlessness of the human soul as if it were empirically obvious (cf. n.1571), a still greater paradox that arrests Glaucon's attention so much that it makes him speechless. Thus the verb and tense buy Socrates a berth to elaborate (cf. n.1285).

5098

καὶ ὃς ἐμβλέψας μοι θαυμάσας (D5), the first “stage direction” we have had since the beginning of Book Five (449A7-B6). For ἐμβλέπειν cf. Charm.155C8, 162D4; Alc.I 132E7-3A5. J.-C. are surprised that Glaucon should be surprised to hear a notion that was expressed and even proved in several other dialogues – most notably on the day of Socrates's death -- but they forget that Glaucon did not enjoy the pleasure they have had of being present for those discussions -- especially not that last one in the prison. In the discussion for which he has been present, on the other hand, soul has for several hours been contemplated as the vehicle for living life well or poorly and nothing else.

5099

σὺ δὲ τοῦτ’ ἔχεις λέγειν (D6), somewhere between question and incredulous assertion, strengthened by the personal pronouns.

5100

εἰ μὴ ἀδικῶ γε (D7), idiomatic in strong affirmation: cf. 430E1 and n.2142.

5101

οἶμαι δὲ καὶ σύ (D7) sc. ἔχεις λόγον: In a dialectical context ἔχειν λόγον entails the ability to διδόναι λόγον. That is, Socrates invites Glaucon to answer.

5102

The back and forth about λέγειν and ἀκούειν (D6-12) again signals and arouses the dialectical partnership of asking and answering. Thus, what Glaucon first “hears” is a question (D13): he will not be a passive ἀκροώμενος (cf. 608A) for long. The question brings up a logical relation, which is the usual opening for a dialectical investigation.

5103

ἀπολλύον / διαφθεῖρον // σῷζον / ὠφελοῦν (E3-4): the absence of chiasm is to be expected at the opening of the argument, just as we would expect a chiasm at the closing (cf. n.584). The statement of a simple opposition signals, as often, the beginning of dialectic (cf. n.4510).

5104

ὀφθαλμοῖς ὀφθαλμίαν (E6-609A1): Socrates exploits the etymological connection to illustrate the principle of specificity (ἑκάστῳ, E6) with a particularly palpable example (cf. 375A2-3 and n.1114). The rest of the list can then present a casual sampling in an open-textured way. What is striking about it is the discovery of recondite (i.e., specialized) κακά for common items, which suggests the point he is trying to make, that nature has provided specialized κακά for distinct things (σύμφυτον κακόν, A3).

5105

σχεδόν (A3) modifies πᾶσι but its purpose is to soften σύμφυτον, the very strong claim that the goods and bads that affect individual things are “assigned” them by nature.

5106

τε (A3). The strongest aspect of the exemplary material (νόσημα, 609A4) informs, or infects, the general conclusion (κακόν), regardless of whether we read τε (AFD) or τι (M).

5107

πονηρόν (A6): More like “poor” than “evil:” for the sense cf. 551C6.

5108

διέλυσεν καὶ ἀπώλεσεν (A7): The distinction or gradation between weakening and destroying is now repeated, from E3 (ἀπολλύον καὶ διαφθεῖρον); the aorists are gnomic. διέλυσεν introduces a mechanism of destruction as a synonym for the process of διαφθείρειν.

5109

πονηρία (A9): the abstract term is drawn out of the adjective presently used for its effect (πονηρόν τε ποιεῖ, A6).

5110

ἔτι (A10) is given the work that λείπειν does in an eliminatio.

5111

The eliminatio (B1-2) is weakened by the way it forces into relief the less than fully articulate premise that while there is a distinct evil for each thing this evil is the only evil important enough to cause its demise. Drawing this objection into relief turns out to be Socrates’s way of making a transition to dealing with it (609C2-610C2).

5112

λύειν ἀπολλύον (B5-6) entertains a corroborative but accidental rhyme.

5113

ἤδη (B6) in the meaning it had at 605A8 and B2.

5114

ἦν (B7), the philosophical imperfect, so called. As we discover that there is not, we also discover that there never was an appointed mechanism for its demise.

5115

ἀδικία τε καὶ ἀκολασία καὶ δειλία καὶ ἀμαθία (B11-C1): In short, the four vices that are opposite to the four virtues, or the κακία that is the opposite of ἀρετή.

5116

ἀνόητον (C4) is added in quasi-predicative position after τὸν ἄδικον ἄνθρωπον so that it can both embellish his viciousness with a supplemental vice in addition to ἄδικον (ἀνόητον varying Glaucon's ἀμαθής) but also predicate what it is that leads to his getting caught (by denoting only the conventional notion of cleverness), and broaching thereby the devil's argument that he might do injustice and be clever enough to get away with it, in this life at least.

5117

The sense is that he would be executed at law, but for the sake of the argument this “demise” is given the natural term ἀπολωλέναι, “perish.”

5118

καὶ ἐννόει μή (C2-3): This counterexample or distinguo (C2-5) clarifies the argument about causation, but at the same time it indirectly exposes not only the hope that if a man were smart enough not to get caught he could sin all his life, but even more the hope that if he is does get caught the penalty will actually kill the part of him that was unjust, a hope that obviates any fear of psychic punishments in the life to come—a hope, moreover, that the Epicureans will later buy at the cost of becoming atomists. This underlying point becomes more explicit below (610D5-7). Though this entire argument for immortality has almost comical weaknesses, it is a formidable exhortation to virtue in case it turns out to be correct even though it might not be valid. Compare the implication of Socrates’s proof in the Phaedo, that how he lives his life here is something he no longer has to worry about since he is dying -- though his students do since they will go on living (115A3-C1, pointing back to 107C1ff).

5119

For μηδέ (C7), “not even.” cf. 420D3, 394D4.

5120

εἰς τὸ μὴ εἶναι ἀφικνεῖται (D2): sc. αὐτά (in parallel with τὸ μήδε σῶμα εἶναι above)

5121

χωρίσῃ (D7): The mythical or metaphysical notion of death as separation of soul from body is assumed without cavil or proof, and it is this characterization of a φθίσις of the soul that Glaucon refers to (with τοῦτό γε, D8) and easily denies.

5122

σιτίων (E2): food (e.g., as opposed to drink: 332C9-10, 445A8; Euthyd.280C2, Gorg.490B3, Phd.64D3 [σίτων BW]), in contrast with σῖτος as used above for the farinaceous plant itself and its fruit (A1: cf. perhaps 404B1). Still, Plato often uses σῖτος for food: H.Maj.298E1, Leg.789D5 (σιτίων fecit O2), 839A8 (σιτίων O2), Prot.353C6.

5123

παλαιότης (E2), again (n.1414) does not mean ancientness but just that their prime has passed.

5124

τῷ σώματι σώματος μοχθηρίαν (E5): The article is used of the specific (human) body affected, but is then omitted (as in E3 and C6) in the reference to (human) body generically, which as such has its generic κακόν or agent of degradation (here, μοχθηρίαν). So also ψυχή is anarthrous at C5 and D4.

5125

δι’ ἐκεῖνα ὑπὸ τῆς αὑτοῦ κακίας (E5-6): ὑπό (by the agency of) is being distinguished from δία (because of, as below: 610B1 vs. B5, and C10-D1).

5126

ἔμφυτον (610A2) varying σύμφυτον (609A3, A9), to locate the operation of the κακόν within the entity as opposed to the notionally “outer” operation of the evil that operates notionally “within” the other entity (ἄλλων, A1).

5127

ὀρθότατ’ ἄν, ἔφη, λέγεις (A4), the reading of all mss. against Stephanus's conjecture of αὖ (read by Burnet) requires only a connective like ὅτι between λέγεις and ὀρθότατ’ ἄν (sc. οὐδέποτε ἀξιοῖμεν); whereas, on the other hand, nothing precedes for Stephanus’s αὖ to refer back to. Alternatively emend to ὀρθότατα with Ast (read by Chambry).

5128

κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον (A5): As food is to body so is body to soul: in each case the demise of the one might occasion the demise of the other (δία), but only if the destructive agent of the one happens also to implant into the other its own respective destructive agent will the other in fact be destroyed (sc. by [ὑπό] its destructive agent).

5129

ἀπόλλυσθαι (A7), a conative present.

5130

ἔχει γὰρ λόγον (A9): cf. 608D6 and n.5099.

5131

μή ποτε φῶμεν (B1) picking up the hortatory μή ποτε ἀξιῶμεν of A6, just as that use of αξιοῦν picked up the use at A3. The double exhortation (A10-B1) prepares us for a strong statement of the thesis.

5132

μηδ’ ὑπ’ ἄλλης νόσου μηδ’ αὖ ὑπὸ σφαγῆς ... (B1-2): Omitting αὖ (primum) with ms.F, read by ADM and edd. If Plato wrote it he shouldn't have. The first μηδέ corrects the narrowness of πυρετοῦ by adducing the entire species (νόσου, with dismissive adverbial ἄλλης – for it is νόσος in general that is the σύμφυτον κακόν of body in general: 609A1). To link the species and genus with αὖ is a use alien to the force of αὖ (at 585B13-C1 αὖ does introduce a generalization [ἀρετή], but only to associate it with the generalization that closed the first sublist [τροφή]: compare αὖ introducing parallel inference at 508D8-9 and 602C10-12). The τε with μήτε before μηδέ anticipates not this αὖ (pace Slings, 174) but the next one, μηδ’ αὖ ὑπὸ σφαγῆς, where (conversely) αὖ is completely appropriate. The proper function of αὖ within lists is like that of our semicolon: it separates one sublist from another, whether because it is an opposing list (Leg.819C4-5 [war/peace], Phdo.71B1 [converse]; Phdrs.268C8; Phlb.26B6 [body/soul]; or a complementary list (Charm.158A1 [father/mother]; Leg.889C3-5 [sky/earth], 935B6 [god/man]; Phdrs.238C1); or simply a new list without a special logical relation (Charm.168E9, Leg. 679B8-C1 [carrying forward the distinction between πλεονεξία / φιλονικία above], 872A7-B1, 902D7-9; Phdo.105B1-3; Polit.299B6, Soph.222A9-10; Tht.146D1). See. n.2107 ad 427B7 for exx. from Rep. The only exception is when αὖ is used in decorative variatio for other connectives, as Polit.259B9-10, Tim.69D2, and perhaps Leg.949C6-7. In the present case the second sublist presents very new items, indeed!

5133

ὑπὸ πυρετοῦ μηδ’ ὑπ’ ἄλλης νόσου μηδ’ αὖ εἴ τις ὅτι σμικρότατα ὅλον τὸ σῶμα κατατέμοι (B1-2): The first two items present in species and genus the body's proper or inherent κακόν (i.e., the ὑφ’ οὗ proper to the body), that as such are sufficient for the argument. The second pair go further, and constitute the “stronger” statement of the thesis we were made to anticipate by the double exhortation (n.5131), presenting under the guise of ὑφ’ ὧν (μηδ’ ὑπὸ σφαγῆς, B2), what are in reality two “external” causes (i.e., δι’ ἅτινα) that would most palpably lead to the demise of the body, but for all that show no indication they have introduced the element of its proper demise, let alone that of soul. Fear is being pitted against logic, as it was by Polus at Gorg.473B12-D. There, as here, the threat of murder does not constitute the argument Polus thinks it does (ἐξελέγχειν, D2), as Socrates tells him: μορμολύττει … καὶ οὐκ ἐλέγχεις (D3): cf. ἐξελέγξωμεν and ἀνέλεγκτα above, 610A10 and B1). But there and here, as well as where Glaucon suggested the same series of tortures Polus did (361E3-362A3), the dispositive issue will always be, what part of the soul is listening?

5134

μηδὲν μᾶλλον (B3-4): The formula emphasizes the logic of the claim (n.353), whence ἀποδείξῃ just below. Only the pure logic of argumentation will be enough to refute us; but only by the soul and its λογιστικόν can such a strong position be accepted, let alone understood.

5135

διά (B5), as at 607E5 above.

5136

αὐτὴ ἐκείνη (B5): cf. 609E2.

5137

ἀδικωτέρα καὶ ἀνοσιωτέρα γίγνεται (B6): i.e., to refute (ἐλέγχειν, cf. A10. B1) the position we have adopted, one must prove that the insults to body eo ipso introduce the agent of soul's demise into soul, the necessary evidence for which would be her moral decline. Virtue (and vice) had just been represented by the usual quaternion (609B11-C1) and now are represented by the usual dyad, for which cf. 331A4 and n.101. The idea is that even the greatest violence to body – its being diced into a thousand bits – could only affect or harm soul in the way soul can be affected or harmed.

5138

κακοῦ (B6): Characteristically, at the end of the argument he reverts to the language used at the beginning when the demonstrandum was announced (κακόν, 608E3, E6), after having used a variety of other expressions along the way (κακόν τε καὶ νόσημα, 609A3-4; πονηρία, A9, C5, C6; κακία, D1, D5; μοχθηρία, E5).

5139

ἑκάστῳ (B7) also reverts to the original expression (608E6-609A10) after several other expressions have intervened (namely, αὐτό, 609B5; the bare genitive [ψυχῆς, B5; σώματος, B6; ἄλλου and αὑτοῦ, D9-10; σιτίων, E2, etc.]; οἰκεῖον, D1; ἀλλότριον, 610A2, A7, B6; ἔμφυτον, A2; ἴδιον, B7).

5140

ἐγγιγνομένου (B7) of which the crucial destructive element is the subject, replaces ἐμποιεῖν from above (A6), of which it was the object.

5141

τινα (C1) refers to the same person as τις (B4).

5142

τῶν ἀποθνῃσκόντων (C4): Grasping Socrates's point (ἀλλὰ μέντοι τοῦτό γε), Glaucon redoes the mortal somatic παθήματα listed above (B1-3) with the present participle so as to slow down the process of somatic death and isolate the circumstances under which the corresponding showing (δείξει redoing ἀποδείξει with prefix dropped: n.1567) about soul must be made -- a showing, that is, that psychic degradation is occurring in their souls (whence γίγνεται and the comparative ἀδικώτεραι) in tandem with the degradation of their bodies, which process must precede their psychic demise.

5143

ὁμόσε τῷ λόγῳ … ἰέναι (C6): To meet someone on their own grounds, often, as in poker, raising the ante (cf. Euthyd.294D5-7, Euthyph.3C5, Tht.166A1): the objector is going out on a limb.

5144

πονηρότερος καὶ ἀδικώτερος (C7): A metabasis moving from the general term for degradation (from the argument about πονηρία above) to the degradation specific to the soul.

5145

ἵνα δή (C8): δή “describing an ingenious stratagem or device” (Denniston 232, though he misclassifies our passage).

5146

ἀναγκάζηται (C8) straddles the two meanings of accepting the thesis as proved by reason (cf. 611B10, Tht.153C8, 196B10, 205B11; and cf. Rep.490C9 and n.2904, and 527A6 and n.3477), and being compelled as by another person to accept the thesis against one’s will (e.g., 473A5 and 490C9 [if it is to be read there]). The term therefore (with the collaboration of τολμᾷ and δή) impugns the motives of the opponent.

5147

ἀξιώσομέν που (C9), with the same modality as at A3 and B2 above.

5148

For τῷ ἔχοντι (C10) of an affliction: cf. 575A2.

5149

ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ, τοῦ ἀποκτείνοντος τῇ φύσει (C10-D1): ὑπό (not δία, saved for D3), as corroborated by the exegetical τῇ ἑαυτοῦ φύσει (D1), stresses that the objector is accepting the general theory of the distinct and sole agent of destruction; but ἀποκτείνοντος now substitutes for all the terms that have been used for that agent: with this the objector suggests that ἀδικία only kills him: that it leaves him to live his unjust life more or less unscathed. But the way he says “unscathed” is, τοὺς μὲν μάλιστα θᾶττον τοὺς δ’ ἧττον σχολαίτερον. In conceding (with μέν) that the most (μάλιστα, superlative) unjust men might die sooner (θᾶττον, comparative), he already degrades the influence of the evil, and at the same time creates a berth to assert (with δέ) the more delicious alternative, that the moderately unjust man might be dealt with in a more “leisurely” way. The rhetoric is exactly the same as Adeimantus's καλὸν μὲν ἡ σωφροσύνη τε καὶ δικαιοσύνη, χαλεπὸν μέντοι (364A2-3 and n.796).

5150

ὥσπερ νῦν (D3) refers to the correction of 609C2-5 that we adopted at C6-D2, that it is because of soul's injustice (δία, as opposed to ὑπό, C10) that the man underwent effects that actually killed him (viz., ὑπό the judicial execution by poison).

5151

Μὰ Δία (D5): This is not the beginning of a new argument, pace Adam: φανεῖται is dialectical and depicts, with ἄρα, an inference. Glaucon with his asseveration breaks through to grasp the motive for the previous argument against immortality, that a person might hope to be unjust until it kills him, nothing surviving to be punished in Hades. The obverse of the irrational hope that my vices will release me from themselves and their outcome (ἀπαλλαγὴ κακῶν), is the irrational fear that resolutely evil persons are strengthened by their vice, which obverse Glaucon now voices in appropriately rueful terms: ζωτικόν, ἄγρυπνον, ἐσκήνηται (E2-3).

5152

οὐκ ἄρα πάνδεινον (D5) points to an unexpected (ἄρα) diminution in the fearsomeness of an unjust life – for the unjust man.

5153

ἔσται (D6): the future indicative vividly envisions a world where the opponent’s thesis is true, a world which we however have not yet entered.

5154

τοὺς ἄλλους ἀποκτεινῦσαν (E1), quite the contrary of the objector's view, as vividly stated above, that his injustice will “kill” himself, being the οἰκεῖον κακόν of his soul.

5155

ἔχοντα (E1) reverts to the language of disease (C10) instead of election (D2, D6), in order to add παρέχουσαν to it in oxymoron.

5156

ἄγρυπνον (E3) suggests unjust acts committed while the victims are asleep.

5157

ἐσκήνηται (E3): J.-C. compare ἀπῳκίσθη, Polit.284E7.

5158

σχολῇ … γε (E7) marking an argument a fortiori: cf. 395A1 and n.1459.

5159

ψυχὴν ἤ τι ἄλλο (E8) repeats μήτε ψυχὴν μήτε ἄλλο from C1.

5160

μηδ’ ὑφ’ἑνός (E10): μηδέν in tmesis to accommodate the preposition, as at 553B6.

5161

ἀνάγκη (611A1), asserting the logical necessity of the eliminatio (μήτε οἰκείου μήτε ἀλλοτρίου being exhaustive).

5162

ἐχέτω (A4) with μέν announces the point as secure in order to distinguish it from for the next step.

5163

ἐννοεῖς (A5), a seeing that is in the mind, the third use of this verb in a page or two (609E1, 609C3).

5164

αἱ αὐταί (A5): the sense in which they are “the same” is not yet clear.

5165

πάντα ἂν εἴη τελευτῶντα ἀθάνατα (A8): Perish the thought! The argument is something of an absurdity, as all reductiones ad absurdum are. I think it refers to the Ionian doctrine of antapodosis, in order to assert that our new conclusion about soul's immortality proves that its manner of existence transcends the world of Ionian process (φύσις). Instead, logic (λόγος, A10) requires us to recognize that mortality is the eternal condition of mortal things only!

5166

τοῦτο (A10) referring to the (more fully elaborated) second possibility (οὔτ’ αὖ πλείους), but denying thereby both possibilities with them the entire reductio, according to the conversational convention of “answering the whole by answering the last” (cf. n.199).

5167

ὁ γὰρ λόγος οὐκ ἐάσει (A10-B1) echoes ὁ γὰρ λόγος ᾕρει, 607B3 (cf. 604C7), but the principle was stated in a different way more recently (610A10-C2, n.b. ἐῶμεν, C1): the admonition to rely on reason further prepares us for the ensuing argument about soul’s purity, which only reason could believe.

5168

ἀληθεστάτῃ φύσει (B1): In the context of a heavy reliance on ἔλεγχος (610B10) and logic (λόγος οὐκ ἐάσει, A10) the notion of degrees of truth is a surprise.

5169

γέμειν αὐτὸ πρὸς αὑτό (B3): He retracts the assertion made at 603D5-7 (n.b. ἐναντιωμάτων … γέμει, D7), and the previous elements of the discussion on which that relied (cf. n.4952), so that Glaucon is taken aback (πῶς λέγεις; B4). For ἀνομοιότης as a cause of διαφορά, cf. 547A2-4 (political); for ποικιλία used of the passions of the soul, cf. 604E1 (πολλή adding quantity to qualitative ποικιλία). That αὐτὸ πρὸς αὑτό depicts contradiction within (Shorey) is confirmed by ἐναντιωμάτων in 603D6.

5170

σύνθετόν τε ἐκ πολλῶν καὶ μὴ τῇ καλλίστῃ κεχρημένον συνθέσει (B5-6) now alludes to another argument against immortality drawn in Ionian terms. If our soul is a composite (σύνθετον ἐκ πολλῶν) as the Ionian πάντα are, and especially if the formula of its compounding is so imperfect (μὴ καλλίστῃ κεχρημένον συνθέσει) as to allow διαφορά to arise within it as we have been seen it arise in soul (indeed it was exactly its internal διαφοραί that enabled us to prove it was many not one, in Book Four [where incidentally the language of σύνθεσις is not used: cf. 612A4 and n.5203], when we needed it to be if we were to achieve our search for the analogue of civil justice in it), then soul would likely undergo ὄλεθρος in the form of the διάλυσις that the πάντα are subject to (for διάλυσις as one model of ὄλεθρος cf. 609A7 and n.5108). By another indirect argument (cf. A5-8), our new conclusion that soul is immortal exempts it from being an Ionian type of thing after all.

5171

ὡς νῦν ἐφάνη ἡ ψυχή (B6-7) i.e., ἀίδιον (B5) with ἐφάνη (dialectical, n.205) referring to what the argument has just now (νῦν) revealed, the conclusion just now secured and nailed down (τοῦτο μέν … οὕτως ἐχέτω) at 611A4: cf. n.5162).

5172

ὅτι μὲν τοίνυν (B9): the fact about soul contrasted with its nature (οἷον δέ, B10) that presumably is the cause of the fact.

5173

ἀναγκάσειεν ἄν (B10): For ἀναγκάζειν meaning “to prove necessarily to be true,” cf. n.5146; Tht.153C8 (with all mss), 190E6, and 196B10. καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι (B9-10) alludes to the body of arguments from which he has just drawn two. It ruins the verisimilitude to imagine that Plato is having Socrates allude, for our sake, to arguments within other dialogues, when Socrates's interlocutor Glaucon was not present for them. As usual it is for the purpose of dismissal that Socrates points beyond the present conversation (n.523), and for the sake of emphasizing the next point in the present context: No matter how many arguments we adduce, we must face the implication (ἀναγκάσειαν ἄν, B10: cf. ἀναγκαζόμεθα ὁμολογεῖν: cf. 610C8-9 and 472C8-9) first that the soul is a divine sort of thing, and also as its possessors that we must live this life well. The verb connotes also that the arguments would have the effect of forcing the person who has the deathless soul to face life.

5174

ἀληθείᾳ (B10) bringing forward new category of “truest truth” broached above, τῇ ἀληθεστάτῃ φύσει, B1 and n.5168.

5175

οὐ λελωβημένον δεῖ αὐτὸ θεάσασθαι (B10-C1): λελωβημένον alludes narrowly to poetry’s pathological effect on the soul (605C7, 595B5 [λώβη]), for the sake of which we had lately been viewing the soul in terms of the tripartition that explains this pathology; but this is soon broadened or reformulated as an effect of its κοινωνία with body and other evils. Given the proof that she exists as a thing outside and beyond the “Ionian” realm, we must view her as undergoing a purification (καθαρὸν γιγνόμενον). Socrates returns to the Image of Book Nine, where the ordering element within soul was “perhaps divine” (589D1; cf. E4). Later this divineness reappeared as a justification for nothing less than a sort of enslavement of one man to another (590C8-D6, n.b. θεῖον, D1), as man might properly be slave to god. In the Image proper, that “divine” element was figured as man (588D3, 589A1, A7, D1), but at the same time the whole man-lion-beast of a soul was made to seem a single animal by an outer casing with the look of – a man. There has always been a tension, therefore, between the two men, a tension each of us knows in the vicissitudes and joys and regrets of our mortal, but moral, existence. There is the outer man that others see and Gyges’s Ring could hide, and the inner man hidden by that outer show who lives an inner life fuller or flatter, more or less harmonious, with its own history of darker and brighter times, but most importantly, and always, lives it with conscience and memory. After the long and painful analysis of vice and sin, which in fact extends back to the beginning of Book Eight and ultimately was put upon us by no greater exigency than the boyish needs of Plato's brothers, the present paragraphs are a clarion call by the part of oneself that honors the best part of oneself as a gift from god immanent in the self, now to witness the soul being transformed (καθαρὸν γιγνόμενον), to view the constant imperfections of its life as like the barnacles of Glaucus, external only and affecting the inner glow and focus not at all, something another man could see if only he looked into Glaucus's eyes, the “windows of the soul.” The call itself is too urgent for us to worry about remedial niceties as to whether there are two forms or states (διαθέσεις: cf. the passive διακείμενον, C7) of soul (the objective formulation) or two theoretical orientations we might adopt (the subjective formulation). Phenomenologically it makes no difference; Plato is again at the edge of language; Socrates drove him to it but this is one of the places Plato makes the problem his own. The confusion or interplay between the subjective and the objective will only continue.

5176

ἡμεῖς θεώμεθα (C2). The punctual aorist of the foregoing infinitive (θεάσασθαι, C1) sets out this present indicative as conative. ἡμεῖς, emphatic because expressed, points up a contrast between our (present and subjective) theoretical purposes as students of justice with the (eternal and objective) “truest” truth of soul, which now imposes a new and higher purpose upon us.

5177

ὑπό τε τῆς τοῦ σώματος κοινωνίας καὶ ἄλλων κακῶν (C1-2): Emphatically proleptic τε instructs us to pair ἄλλων κακῶν with τῆς τοῦ σώματος κοινωνίας, not just with τοῦ σώματος. Thus κοινωνία describes only the relation between soul and body, not soul and “this life.”

5178

Reading διαθεατέον (C3), the correction of Laur.80.19 [apud Slings] instead of θεατέον (M), as suggested by διαθετέον of AFD. Thereby we boldly edit a very rare word into the text. After the change of tense between θεάσασθαι (C1) and θεώμεθα (C2) a mere repetition of the verb does not achieve the required contrast, the new and clearer focussing that will be explained below (cf. C5).

5179

οἷόν ἐστιν καθαρὸν γιγνόμενον (C2-3) echoes οἷόν ἐστιν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ above (B10), and therefore καθαρὸν γιγνόμενον redoes τῇ ἀληθείᾳ: the implication is that soul has a true (ἀλήθεια) and essential (ἔστι) nature that it (paradoxically) becomes through purification, in contrast with the mutilated state (λελωβημένον) we have now been theorizing it to be in (ὥσπερ θεώμεθα). Are there truly two states of soul, or are there two theoretical points of view?

5180

καθαρὸν γιγνόμενον (C3): Since the participial formulation is parallel with λελωβημένον we should have expected καθαρὸν γεγονός.

5181

εὑρήσει (C4): sc. ὁ λογισμός. Again at the highest level of theoretical activity Socrates personifies Reason (cf. ὁ λόγος ᾕρει, 607B3 and n.5050; 604C7 and n.4966; λογιστικόν, 580D4 and n.4451). The personification is more than rhetoric. It will seem alien, just as the expulsion of poetry will seem rash, to the extent that we fail to recognize our own rational experience as real; but when we do, we see there is no clearer way to speak.

5182

διόψεται (C5) continuing the fine focus of διαθεατέον (C3), recalls the search for the inner psychic state that Socrates invoked at 577A2-5 (τῇ διανοίᾳ [577A2] ~ λογισμῷ [C3] // διιδεῖν, διορᾷ [577A3,5] ~ διόψεται [C5] // εἰσελθόντας θεάσασθαι [577E1] ~ διαθεατέον [C3]).

5183

δικαιοσύνας τε καὶ ἀδικίας (C5): the plurals of the abstracts are striking, and denote the phases of the argument as it studied the forms of justice and injustice in cities and in souls of various kinds. Compare πάθη τε καὶ εἴδη (of soul, 612A5). The new vision of soul will enable us to see the theoretical (θεώμεθα, θεάσασθαι above) work we did previously in a new light.

5184

οἷον ἐν τῶ παρόντι φαίνεται (C6-7): οἷον associates the phrase with οἷόν ἐστι τῇ ἀληθείᾳ (B9) and οἷόν ἐστιν καθαρὸν γιγνόμενον (C2-3), and therefore lays stress on the shift from ἐστὶν to φαίνεται. There at two “truths” (as above there was a gradation of truth: nn.5174, 5176): the truth of how soul appears ἐν τῷ παρόντι and the truer reality of the soul purified. ἐν τῷ παρόντι, temporal, refers back to νῦν (C2) and continues the (subjective) contrast between our present theoretical orientation and the new one being proposed (described in prospect by the futures εὑρήσει and διόψεται); but how can ἐν τῷ παρόντι not also refer (objectively) to the present state of soul (λελωβημένον), the state of soul in this life?

5185

τεθεάμεθα μέντοι (C7) answering εἴπομεν μέν (C6): “What we have been arguing (μέν) is true (ἀληθῆ) but is so only (μέντοι) from the theoretical stance we had adopted, which stance placed soul in a state (διακείμενον)” -- the subjective formulation, according to which we placed soul in that state. Alternatively we can give the sentence an objective interpretation, that we have been viewing a soul placed in a state (namely, λελωβημένον).

5186

ὥσπερ οἱ τὸν θαλάττιον Γλαῦκον ὁρῶντες (C7-D1): the vagueness of διακείμενον (in both its reference and its syntax) leads us to anticipate that ὥσπερ will specify the soul's state (i.e., we anticipate διακείμενον ὥσπερ τὸν Γλαῦκον). Instead, ὥσπερ introduces a description of the theoretical position we have taken (i.e., τεθεάμεθα ὥσπερ οἱ ὁρῶντες), the subjective version described in the previous note, and repeats therefore the ὥσπερ of C2 (λελωβημένον … ὥσπερ νῦν ἡμεῖς θεώμεθα).

5187

The fisherman Glaucus (D1) ate a strange herb that made him immortal but turned him into a monster with fins. Though rejected on the shore because of his looks, by Scylla, he was received by Oceanus and Tethys to dwell in the sea, where he guided wayward sailors with his prophetic powers. So also (objectively) the soul lives within an alien and monstrous body affected by the sea of phenomena, but nevertheless retains its orientation to the world beyond change; while also (subjectively: see prev. n.) we may imagine ourselves wayward and lost in that sea and looking into Glaucus's prophetic eyes for the guidance and mooring we lack, wandering disconcerted through this world (602C11-D1 and n.4920, 444B7-8 and n.2344). The idea is developed just below (E1ff).

5188

τὴν ψυχήν (D6): Soul (ψυχή, B9) moved into the neuter gender for the description of her degraded state (B9-C7) -- at first her predicates, starting with οἷον (B10), but then even herself: αὐτό (C4), αὐτοῦ (C6), αὐτό (C7). Now as we see her being purified (καθαρὸν γιγνόμενον, C3) she returns to her true gender and stays there (E1-612A6). Compare the “hominification” of soul at 620E (n.5387).

5189

ὦ Γλαύκων (D7): the phonetic proximity of the two names may as well be part of Socrates's paraenesis: cf. n.4991.

5190

ἐκεῖσε (D7) is more than ἄλλοθι as it is often translated: Socrates is speaking anamnetically, as βλέπειν as opposed to σκοπεῖν, confirms (cf. n.1776).

5191

This image of Glaucus of course reformulates the Image of Book Nine. There the “man within” was depicted as outnumbered by the other parts of soul (cf. esp. 588E6 and n.4645), though being their natural leader and perhaps divine (ἴσως, 589D1). Now the “perhaps” becomes factual and the other parts of soul are seen as mere accretions to the leading part that so obscure its nature that in order to know it we must look off to the object that forms it by being the object of its love, to 'know it even as it is known,' if you will. In the Image the turmoil within our soul was hidden by a covering that itself made us look like men and indicated there was a man inside; here it is the inner truth and order that is hidden and we can come to see it only by remembering its true orientation. The argument has brought us far enough and raised our consciousness by such a high degree that it is within our reach to identify with that part, and within the reach of Glaucon to identify with Glaucus.

5192

ἐννοεῖν number four (E1).

5193

ἅπτεται (E1): Conative present. For the expression cf. the climactic remark at 490A8-B7 describing the philosopher’s love (n.b. αὐτοῦ ὃ ἔστιν ἑκάστου τῆς φύσεως ἅψασθαι ᾧ προσήκει ψυχῆς ἐφάπτεσθαι τοῦ τοιούτου [490B3-4]).

5194

ἐφίεται ὁμιλιῶν (E2): cf. πλησιάσας καὶ μιγείς (490B5), in obvious contrast to the consorting of the lesser parts of the soul with mimetic art (603A10-B2, n.b. προσομιλεῖ).

5195

συγγενής (E2): cf. συγγενεῖ, 490B4. ὡς reminds us that we just proved her immortal.

5196

πᾶσα (E4) is adverbial. It is more important to recognize the total dedication of the “true nature” of soul to this dogged pursuit than to glance back at the previous version of soul as tripartite by saying the “true” part has separated from the others and therefore is all that is there. Though he had alluded to the tripartition in the argument about the σύνθετον and its σύνθεσις (B5-6), he rather emphatically abandons any continued reference to it at C1-2 when he characterizes the causes of soul's “mutilation” (λελωβημένον, a process that had originally been articulated exactly on the basis of the tripartition: 595A5-B7) as ἡ τοῦ σώματος κοινωνία καὶ ἄλλα κακά. Moreover, in the end (612A4) he is not certain whether the soul in its true nature is simple or manifold.

5197

The reciprocal relation here described (E4) of the zealous search (ἐπισπομένη) met with the response of guidance from beyond (ἐκκομισθεῖσα), symbolizes the primary experience of reason (cf. γεννήσας νοῦν καὶ ἀλήθειαν γνοίη τε καὶ ἀληθῶς ζῴη καὶ τρέφοιτο καὶ οὕτω λήγοι ὠδῖνος, πρὶν δ’ οὔ, 490B5-7), and can be placed alongside many later equivalents—e.g., Knock and it shall be opened; We shall know Him even as we are known. We have seen (and even felt), the soul being purified incrementally by (and during) the theorization of standard studies, in Book Seven (e.g. 527D6-E2). The idea Socrates here proposes, to study the truth of soul by studying the object toward which in its best condition it is oriented, is perhaps the most philo-sophical idea there could be!

5198

ἐκ τοῦ πόντου (E5): The analogy between soul and Glaucus now begins to be drawn, an analogy that prefers opportunistic allusiveness over internal consistency, like the explosion of metaphors at 586A6-B4, a passage to which it presently alludes.

5199

γεηρὰ καὶ πετρώδη (612A1-2): The chiastic order (cf. ὄστρεα … πέτρας, 611D5) of “before and after” applies the comparison or the metaphor of Glaucus to the soul.

5200

ἄγρια (A2) brings forward the notion of the beast in θηρίῳ (611D5) but the heap of images becomes slovenly and even ugly. Earth and sea are mixed together, and then eaten, and then many and wild. For its lurching nonsense the passage resembles the absurd picture of the cattle, heads earthward, eating at table and mounting each other, and their horns becoming metal armaments since they are men after all (586A6-B3). This mess of images stands in strong contrast to the concerted and powerful image of the soul freed, reminiscent of the contrast between the descriptions of the moderate home life (372AB) and the feverish city at (373AC).

5201

ἑστιάσεων (A3), following and emphasizing ἑστιωμένῃ (A1), now treats the entirety of earthly life as a feast, recalling the εὐωχίαι of 586A1-6 that disable persons from knowing real pleasure, and recalling the senseless revelry (μέθην αἰώνιον) fabled to await the good in Hades (363C4-D2), than which Adeimantus had criticized his caretakers (362E4-3A1) for having nothing more to promise in the afterlife (363E3).

5202

ἴδοι (A3) corresponds with ἴδοιεν (D1). The aorists denote making out what is being seen.

5203

εἴτε πολυειδὴς εἴτε μονοειδής (A4): it is not impossible that she might have many aspects after all. The language of εἴδη recalls the analysis in Book Four, which was, after all, a logical analysis and not a mechanical one.

5204

ὅπῃ … καὶ ὅπως (A4-5) cf. 621B; Leg.652A, 899A9, B8; Phd.100D6 (and Leg.872D7, Phlb.12C3, Prot.358A7, Tim.28B2; Aesch.Ag.160, etc.): a formula by which the speaker acknowledges his puniness in the face of what he tries to articulate (or calls upon: Crat.400E1), hoping his ignorance will not limit the illumination he may receive, comparable if you will to the worshipper in a kletic hymn aporizing over what epithets or sedes to adduce, or which hypomnesis, to secure the god’s attention and clemency. It is more of the symbolization of participation. By equivalent formulas Plato elsewhere attributes such important knowledge to god, while men must guess and hope: Leg.641A, Phdrs.246A, Tim.72D. Cf. n.1465.

5205

καὶ τότ’ ἄν (A3): No more will be said, or needs to be said, about the truth of the soul purified, beyond these adumbrations. Halliwell is surprised to find no “philosophy” in the Myth of Er; but that story deals with persons temporarily dead, not souls purified and not metaphysical entities, as he presumes (in his notes ad 611C1, 611E1); nor does the myth present “philosophical” symbolism (contra his note ad 614B2), but moral beings of flesh and blood.

5206

οὐκοῦν seven (A8).

5207

ἐν τῷ λόγῳ (A8), a new expression by which Socrates looks back over the discussion which he has just declared to be complete (ἐπιεικῶς … διεληλύθαμεν, A6)., indirectly announcing thereby a large closure that reaches back at least to the beginning of Book Two. Cf. n.5219.

5208

τά τε ἄλλα … καί (A8-B1) another virtual ἄλλως τε καί construction, dismissing the treatment of soul's human life (A5-6) which itself constituted the brunt of the answer to the challenge the brothers had put before Socrates, in order to highlight the fact (καὶ οὐ ..., B1) that now that the treatment is done they can truly say they stayed clear of considering the rewards.

5209

ἐπῃνέκαμεν (B1): surely the corrector of A is right, against ἐπηνέγκαμεν of AFDM: Socrates is quoting Adeimantus at 367D3 (ἐπαίνεσον), D6 (ἐπαινούντων), and 366E3 (ἐπῄνεσεν), another instance of “accuracy” in quotation (n.359), along with ἄριστον, 612B3 (n.5211); δόξης, 612D4 (n.5226); and ἀνέξῃ, 613C8 (cf. nn.5249 and 917).

5210

ἔφατε (B2): Socrates uses the plural because while it is Adeimantus that said this (ὥσπερ ὁ γενναῖος Ἡσίοδός τε καὶ Ὅμηρός φασιν, 363A7-C2), it is Glaucon that he is speaking to. In looking back he appropriately quotes, with the words οὐ τοὺς μισθοὺς οὐδὲ τοὺς δόξας (B1), the end of the two brothers’ speeches (on the expression μισθοὶ καὶ δόξαι cf. 367D4, and D6-7 and n.915). This is the attention to detail and the literal accuracy of back-reference more typical than what we saw at 603CE (n.4952). Thrasymachus is not included in the second plural, here or below: he refused to participate in the dialectic, and always will. Moreover, Socrates owes him nothing and lent him nothing. If Socrates had explicitly included him, his tyrannical manner and temperament would have compelled him to interrupt the argument.

5211

ἄριστον (B3) cf. ἄριστον δικαιοσύνη, 366C5; and cf. 366E8-9.

5212

αὐτῇ ψυχῇ (B3). To show this particular point, that soul in itself benefits from justice, was not part of the charge that Glaucon and Adeimantus placed upon Socrates. They wanted to know the benefit justice confers on the man who has it in his soul by virtue of its being in his soul (358B5-6; 366E5-6; 367B4-5, D3-4, E3). Strictly, the discovery that justice is a matter of the soul’s internal order only, and that how “the man” is virtually identical to how his soul is, with the implication that a civic construction of justice is irrelevant and obsolete, was reached at the end of Book Four (443C9ff).

5213

καὶ πρὸς τοιούτῳ δακτυλίῳ τὴν Ἄιδος κυνῆν (B5): anarthrous τοιούτῳ is derogatory; the repetition of δακτύλιον indicates he is joking about a sartorial ensemble; but the mention of Hades (cf.Iliad 5.844-5) also alludes to the implication with which the proof of immortality is pregnant: that the unjust soul will be miserable not only whether discovered or not, but also whether here (where he will need the ring) or in Hades (where he will need the cap). In reverting to the arguments of the brothers in Book Two, the reference also recalls the more “extreme” position (ἐπὶ πλέον, 363A5; cf. θαυμασιώτατοι, 364B3) Adeimantus there presented about the gods and in particular the afterlife, no less than three times (363C3-D7, 364B5-365A3, 365D6-366B2).

5214

νῦν ἤδη (B7): νῦν means now as opposed to then, referring to the attitude adopted during Book Two; ἤδη means from this point forward (into the future) as at 605A8, B2, and 609B6.

5215

ἀνεπίφθονον (B7). Truly just behavior will incite the admiration of others, once it is understood as the expression of a beautifully ordered soul as we now do (cf.D3-9 below); and as such the just man should, and may, receive ἆθλα—honor and respect—from his neighbors; unless of course we find it more convenient to have him killed. In returning to the hypothetical that Glaucon required of him in Book Two, Socrates now brings out into the open the element of envy in Glaucon’s gratuitous outburst of tortures (361E1-362A3 and nn.763, 769, 770). Compare the topic of envy at the crucial stage of the argument with Adeimantus in Book Six (502D7 and n.3093; and the role of envy in the resistance to philosophy: nn.763, 1994, 2373, 2832, 2834, 2923, 3002, 3042.

5216

μισθούς (B8) again denoting the distinction Glaucon drew at the beginning of Book Two.

5217

ὅσους τε καὶ οἵους … παρ’ ἀνθρώπων τε καὶ θεῶν ζῶντός τε ἔτι τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ ἐπειδὰν τελευτήσῃ (C1-3): the thorough and balanced recitation of the rewards imitates the proud challenge Adeimantus made in his peroration (καὶ παρὰ θεοῖς καὶ παρ’ ἀνθρώποις … ζῶντές τε καὶ τελευτήσαντες, 366B5-6: cf. n.875). The brunt of his speech was a critique of poetry and in particular its promises for the afterlife: clearly these background ideas provide the program for Book Ten.

5218

By repeating his ἆρ’ οὖν (C5) from above (B7), Socrates acts as if he were cashing in on Glaucon’s good will.

5219

ἐδανείσασθε ἐν τῷ λόγῳ (C5): For the metaphor of an interlocutor “borrowing” an hypothesis from his interlocutor like a loan to start a business, cf. Polit.267A. Compare the different but also financial metaphor of postponing to pay the principal by paying the interest, at 506D8-507A4. For ἐν τῷ λόγῳ cf. n.5207: we can now say that the logos in question is the joint venture of building a city and looking for justice in it, and that Adeimantus and Glaucon's speeches provided the terms.

5220

τί μάλιστα; (C6): Glaucon is brought up a bit. Calling in a loan always provokes a little amnesia (whence Socrates’s ἢ οὐ μνημονεύεις, D1); but more importantly in his eager zeal to present (and confess) his position in Book Two, he failed to recognize how it might have grated on Socrates to have to hypothesize it.

5221

ἔδωκα (C7): The asyndeton feigns indignation. He is referring in particular to Glaucon’s postulates at 361A5-B1 and B8-D1, presented impersonally with verbal adjectives and the third person imperatives of geometrical proof; and to Adeimantus’s restatement of them, delivered with characteristic belligerence as διακελέυματα (367B6) and with the threat of slander in case Socrates should not grant them (B7-C5).

5222

Reading ᾐτεῖσθε (C8) with A (ἠτεῖσθε M Stob. : ἡγεῖσθε FD). With the imperfect Socrates recalls the importunity of their request in contrast with the generosity he exhibited in his granting it, which he now wishes Glaucon to reciprocate.

5223

ἵνα … κριθείη (C10-D1): remembering Glaucon’s claims at 360E1-3ff and 361D7-E1. Cf. the prominence Socrates gave the notion of κρίσις in Book Nine (cf. nn.4385 and 4398).

5224

ἀδικοίην μεντἄν (D2): At the same time it is idiomatic (meaning “I would be quite off base:” cf.608D7 and n.5100), Glaucon tunes in on Socrates’s joke: cf. E1.

5225

δοκεῖσθαι (D5): the passive represents an expression with δοκεῖν plus verbal adjective such as δοτέον δοκεῖν or θετέον δοκεῖν, serving now as the counterplea to Glaucon’s ἀφαιρετέον τὸ δοκεῖν (361B8).

5226

ὥσπερ ἔχει δόξης (D4): the genitive of the topic (cf. n.4377): Socrates is again quoting a remark by Adeimantus in Book Two: ὡς … ἔχουσι τιμῆς, 365A5-6.

5227

ἵνα καί (D6) answering pari passu Glaucon’s purpose in his request for the opposite hypothesis as Socrates just depicted it (C10-D1: cf.360E1-2).

5228

ἐξαπατῶσα (D8) recalls the corrosive and dispiriting effect on men when they contemplate being deceived by the gods (cf. 382E9, the example at 383B involving Thetis, and n.1321), but a specific reference is not needed. The expression (ἀπὸ τοῦ εἶναι / διδοῦσα // ἐξαπατῶσα τῷ ὄντι λαμβάνοντας) is a chiasm of the contrapositive (n.1797), in which ἐξαπατῶσα plays the converse of διδοῦσα.

5229

λαμβάνοντας (D9), present. Cf. its use with ἀδικία at 610D2 and D6 (vs. ἔχειν, E1). It is not only that her deserts had been withheld by the hypothesis Glaucon and Adeimantus forced onto Socrates, but also that the hypothesis was in itself offensive to those who know her, as resembling the cynicism of a Thrasymachus. We are moving beyond the question of knowing what justice is, and moving toward dropping our envy and hatred of it, and loving it instead for what it is.

5230

δίκαια … αἰτῇ (E1): αἰτῇ refers to Socrates’s ἀπαιτῶ of D3 (not ᾐτεῖσθε, C8) the prefix being dropped in repetition as usual (cf. n.1567).

5231

ἀποδώσετε (E2) returns to the metaphor of the loan. The bold claim that the gods do not know or can be deceived was voiced by one part of the young man's soul against the other, in Adeimantus's oration (365D6-E6).

5232

θεούς γε (E3). γε in a single gesture indicates and passes over spelling out the assertion that gods by their very nature are not likely to be unaware. So it was used, and for a similar purpose, at 379B1.

5233

κατ’ ἀρχὰς ὡμολογοῦμεν (E6). It is not and cannot be to his request that Thrasymachus grant that gods love the just and hate the unjust (352A10-B2) that Socrates here refers (per Halliwell) -- not only because Thrasymachus does not there grant it but more importantly because Thrasymachus refused to participate in the common work of the dialectic, in which case ὡμολογοῦμεν would become empty of meaning (cf. nn. ad 612B2 and ad 588B3). The proposition is in any case an ἔνδοξον: Cephalus does not need to defend it at 330D7-331A10, nor does Socrates at 501C1-2. Socrates only means to remind Glaucon of the peroration of his own speech, in which he initially (κατ’ ἀρχάς) laid out the problem, and in particular to his remark that the unjust but just-seeming man would even be θεοφιλέστερον in comparison with the just but seeming unjust man, by virtue of his greater ability to afford sacrifices from his ill-gotten gains (362C4-6: n.b. καὶ θεοφιλέστερον). Having now taken away the “seeming” that Glaucon required us by hypothesis to add, which it is the burden of the present argument to do, the gods would behave according to the usual expectation, to which Glaucon’s own καί had there taken exception. In short, Socrates’s ὡμολογοῦμεν is pointing to Glaucon’s καί.

5234

ἀναγκαῖον … κακόν (613A2). On divine punishment cf. 380A7-B6. That the προτέρα ἁμαρτία took place in a previous life (pace J.-C.) is not implied by the imperfect ὑπῆρχεν (pace Adam), I think.

5235

τῶν δοκούντων κακῶν (A5-6). πενία and νόσος are as truly evil as health and wealth are truly goods (of the “external” type). The sense is not that they might seem but not be bad, but that from the short sights of the man involved it is unclear how to measure them against the ultimate outcome, as we learned from the νόμος at 604B9-C3-4: οὔτε δήλου ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ τε καί κακοῦ τῶν τοιούτων (sc. συμφορῶν).

5236

τούτῳ (A6): emphatic as at 582D11. Cf. n.5238 below.

5237

ζῶντι ἢ καὶ ἀποθανόντι (A6-7). Cf. n.4818. For the fulfillment of this promise cf. 614B1ff and n.5256.

5238

The theme of an ὁμοίωσις θεῷ (B1) has broken through before: cf. 383C4 and n.1323, 501B5-7; and it underlay the converse notion that to know the soul in its true state we must look off to the divine (611D7-12A5). The communication goes both ways: it is by virtue of my own kinship with god that I now believe in the face of life's vicissitudes that he will preserve me! See further 614B1 and n.

5239

εἰ δεῖ τὸ ὂν τιθέναι (B9-10) In contrast again with impossible hypothesis (κἂν εἰ μὴ δυνατόν, 612C8) Socrates had been constrained to loan him (ibid., C7-D1: ὅμως δοτέον εἶναι), as well as the envy behind it: cf. 612B7 and n.5215 (to posit truth needs no special motive).

5240

δεινοί τε καὶ ἄδικοι (B10): τε καί dispositively and without fanfare associates Thrasymachus’s appeal (δεινοί) with his substance (ἄδικοι).

5241

τοῦ βίου (C5): adding the article breaks the governance of ἕκαστος which had in any event become weak.

5242

The metaphor of the race minimizes our lurking readiness to envy virtue: athletics is the only field of human activity in which rewards are given immediately and unstintingly (whence its name) with maximal popular unanimity (though, even so, φθόνος is a major theme for Pindar!). Here more than elsewhere we find it palatable to hope that “the best man win,” and we admire the winner and feel sorry for the loser (B12-C1). All that is at stake in their εὐδοκιμεῖν and ἆθλα φέρεσθαι (C5-6) is other persons' willingness to grant them these things—i.e., to honor virtue rather than allow envy to ignore, or lynch, or contrive a judicial murder for the good man.

5243

ἀνέξῃ ἄρα (C8): The semantics of the verb implies that Socrates imputes some envy into what Glaucon had said (ἅπερ αὐτὸς ἔλεγες): cf. ad E4, below.

5244

ἔλεγες (C8), imperfect of citation: cf. next note.

5245

With γαμοῦσί τε ὁπόθεν ἂν βούλωνται ἐκδιδόασί τε εἰς οὓς ἂν ἐθέλωσιν (D3-4) it becomes ineluctably clear that he is quoting Glaucon’s peroration, from 362B3 (γαμεῖν ὁπόθεν ἂν βούληται, ἐκδιδόναι εἰς οὕς ἂν βούληται), where again the expressions refer to alliances achieved by the marriage of one’s son or of one’s daughter, respectively.

5246

ἐκείνων / τῶνδε (D5): With a diplomatic use of the demonstratives, Socrates embraces his own candidates as his own (with “first person” τῶνδε) while he creates a salubrious distance between his interlocutor’s candidates and his interlocutor himself by placing them into the third person (ἐκείνων rather than τούτων). Moreover he demurs to go through the rest of Glaucon’s list in the same detail since the abuse of power cannot so easily be made to resemble the execution of a privilege.

5247

οἱ πολλοὶ αὐτῶν (D6): Socrates provides a fleeting opportunity for the naysayer to cite counterexamples.

5248

With εἶτα (E2), which bothered Ast into excision and Stallb. into transposition, Socrates “quotes” the perverse deliberateness of Glaucon’s sequence of tortures, just as he had quoted the privileges of the unjust, above (D1-5).

5249

ἀνέξῃ (E4), repeated from C8 above. When used of one person’s reaction to another (as opposed to the uses at 518C10 and 363B7) ἀνέχεσθαι has only appeared in the negative (as a reaction in conversation, cf. 479A4, 480A4, 493E4 [of the unphilosophical refusal to accept the Ideas], cf. Charm.162D2; or as a response that threatens to prevent a course of action by force, cf. 564D10, 579A6): thus we do not really know what it means to abide (in the positive) a statement being made. In his present question, Socrates is inviting Glaucon to say “No” (for he does not ask, οὐκ ἀνέξῃ; which would make way for the answer, “Yes”). From the cases we have seen it would appear that not tolerating a statement consists of more than the dialectical responses of disagreeing, or denying, or declining to grant or to agree (ἀποδέχεσθαι has this range of meaning: 340C2 and n.357), but apparently threatens even more than quitting the conversation.

At 367D5 Adeimantus told Socrates that from others he would “accept” (ἀποδεχοίμην, mss.F et in marg. γρ. AT) a praise of justice only for its outcomes, but not from him. For that passage the apparatus of Chambry gives the fullest report: ἀποδεχοίμην F et in marg. γρ. AT : ἀποσχοίμην AT et in m. γρ. W : ἀνασχοίμην T2W (sic). Socrates throughout the present passage is turning the tables on the brothers in response to the speeches they made at the beginning, so that the presence of ἀνέξῃ, here, even though it is here addressed to Glaucon rather than Adeimantus and despite its inferior historical credentials, is dispositive for adopting ἀνασχοίμην at 367D5 (cf. n.917).

5250

δίκαια γὰρ λέγεις (E5), in comparison with ἀδικοίην μεντἄν (612D2) and δίκαια αἰτῇ (612E1) brings the playful ambiguity of speaking in a dialectically just manner about justice still closer to the surface. One might hear an echo of πιστεύω γὰρ δίκαια εἶναι ἃ λέγω at Apol.17C2-3 and 18A4-5 cf. also 28B5), where Socrates ended up being wrong in the belief that the Athenians would acquit him simply because his position was just. Why is it, after all, that persons resent the philosopher asking about the truth? Why was the reaction against the Ideas so strong in Book Five (the other time ἀνέχεσθαι was used)? Why the resistance of Polemarchus and then the entire group at the end of Book Four? How can it be that calling Socrates σοφός (though, as he says, he is not) is an instrument of calumny (at Apol.23A3), but that Socrates’s admirers will castigate the jurors that voted against him, for killing a σοφός (though, as he again says, he is not, at 38C3-4)? Cf. n.5054. From the elevated plane Socrates and Glaucon have reached, these questions are less vivid and less lethal than usual.

5251

ἆθλά τε καὶ μισθοὶ καὶ δῶρα γίγνεται πρὸς ἐκείνοις τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς (614A1-2) repeats πρὸς ἐκείνοις καὶ τοὺς μισθούς from 612B8, and thereby closes the section by repeating the words with which it opened; but the triad that redoes μίσθους marks (with ἆθλα and δῶρα) the advance that has been made against the forces of envy, and it also resembles the triad that Adeimantus had used when he enjoined Socrates to supplement the wisdom literature with a praise of justice per se, in addition to dealing with δόξας τε καὶ τιμὰς καὶ δωρεὰς τὰς ἀπ’ αὐτῶν (sc. δικαισύνης καὶ ἀδικίας) γιγνομένας (366E4-5): there the more venal term μισθούς (cf.n.5091 ad 608C1-2) was of course absent as being unpraiseworthy, since μισθοί are intrinsically valuable.

5252

καλά τε καὶ βέβαια (A4): Glaucon remembers ἀγαθὰ διδοῦσα … καὶ οὐκ ἐξαπατῶσα (sc. ἡ δικαιοσύνη), 612D8.

5253

ἑκάτερος (A7): the just and the unjust man. Adeimantus, similarly, referred compendiously to the consequences of both a just and an unjust life with positive terms only (the negative terms implied), in the statement Socrates has just now (perhaps) quoted (cf. n.5251, n.b. the plural αὐτῶν).

5254

τελέως ἑκάτερος αὐτῶν ἀπειλήφῃ … ὑπὸ τοῦ λόγου ὀφειλόμενα (A7-8): Again the metaphor that the conversation of Books Two through Nine (ὁ λόγος, as at 612A8 and C5) was made possible by the brothers “borrowing” a false hypothesis from Socrates, which must now be “paid back.” Now that Glaucon has “tolerated” Socrates turning his own assertions on their head (n.5249), it is only to the men themselves, the just and unjust, that this last payment will be rendered. Socrates is not alluding to Polemarchus's definition of justice as repayment since that would be pointless.

5255

With ἀκοῦσαι (A7-8), repeated (pace Stephanus), Socrates continues the notion of giving truth its proper hearing (cf. 613E3, echoing λέγοντος and ἐρῶ at 613C8-D1). As Socrates’s begins to forgo dialogue and analysis for praise, Plato indicates to us that the dialogue is coming to an end.

5256

ἥδιον ἀκούοντι (B1): With ἀκούοντι (as opposed to ἀποκρινομενῷ) Glaucon recognizes and acknowledges that he will be “treated” to a performance. For ἀκούοντι describing the passive disposition of the listener, cf. ἄκουε τοίνυν ὡς ἐροῦντος, the expression with which Socrates introduces his “autobiographical” narrative at Phdo.96A6. The reason this will be so pleasant (οὐ πολλὰ ἄλλ’ ἥδιον) is that it will fulfill the promise and resolve the paradox of 613A5-7.

5257

ἀλλὰ οὐ μέντοι (B2) continued by ἀλλ’ ἀλκίμου μέν (B3) along with the absence of an answering δέ, steps back to a preliminary point (pace Denniston, 378).

5258

Ἀλκίνου γε ἀπόλογον (B2): The diction (ἀπόλογος rather than ἀπολογία) and the order of the phrase (Ἀλκίνου ἀπόλογος), reproduced twice by Aristotle, is distinctive and fixed. From the Poetics (1455A2-4) we learn that the Ἀλκίνου ἀπόλογος is the response of Odysseus as guest to his host's (Alcinous's) request that he tell him who he is, a request completely polite due to his noticing Odysseus weep at hearing the minstrel Demodocus sing the story of the Trojan Horse (Od.8.531-586). At Rhet.3.16 (1417A) the Ἀλκίνου ἀπόλογος serves as an example of the tactic of answering a charge (n.b., ἀπολογουμένῳ, 1417A10) with a vivid narration (λέγειν πραττόμενα rather than πεπραγμένα) so as to incite pity or fear. In both cases the citations point to the response as being autobiographical. Whereas the formula οὐκ ἐμὸς ὁ λόγος (for which cf. Apol.20E5, Symp.177A2; Eur. Hel.513, f.484 Nauck; D.H.Rhet.9.11; Call.Hym.5.56; Plut.QC 661A, 718A; Luc.Hermot.47; Julian 197C, 387B; Hor.Sat.2.2.2) introduces a story as resting on better authority than the man's authority who is telling it, to call a story an Ἀλκίνου ἀπόλογος recommends it as certainly true because the teller is the person the story is about and knows what happened first hand. Only later comes its proverbial sense (Paroim.Gr. I.210, 2.13) of going on with nonsense at too great a length – a thing we all tend to do, after all, when speaking about our favorite topic. Cf. K.Tuempel, Philologus 52(1896)523-33 for a complete assembling of the evidence.

5259

ἀλλ’ ἀλκίμου μὲν ἀνδρός ... (B2-3): The sound play trumps his shift from the (awkward) objective genitive of the byword (Ἀλκίμου) to the subjective genitive he now needs (ἀλκίμου ἀνδρός). Socrates will not, to reproduce the solecism in English, “tell a tale he underwent himself, but a brave man did, a man called Er.” The μέν solitarium recommends Er as deserving our attention by suggesting there is more to be said about him than that he is ἄλκιμος. With the relative ὅς ποτε (B4) his storytelling is suddenly underway and we learn what that “more” is. An allusion to the Nekuia of the Odyssey is no more than a happy tangent. Like anyone else Socrates must credential his source when he retells a story (e.g., Phdo.108C); but here as in the Odyssey citing a source is unnecessary since the story is the teller's own. Thus, it is an Ἀλκίνου ἀπόλογος after all: it's just that Socrates is not the “himself” the story is about. The fact that it is autobiographical embodies the crucial truth-modality of the ensuing myth, that the adventurer survived to tell it so that the story itself survived for us in this world. We are constantly reminded and almost never allowed to forget this crucial modality by the style of the telling, namely, the fact that the whole tale is presented in oratio obliqua. I have adopted an orthography to reflect this fact, by indenting Socrates's quotation of Er's narrative, and double-indenting Er's quotation of personages in Hades (615D3-6A3, 617D6-E5); but when Socrates interrupts his narrative of Er's narrative in order to address Glaucon directly (at 618B6-9B3, 619D5-E5, and of course at the end 621B8-D3), I revert to the normal margins.

5260

τοῦ Ἀρμενίου (B3): The evidence that Armenios is his patronym rather than a designation of his nationality comes from Clem.Al. Strom.710§24, who identifies Er with Zoroaster, whom he goes on to place into the nominative in order to say he wrote the story, and then describes him as Ἀρμενίου τὸ γένος Πάμφυλος. (where note the nominative).

5261

ἀνεβίω, ἀναβιοὺς δέ (B7): such epanalepsis is a feature of the Ionian storytelling style we find in Herodotus.

5262

ἐκεῖ (B7): cf. τὴν ἐκεῖ μοῖραν, 498C4.

5263

οὗ ἐκβῆναι (B8): that is, once he had died. The language will be simple in the story-telling of this mystery of mysteries! To the extent that he is his soul, he is who departs; and to the extent that he is not, it is himself that he departs, so the reflexive is as appropriate as not. Compare the borderline case when Eros takes over the self of the democratic personality and the direct pronoun is replaced with the reflexive (573B1 and 3 and n.4299) and how the λογιστικόν also watches what the ἐπιθυμητικόν wants to see, at 606B1. For the infinitive invading even subordinate clauses of infinitival oratio obliqua, cf. 617D2, 619C2, Symp.174D7. GMT§755 calls it “assimilation” and restricts the phenomenon to relative and temporal clauses (though noting that it extends to εἰ-clauses in Hdt.). In relative clauses it is easier to re-supply the verb of direct speech since the relative can virtually be functioning as a coordinating conjunction (e.g., 490C6: cf. n.5291 ad 615E1).

5264

σφᾶς (C1): In narrating his story to his audience he now “identifies” himself with the group of people he accompanied.

5265

χάσματα (C2) recalls Glaucon’s story of Gyges in the field (χάσμα, 359D4), if the Herodotean storytelling style (including the epanalepsis at B7 [ἀνεβίω, ἀναβιοὺς δέ]) hadn’t already reminded us of it. The “underground” subconscious Glaucon hoped to rely on but ignore is becoming the eschatological realm we will end up in whether we knew it or not.

5266

κελεύειν (C5), the present infinitive representing an imperfect in the original speech.

5267

τοὺς μὲν δικαίους (C4-5), masculine. That they are disembodied souls (B8) is already forgotten; they have become the persons that they were, again. The myth is not geological (where does not matter [pace Halliwell ad 614B7]) nor philosophical (the metaphysical status according to which the souls can see, etc., though disembodied, does not matter [pace Halliwell, extensively, ad 614B8]). As we have seen, the pursuit of philosophy is a separate matter (cf. φιλοσοφία, 611E1 and n.5197): this is a meditation on the personal morality of life as lived by all men (as Socrates announces when he interrupts the story at 618B6-619B1, below), including philosophers, who are merely men.

5268

The linking with τε καί (C5) suggests three other possibilities: up to the left, down to the right, and down to the left.

5269

σημεῖα περιάψαντας (C6): cf. ἐπισημηνάμενος, Gorg.526B7. ἐν τῷ πρόσθεν here (C8) pre-empts any confusion as to their moral stature as other souls encounter them, the converse of both versions of the devil’s advocacy we got from Adeimantus and Glaucon.

5270

αὐτόν (D1), is an adjective (emphatic) not a pronoun (which would have been ἑαυτόν); διακελεύοιντο (D2) is parallel with δέοι and represents a first plural present. As souls approached the judges would look at them and send them along, pointing this way or that way. But when Er approached (ἑαυτοῦ δὲ προσελθόντος) they did something different. “Your fate,” he said they said, “is different. You are not to go through either chasm but to act as messenger for mankind of the goings-on here. We are commanding you (διακελευόμεθά σοι, with σοι now unemphatic, replaced in Er's direct speech by simple indirect reflexive οἱ: 'they said [εἰπεῖν ὅτι] that they were commanding me') to watch and listen.”

5271

τῷ τόπῳ (D3) is just the place he is in (cf. τόπον τινὰ δαιμόνιον, C1), soon referred to as ὁ λειμών (E2) and then as δεῦρο (615D3) by the souls that have sojourned under earth and in heaven and then again as ὁ λειμών (616B2): it is not coextensive with ἐκεῖ (614B7) but is just the part of ἐκεῖ that Er is allowed to visit. Of the rest of the place he will know only by hearsay (hence ἀκούειν τε καὶ θεᾶσθαι), just as we know of the place he has reached and returned from only by hearsay from him. As elsewhere in the Dialogues, the more layers we have to peer through or relays we need to rely on to see things in our mind first hand, the less incredulity we have time to interpose.

5272

ἀνιέναι (D6) and καταβαίνειν (D7) represent imperfects, and revert to first-tier indirect discourse from the second-tier construction with the participle ἀπιούσας (D5), a supplementary participle in indirect discourse with the verb of perception ὁρᾶν, already an infinitive in indirect discourse. If we really are to hear what Er has been commanded to hear and watch (ἀκούειν τε καὶ θεᾶσθαι), the rest of the tale would have been done in participles subject to verbs of perception like ὁρᾶν (D3) itself subject to ἔφη (sc. ὁ Ἤρ), understood. Instead, once the report is said to be what he saw (ὁρᾶν δή, with δή asserting he complied by watching) this second level of subordination can be allowed insensibly to coalesce with the first, as I have made it do in my translation.

5273

καθαράς (E1) means “clean” and has nothing to do with the “philosophical” metaphor of purity at 611C3 (pace Halliwell), though a sojourn in the heaven of Hades would perhaps feel similar to what philosophers strive for.

5274

οἷον ἐν πανηγύρει (E3): In a πανήγυρις everybody (πᾶς) gathers (ἄγω) no matter what their “walk of life.” That here in the meadow of Hades the “lucky” ones eagerly speak to the “unlucky” and vice-versa, once they return to “society” in the meadow, is a canny and humane touch. In our world “above,” we persons of these two types surely avoid each other; but there in Hades we are more comfortable together than we were alone, having been de-socialized and having suffered our private moral rewards for a thousand years in both places, the better and the worse. It is this basic human truth, that men feel better together than they do alone with their conscience (ἀπάνθρωπος, Aesch.P.V. 20), that divides the normal run of mankind from philosophers (and madmen). The reader will and should decide in which group he belongs. This simple and common human impulse, I believe, was the motive for Polemarchus’s interruption at the beginning of Book Five. The forces that draw us together are somehow allied with the mechanism of envy we immediately feel once we gather – again René Girard is the prophet for painful truth. The souls in Hades are attractively portrayed as immune to this problem, just as run-of-the-mill persons living on earth above are pessimistically portrayed as vulnerable to it (586B1-3 and C1-3, and n.4592). For Plato, it seems, an adumbration of the Christian vision of humanity is available only in Hades.

5275

ὅσα τε καὶ οἷα πάθοιεν καὶ ἴδοιεν (615A1-2): The doublet of quantity and quality is for auxesis (whence πολλοῦ χρόνου below. The doublet πάθοιεν / ἴδοιεν distinguishes the punishment the narrating soul suffered from the punishment of other souls that it witnessed. Its own wailing and moaning in the memory of these things thus evinces its feeling of pity and solidarity with the other destitute souls.

5276

εὐπαθείας (A3) answers πάθοιεν. The abstract noun answering the verb suggests something like a state of mind rather than physical torture, as does θέας answering ἴδοιεν, even though in all strictness it is souls that are involved. ἀμηχάνους τὸ κάλλος depicts, in virtual quotation, their being overwhelmed by the beauty, which is made to correspond to the others' being overwhelmed by pain (ὀδυρομένους τε καὶ κλαούσας). The absence of envy and odious comparison in these very different interchanges is a relief, and is somehow credible in this world beyond, or beneath, the world. They express their joy and sorrow freely in public; and to feel the other person's sorrow and joy in sympathy (606AB) will not harm but will help the auditors’ souls!

5277

θέας ἀμηχάνους τὸ κάλλος (A4): but the goodness of the good, available to reason, is better than its beauty, which the senses cannot describe. Their beautiful experience will be leaving these souls flaccid (ἀγυμνάστους, 619D3).

5278

ἵνα (B1).

5279

καὶ οἷον εἴ (B2), introducing a second example or expression of τὸ κεφάλαιον (A5-6), parallel to ὅσα πώποτε … καὶ ὅσους (A6-7) which introduced the first.

5280

οἷον εἰ … μεταίτιοι (B2-5): The non-distributive binary construction (a A’ing and b B’ing, meaning that both do both: cf. n.2410). Murder or the permanent ruination of a person’s life, such as enslaving him, is the crime, and they are guilty of it whether as the main perpetrator (αἴτιοι) or as an accessory (μεταίτιοι). The permanence is expressed by the perfect ἐμβεβληκότες and its durative aspect is done by the hapax legomenon κακουχία (= κακῶς ἔχειν: it generalizes δουλεία and is passive, pace LSJ, s.v.).

5281

καὶ αὖ εἴ τινας (B6-C1): The credits for being good, and the litotes by which they are described, suggest that it is only remedial punishment and not envious or resentful revenge that the policy is seeking to achieve.

5282

τῶν δὲ εὐθὺς γενομένων καὶ ὀλίγον χρόνον βιούντων (C1-2): sc. ἀποθανόντων, a litotes, not a lectio manifesto corrupta (Stallb., ad loc.).

5283

οὐκ ἄξια μνήμης (C2): The dismissive generalization (for which cf. 616A8-B1, 618B4-6, 620D2-5) suggests we should break the paragraph here (C2) rather than at C4 (with Burnet, Slings, Chambry).

5284

γάρ (C5) promises that the next event in the story of what Er heard and saw will answer the question about these “greater rewards.” δή adds to γάρ the promise of arresting detail (cf. Denniston, 243).

5285

ὡς ἐλέγετο (D2). Clearly he had no ring to keep him invisible. The detail about the older brother reveals that his purpose was to become tyrant himself by a two-step plan, like Gyges's plot to seduce the king’s wife and then kill the king with her help.

5286

δή (D1) in ἄλλα δὴ πολλά τε καὶ ἀνόσια indicates that his story will serve as an example of the general policy about the other more heinous acts.

5287

οὐδ’ ἂν ἥξει (D3): for ἄν with future indicative cf. 492C4 and n.2934. Goodwin (GMT 205) compares S.Ant.390 for the tone: σχολῇ ποθ’ ἥξειν δεῦρ’ ἂν ἐξηύχουν ἐγώ. Richards collected many instances (CR6[1892]336-42).

5288

ἐθεασάμεθα and θαυμάτων (D3, D4) remind us that both above and below there were things done to the sojourners in addition to things they witnessed (A1-4).

5289

τυράννους (D7): Still and again it is this life and this sin that the entire conversation has had to expose, thanks to Thrasymachus’s remark at 344A6-7.

5290

μεγάλα ἡμαρτηκότων (E1): cf. Thrasymachus’s οὐ κατὰ σμικρόν … ἀλλὰ συλλήβδην (344A7-B1).

5291

οὕς (E1): the relative pronoun is another of the connectives characteristic of the story-teller’s λέξις εἰρομένη, alongside epanalepsis (cf. 614B7 and n.). Compare 616B6, C5; 620E1; and the formulaic ὅς ποτε used to begin (6I5B4). For the connective being not so far from the demonstrative cf. 616E2, 620D8.

5292

Whence the assertion καὶ τἆλλα πάντα πεπονθότες above (D5)

5293

ἔφη (616A5) sc. Er: the direct quotation of the ἐρωτώμενος that began at οὐχ ἥκει (615D3) has come to an end and we revert to Er reporting what he said (ὑπερβάλλειν, “was exceeding”).

5294

ἑπτὰ ἡμέραι (B2). The time from Er dying in the field to his being placed on the pyre was twelve days (614B5): seven of these have now passed. Add next the four days of walking (τεταρταίους, B4) and only one is left.

5295

ἑκάστοις (B2) implies that whatever associations they had during their rest, when they departed they regrouped with those they happened to arrive with.

5296

Reading προελθόντες (B7), with all mss. (against the scribitur in the Monacensis). The shift to the nominative (from the acc. τεταρταίους, B4) reminds us our narrator was part of the group that went forth and saw this. Cf. shift from τὴν ψυχήν to σφᾶς, 614B8-C1, with n.5264.

5297

γάρ (C2) means that from their closer perspective they came to understand the purpose of the light’s configuration.

5298

δι’ οὗ (C5): the genitive suggests the spindle is a central mechanism of the movement rather than merely its cause.

5299

οὗ τὴν μὲν ἠλακάτην τε καὶ τὸ ἄγκιστρον (C5-6):The ἠλακάτη referred to must be not the distaff (a separate rod on which the carded wool was poised to be drawn off by the hook [ἄγκιστρον] of the entire spindle [ἄτρακτον]), but part of the spindle itself (as οὗ indicates) fitted with the hook on the end (as τε καί indicates). This is confirmed below (E2).

5300

ἐξ ἀδάμαντος (C6): Whatever the chemical identity of the metal, the point is that the staff is not merely of wood as in this world. This is a spindle that has not, and will not, wear out.

5301

φύσιν (D1) following upon καὶ τῶν ἄλλων γενῶν continues the idea that the σφόνδυλος will be interesting, whereas the staff and hook were durable.

5302

ἐνθάδε (D2), the opposite of ἐκεῖ (614B7, D2): with μέν it dismisses the outer shape as uninteresting and not worth describing.

5303

ἐξ ὧν ἔλεγεν (D2): Socrates now presents a reformulation of a portion of Er's narrative. He returns to Er's narrative proper when he reverts to the accusative/infinitive construction at καὶ οὔτω δὴ τρίτον ἄλλον … , D5.

5304

ἐν ἀλλήλοις (D5) again in a less than strictly reciprocal sense: cf. 461C8-D1 and n.2529.

5305

διαμπερές (E3): The sequence of the description moves from outside in and then from top to bottom to top. Hollow out the whorl and place another within it: viewed from the top the result looks like eight circles, though viewed from beneath it appears a single hemisphere with the staff centered. As for the staff, going back to the top and looking down, it pierces all the way through the eighth. The original σφόνδυλος is of course rigid with the ἠλακάτη (whose whole purpose after all is to give angular momentum to the rotating spindle), but the added pseudo-σφόνδυλοι are pierced through by it so that they can rotate freely around it as free from an axle, although (the orientation now reverting to ἄνωθεν) only the eighth can be seen to be pierced. The ἠλακάτη itself continues on, though and beyond and above them, with its hook fitted to its the end.

5306

τὸν τοῦ χείλους κύκλον (E4-5) the genitive is used to phase out the metaphor: from now on the tops of the metaphorical cups (χείλη) will be spoken of as they appear from above, namely, as circular bands (κύκλοι).

5307

Mapped in two dimensions these ordinals and cardinals (E3-8) and the others below (E8-617A4, A6-B3) have ennealogical significance, to limn which I leave to the pious (cf. J.-C. 475-6; Adam's Appendix VI). It is consistent with the entire tale that the architecture of the universe should have a hidden order; but to search for an esoterical message from Plato or from Socrates without consideration of the moral lesson, is at best an amusing pastime (witness Adam’s lucubrations, 2.441-453) but more likely an irresponsible divertissement. For example J.-C. (478) can misperceive the practical lesson that Socrates extracts from the tale, when he is moved to interrupt it at 618B6-619B1, as spoiling the tale’s integrity!

Most important is it to see how the myth allows the hearer to recognize only gradually that this mechanism represents the solar system in microcosm, seen now by the souls from without who in truth, along with ourselves, are a mere speck within it as within the rest of the time both past and future. Our morality, whose limit we always feel as intentional—i.e., as being merely “our” morality, fraught with presuppositions of ours that are perhaps even the most significant part of the problem—is being given a ground in the all-enveloping world, to which and by which our hitherto merely intentional consciousness is now being awakened and by which illuminated!

5308

καί (E8) in its simplicity suggests that we should anticipate a qualitative differentiation among the circles (χρῶμα, though the term does not appear until 617A1), after the quantitative one (σχῆμα).

5309

ποικίλον (E9): Presumably the star-studded sphere is meant.

5310

λαμπρότατον / προσλάμποντος (617A1). As to the order, from the first (the μέγιστος σφόνδυλος, i.e., the first and outermost with which he also started in the quantitative list, E4-8) he skips to the one that is most notable, qualitatively, because of its brightness (the sun, which happens to be seventh), and then parenthetically to the moon (which happens to be eighth) since it receives its brightness from it. After this parenthesis he picks up where he left off when he was distracted by the λαμπρότης of the seventh, reverts to the ordinal protocol (τὸν δὲ τοῦ δευτέρου, A2), and then sticks with that protocol to the end (δευτέρου [with parenthesis on the πέμπτον because of its close relation], τρίτον, τέταρτον and τὸν ἕκτον [the fifth having been covered] which is last since the seventh and eighth had been covered). The subsequent colorations appear to represent the colors of the other planets: cf. Adam ad 617A.

5311

δεύτερον … τὸν ἕκτον (A4): The ordinal predicate (anarthrous δεύτερον with λευκότητι) is allowed to exchange positions, but not roles, with the ordinal subject (ἕκτον). The article τόν subsequently confirms that ἕκτον is subject and τὸν ἕκτον is a compendious expression for τὸν τοῦ ἕκτου κύκλον. The inversion of order along with the brachylogy effect closure (cf. nn.584 and 1797, respectively). After the adjectival description of the nested σφόνδυλοι is completed (i.e., their quantity and quality presented) they are ready to be set into motion (κυκλεῖσθαι δὲ δή, A4-5).

5312

τὴν ἐναντίαν (A7): I take him to mean they would appear to be going backward in relation to the outer circle.

5313

Reading τὸ (B1) with F (τὸν AM : om. Monacensis). In running through the circles and their relative sizes he adopted a formula that kept the ordinal designating which circle, distinct from the ordinal designating the rank in width, using τὸν τοῦ with ordinal for the circle and anarthrous ordinal for the rank (616E3-8); but he did take the liberty to vary their order in the middle of the run-through (between the second and third rank: E5). Next, in the run-through of their colors (616E8-617A4), he again attaches the ordinals that pertain to the circles per se with τὸν τοῦ but suddenly drops this technique when he comes to the third and fourth circles, at which point he uses the anarthrous ordinal he had used for rank (τρίτον δέ … τέταρτον δέ, A3-4); and finally, to cap it off says δεύτερον δὲ τῷ λευκότητι τὸν ἕκτον (A4), on which cf. n.5311. Given the variation in those descriptions, the only thing objectionable about the τὸν (B1) of mss.AM, here, is that it is masculine: the mere fact that the other ranking ordinals are anarthrous cannot be counted against the viability of τὸ (the reading of F). φοραί is added to confirm that τρίτον represents the rank.

5314

σφίσι (B2): Again Er speaks to us of himself as a member of a group of souls: cf. 614C1, 617D1, 621A5 and n.5296.

5315

ἐπανακυκλούμενον (B2): I take the meaning to be that it would be “lapped” by the outer rings which rotate faster.

5316

στρέφεσθαι (B4): passive, though above (A5) it was middle since the agent (indeed agents, as it will turn out: C5-D1) doing the spinning had not yet been included in the picture. Now we discover Ἀνάγκη is the spinster with the spindle laid across her lap, a configuration we see on several vases (cf. A History of Technology, ed. C.Singer, et al. [Oxford 1956] 2.200-202).

5317

φωνήν (B6): Next (after setting it in motion: cf. n.5311) he presents the sound of the apparatus.

5318

The unremitting elaboration without connectives (C1-3) is striking and magisterial and sets the tone for the Spokesman’s address, below (D6ff).

5319

The Spokesman’s exordium (D6), with its “rising” word order (H.Weil) is magisterial, lapidary, and abrupt (Proclus: ῥήματα ἀφιεὶς ὥσπερ βέλη νοῦ γέμοντα καὶ ὑψηλῶν ἐπιβολῶν, 2.269.4-5 [Kroll]). The exordium begins with a genitive (Ἀνάγκης) which is governed by the subsequent genitive (θυγατρός), itself expanded by an appositive genitive (κόρης) and a proper name in the genitive (Λαχέσεως), both added without connective. This string of genitives is then followed by a bare nominative without copula, abruptly implying that the genitive that came before is subjective and that the sentence is over. Plut. Mor.568D characterizes the style as οὐ τραγικῶς ἀλλὰ θεολογικῶς (on which cf. Chalcidius §143 (203.13-16 [Wrobel]).

5320

Lachesis’s exordium (D6-7) is likewise abrupt. This time the word order “descends:” we begin with a bare nominative, which this time governs a predicative genitive without copula (adjective plus noun, ἄλλης περιόδου, this time objective), followed by a dependent genitive (adjective plus noun, θνητοῦ γένους, another descending step); and a genitive is then appended that closes the sentence by virtue of the semantic fact that it modifies the earlier genitive (περιόδου).

5321

δαίμων (E1), the personal guiding spirit in our lives, famously spoken of by Heraclitus (ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων, B119 [DK]).

5322

Elevation is again achieved (E1), this time by expressing an antithesis by parallel word order with shift of cases (ὑμᾶς, δαίμων / ὑμεῖς δαίμονα) rather than the more direct method of reversing the order.

5323

ὁ λαχών (E2): Lachesis oversees λαχεῖν.

5324

ἀρετὴ δ’ ἀδέσποτον (E3), quoted by Plutarch QC.9.740D: ἀρετὴ γὰρ ἀδέσποτον καὶ κακία, who takes it to mean that whether we are good or bad falls to our free will and the choices we make in the life we subsequently live. Cf. 618B3-4 below with n.

5325

Again (E3-4) the word order is parallel (τιμῶν, ἀτιμάζων / πλέον, ἔλαττον) rather than chiastic.

5326

αἰτία ἑλομένου· θεὸς ἀναίτιος (E4-5): Closure by chiasm after the parallelisms in word order. The entire passage is a lesson in avoiding the article.

5327

καὶ δὴ καί (618A4) selects the human species out of the genus of all animals, and then ἅπαντας includes every kind of life available within that species.

5328

εἶναι δὲ καί (A7): the καί answers τυραννίδας τε (A4). The spectrum of human lives (τοὺς ἀνθρωπίνους ἅπαντας) is represented with a pair of categories: a subspectrum of tyrannical careers (namely, A4-7) and a sub-spectrum of lives reputed (δοκίμων) to be upstanding (namely, A7-B6), with the grounds for the good repute retailed according to the usual categories of good (cf. nn.5329 and 5333). As in the distinction of lives leading to the distinction among punishments (615A5-616A3), the common spectrum of lives is set apart from the extreme case(s) of the tyrant (615C2ff. Cf. n.5283). The warped division corresponds to and answers Thrasymachus's warped division between the common run of unjust acts which he despises and the “perfection” of ἀδικία embodied in tyranny which he adores (344A6-C2).

5329

καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἰσχύν τε καὶ ἀγωνίαν (A8-B1): ἄλλην is of course adverbial (= praeterea). The bodily virtues are generalized to allow the transition to “external” goods (here γένος / πρόγονοι).

5330

The plurals εἴδεσιν, κάλλη, ἀρεταῖς (A8-B1), where we would expect generic singulars, invite the mind to imagine a concrete plurality (in accordance with πλείω and παντοδαπά above) rather than move through the abstract categories unreflectively.

5331

ψυχῆς δὲ τάξιν (B2-3): τάξιν is a new and very vague expression: we are not meant to know just what it means. If anything we might remember the notion of differing ἀρχαί in the soul that appeared at 580D8 (cf. ἄρχει, 581B12) and were shown at work in their responses to the questions about what was more important (581C8-E4).

5332

ἄλλον ἑλομένην βίον ἀλλοίαν γίγνεσθαι (B3-4): Cf. ἀρετῆς ἀδέσποτον, E3 above. The ἄλλος ἄλλο construction provides a berth for a chiasm of cause and effect (cf. n.1693): the choice (ἑλομένην) of the soul is what determines the way the soul turns out (ἀλλοίαν γίγνεσθαι, present).

5333

τὰ δ’ ἄλλα (B4) refers to the salient features of body and family excluding the τάξις of soul, but then there is more: the external conditions of wealth and health. Once we notice that the traditional tripartition of goods (psychic, bodily, and external) underlies this configuration, we notice how different from ours is the point of view of these souls. They are about to choose what in this life we think we are born with, including even who shall be their forbears! Thus health takes on the aspect of an external good like wealth; and family lineage, elsewhere an external good, takes on the aspect of personal bodily goods like beauty and strength.

5334

With ὡς ἔοικεν, ὦ φίλε Γλαύκων (B6) Socrates boldly interrupts his narration of the narrative of Er to express his own view to Glaucon directly (the vocative alone had not been enough to initiate an interruption at 615A5). Again a paragraph break in the printing of the text is to be placed here (again after a dismissive generalization: cf. 615C1-2). For the vocative to indicate change of addressee cf. Lys.204C7 and 204E9. On the asseverative force of an adjective added to the proper name in the vocative, cf. n.3407. Socrates’s admonition to Glaucon is made all the more emphatic by the hyperbaton of ὁ πᾶς κίνδυνος and by the fact that he switches into his own voice without announcing it to us (as for instance with ἦν δ’ ἐγώ). One might wonder what the others present think of these two ignoring them at this moment, a moment representatively crucial for all mankind.

5335

ὦ φίλε Γλαύκων, ὁ πᾶς κίνδυνος ἀνθρώπῳ (B6-7), echoing ὦ φίλε Γλαύκων, μέγας ὁ ἀγών at 608B4, and therefore associating this passage with that. For ὁ πᾶς κίνδυνος cf. Phdo.107C4, P.Nem.8,21, Antiph.5.43, and ἐν ὅλῳ κινδυνεύοντα, Rep.424C4. For the collocation of this with ἀγών cf. Ar.Nub.955. Cf. also ἐν τούτῳ πᾶς εὐδαιμονία, Gorg.470E8. To repeat the lesson of that passage (i.e., 608B) here corroborates what should be obvious, that Socrates’s purpose in telling the Myth of Er is to help in the way we live this life.

5336

τῶν ἄλλων μαθημάτων ἀμελήσας (C1-2): Cf. 591C2-3. This dictum would include my study of Plato's Republic.

5337

καὶ ζητητὴς καὶ μαθητής (C2): One may seek the knowledge on his own or find a teacher. The second possibility is then subdivided: he may either find the teacher on his own or learn of him somewhere (μαθεῖν καὶ ἐξευρεῖν, C3). The chiasm is characteristic.

5338

Reading εἰδέναι (C8) with mss. AFM rather than καὶ εἰδέναι with D. I take the accusative-infinitive construction beginning at C6 to be the “antecedent” of τούτου in C2, the intervening lines (C3-6) being a self-interruption to describe the teacher one might seek that broaches in general and unscientific terms the goal of the learning.

5339

τὰ νυνδὴ ῥηθέντα (C6): We may say as a rule of thumb that τὰ ῥηθέντα are the subjects adduced whereas τὰ εἰρημένα are the things said about them. Cf. Thg.123A9-B1.

5340

πρὸς ἀρετὴν βίου (C7): ἀρετή, “goodness,” functioning as the noun for the adjective ἀγαθός (cf. n.544). The life chosen in Hades will contain one set of attributes or another as “contained in” (ἐνεῖναι, B3 cf. ἐνοῦσαν, 619C1) the παραδείγματα (A1-3). The choice of these will “necessarily” produce one τάξις of soul or another (B2-4); but Socrates has interrupted that narrative to talk about “us” in this world, and how “we” might manage, day by day and under varying circumstances, to make the best of the situation (ἐκ τῶν δυνατῶν, C5: cf. the admonition at 604C5-D2) in all our choices (ἀεὶ παντάχου) in this life as well. Finally we are being shown what ἢ προὔργου τι ποιήσωμεν εἰς ἐκεῖνον τὸν βίον meant, at 498D3!

5341

συντιθέμενα ἀλλήλοις καὶ διαιρούμενα (C7) suggests the application of the methods of dialectical scrutiny (e.g. Phdrs.266B) to the empirical lives where attributes are already bundled, i.e., the empirical mixtures displayed in the παραδείγματα (μεμεῖχθαι, B5: cf. κραθέν, C8).

5342

κραθέν (C8): The actual effect (τι ἐργάζεται) of combining them (κραθέν) will be predictable (εἰδέναι) based on our evaluation (ἀναλογιζόμενον) of both their individual essences (διαιρούμενα) and the compounding of them (συντιθέμενα).

5343

τί κάλλος ... (C8-D5): The list is governed by the infinitive (εἰδέναι) and instantiates the generalized formulation that precedes (πάντα … συντιθέμενα … διαιρούμενα, C6-8), which is governed by the circumstantial participle (ἀναλογιζόμενον, C6). The pairing of the phrases mirrors the previous pair (participial phrase [C4-5], infinitival phrase [C5-6]), but there the participle described the means and the infinitive the end, whereas here the participle describes the method and the infinitive describes the resultant prediction. The first section (C8-D1) lays out the matrix of variant attributes (n.148), by instantiating the triad, body (~κάλλος) / externals (~πενίᾳ / πλούτῳ) / soul (~ποίας ... ἕξεως), with the specific κάλλος chosen to confirm the allusion to τὰ νυνδὴ ῥηθέντα (C6), namely, the list of praiseworthy attributes at A7-B1 [n.b. κατὰ κάλλη, A8]).

5344

εὐγένειαι / δυσγένειαι (D2): The plurals insist that the knowledge he desiderates should include detailed differentiation among the gradations of more and less noble and ignoble birth, and likewise with all the other items in this section of the list (D2-3): cf. the plural κάλλη at 618A8 and n.5330.

5345

The matrix having been set up, the list in its second section (whose governing construction will be a restatement of τί κακὸν ἢ ἀγαθὸν ἐργάζεται? [C8-D1], namely τί συγκεραννύμενα πρὸς ἄλληλα ἐργάζεται? [D5]), continues to regurgitate the νυνδὴ ῥηθέντα. εὐγένειαι brings forward ἐπὶ γένεσιν (B1) and is expanded with political office (ἀρχαί), an expansion naturally associated with family in such lists (since family connections lead to offices). Then bodily strength (ἰσχύες καὶ ἀσθένειαι) is brought forward from A8-B1 (τὴν ἄλλην ἰσχύν τε καὶ ἀγωνίαν). But while in the previous passage Er was preoccupied with the fact that the τάξις of the soul was not presented in the παραδείγματα, since it is an outcome of the choice, Socrates has shifted to the topic of the choices men need to make in the real world daily, in which context the suppression of psychic attributes is less necessary (whence ποίας … ἕξεως, D1), so that he may now include the consideration of psychic ingredients and the effects of their presence or absence along with bodily and external attributes. His example is εὐμάθεια and we are reminded of the attributes of the philosophical type at the beginning of Book Six. Still, as before he must keep separate the virtue of the soul and of the man, since this is to serve as the criterion of the most choiceworthy mixture (D6-E2, cf. πρὸς ἀρετὴν βίου, C7). From all this we can sense the difference in meaning between a τάξις or order of the soul (the determinant or even the constitution of its virtue or viciousness) and the soul’s ἕξις or ἕξεις (as mere ποιότης). Since the psychic category is new and not among the νυνδὴ ῥηθέντα from the previous page, it receives not only a specific instantiation (εὐμάθεια) but also an elaboration (καὶ πάντα … ἐπικτήτων, D3-4). The distinction between inborn and acquired habits (φύσει / ἐπίκτητα) is meant to stress the need for a comprehensive grasp of the variables (which πάντα insisted upon, above [C6]).

5346

συγκεραννύμενα (D5): A variation on κραθέν (C8), again depicting the empirical effect, with σύν- generalizing all the various headings of ingredients.

5347

συλλογισάμενον (D6) repeating ἀναλογιζόμενον from C6, and, now construed with αἱρεῖσθαι, replacing the less scientific expression διαγιγνώσκοντα used with it above (C4-6), before the scientific description of the μάθημα had been articulated.

5348

αἱρεῖσθαι after συλλογισάμενον (D6) instead of ἀναλογιζόμενον above (C6): note the chiastic order, indicating that the point has been made.

5349

ἁπάντων αὐτῶν (D5-6), stricter than τούτων, for the items have been submitted to close dialectical scrutiny (cf. n.5341).

5350

φύσιν (D7), as the sequel shows (n.b. γίγνεσθαι, E2) has a very different meaning from just above (φύσει, D4). It means the condition of the soul; it corresponds to πρὸς ἀρετὴν βίου above (C7); and it restates what was said by τάξιν at B3.

5351

τόν τε χείρω καὶ ἀμείνω βίον (D7-E1): τε … καί linking opposite alternatives (n.92). The phrase redoes βίον καὶ χρηστὸν καὶ πονηρόν above (C4-5), continuing the chiastic order.

5352

καλοῦντα (E1): Rather than accept the list of καλούμενα or λεγόμενα ἀγαθά he will judge those items as good or bad, better or worse, in reference to their effect on the ἀρετὴ ψυχῆς, according to the argument reached at the end of Book Nine (591C1-592A4: cf. nn.4709 and 4714).

5353

χαίρειν ἐάσει (E3) redoes τῶν ἄλλων μαθημάτων ἀμελήσας (C1-2). What had began as a chiasm is widening out into an annular construction!

5354

κρατίστη (E4) – “influential, crucial” – brings forward the notion of κίνδυνος with which the passage began (B2).

5355

The annular structure is continued as Socrates next (618E4-619A1) reverts to Er’s topic of the choice the souls make in Hades, from which he digressed at 618B6.

5356

ἀνέκπληκτος (619A2): He refers specifically to his admonition to Glaucon at 576D6-7B4 (n.b. ἐκπλήττεται, 577A3).

5357

πλούτων (A2): A plural, like the empirical plurals above, but at the same time it is derogatory and dismissive. Even though the value of wealth has now with all the rest been seen to be strictly indifferent, he calls it (and them) evils (τῶν τοιούτων κακῶν) because now that the choosing soul (ἑλομένην, 618B3) has been equipped with science, she knows these are not eo ipso good and is immune to ἔκπληξις. The paradoxical ambiguity of 618B2-4 (cf. n.5332) is therefore resolved!

5358

τὸν μέσον … βίον (A5): μέσον with the same meaning as μεσοῦν at 618B6. It is less an adumbration of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean than of the Stoic doctrine of the ἀδιάφορα. Compare the expressions for adjustment at the end of Book Nine (n.4725).

5359

τῷδε (A6): Socrates uses the first person demonstrative to distinguish speaking to Glaucon in his own voice (about this life) from retelling the tale of Er (about the other world).

5360

οὕτω γὰρ εὐδαιμονέστατος γίγνεται ἄνθρωπος (B1) closes the annular structure of Socrates’s interruption by referring to its beginning: ἔνθα δή … ὁ πᾶς κίνδυνος ἀνθρώπῳ (618B6-7), completing what is to me one of the most beautiful pages in all of Plato.

5361

καὶ δὴ οὖν καὶ τότε (B2), a rare collocation of particles, by which he makes the transition back to the narrative of Er.

5362

τὸν μὲν προφήτην (B2-3). μέν is answered by εἰπόντος δέ (B7), where Er moves the focus to the man who is choosing. Though the events are merely a linear sequence these particles are used to place them over against each other in order to return us notionally to the space between them.

5363

συντόνως (B4) says, in the laconic manner of the Spokesman, what Socrates said with συντείνας at 591C1-2 (cf. σύνταξίν τε καὶ συμφωνίαν, 591D6-7 and n.4717).

5364

ἀνασκεψάμενον (B9).

5365

εἱμαρμένην (C1) bringing forward the admonition ᾧ συνέσται ἐξ ἀνάγκης (617E2-3).

5366

βρώσεις (C1): for the plural cf. πλούτων (A2) and n.5357. It is accusative in apposition to the participial noun εἱμαρμένην, itself the subject of ἐνοῦσαν a supplementary participle with λαθεῖν.

5367

σκέψασθαι (C2): the prefix ἀνα- dropped in repetition (n.1567).

5368

τοῖς προρρηθεῖσιν τοῦ προφήτου (C3-4). The phrase is echoic but not etymological: the first προ- means “before” and the second “on behalf of.”

5369

ἐν τεταγμένῃ πολιτείᾳ (C6-7), more general than ἐν πόλει εὖ πολιτευομένῃ (cf. 549C3, which uses the inverse expression) as if to be general enough to include the conclusion reached at the end of Book Nine (591E1, cf. n.4723).

5370

ἄνευ φιλοσοφίας (D1): Er is given the Socratic term as if he had been present for Book Five. The surprisingly strong term emphasizes that the ability described on the previous page (618C1-619B1) is truly crucial (ὁ πᾶς κίνδυνος), and the point will be drawn out by Socrates in his own voice just below (D7-E5). This first soul to choose learned nothing from the beauties of his sojourn above (cf. n.4723).

5371

ὡς δε καὶ εἰπεῖν (D1) δέ links this statement of Er to the last one; the infinitive is adverbial in the expression ὡς εἰπεῖν; and καί means “in fact,” adding to the surprise.

5372

πεπονηκότας / ἑωρακότας (D4-5): again rehearsing the two sources of knowledge made available to the penitents (cf. πάθοιεν / ἴδοιεν, 615A1-2; εὐπαθείας / θέας, A3-4; πεπονθότες / κατείδομεν, D5-6; and cf. τοῖς ἀεὶ παριοῦσι σημαίνοντες, 616A3) as well as to Er (614D3).

5373

καὶ μεταβολήν (D6). The notion is close enough to an Ionian process that it casts a comic light on the whole human spectacle. Cf. nn.244, 1240, 1366, 4138, 5045, 5165: cf. n.5377 below.

5374

καὶ διὰ τήν … τύχην (D7), adding luck as a factor in addition to the antecedent factor διό (D5). The story does not dismiss the role of luck; instead, the factors within our control are described in rueful detail. Contrast the reaction of the first chooser above (C4-6).

5375

ἐνθάδε (D8), along with the indicative, κινδυνεύει, that follows (E2), announces another shift from the voice of Er to the voice of Socrates, or more exactly a shift from Socrates retelling Er’s narrative to his own agenda of deriving its lesson for our life here (note tense of τῶν ἐκεῖθεν ἀπαγγελλομένων, E2, referring to the time of Socrates narration of it to Glaucon). We almost need a paragraph break at ἐπεί (D7).

5376

ὑγιῶς φιλοσοφοῖ (D8) is Socrates’s interpretation of the Spokesman’s συντόνως ζῶντι (B4), who could hardly be expected to use such an expression (cf. n.5363). His use of ὑγιῶς echoes expressions like ἐπ’ οὐδενὶ ὑγιεῖ (603B1-2, 523B3, n.3421).

5377

οὐκ … χθονίαν καὶ τραχεῖαν … ἀλλὰ λείαν τε καὶ οὐρανίαν (E4-5): The chiasm is characteristic in closure (n.4924). While a man might live a good life here and be rewarded by a heavenly sojourn in Hades, only the man who lives philosophically is exempt from the μεταβολή from virtue to vice and happiness to sadness that he would undergo on his way back (καὶ δεῦρο πάλιν) due to a poor choice of his next life in the manner of the majority of men, which choices make them the butt of a comic and futile Ionian ἀνταπόδωσις, as the tale from Hades is now teaching us.

5378

With ταύτην and ἔφη (E6) Socrates abruptly reverts to Er’s narrative. As to γὰρ δή, Shilleto’s examples of γάρ used to return to narrative after a parenthesis (in Dem.Fals.Leg.§107 [=19.94: ubi legit τοῖς γὰρ τὰ δίκαια] citing also 44.21, 45.84, 47.59; E.IT 38 [seclusit Murray], Pl.Gorg.454C1) are not convincing; moreover, Denniston does not note this use. Its resemblance to the γὰρ δή at 615C5 (cf. n. 5284) is, however, striking. We may keep part of Shiletto’s idea and say that the particles announce that the reversion to narrative (Denniston 243) will prove, or justify, the intervening “parenthesis” (in this case, the interruption by Socrates [D5-E5]).

5379

ἐλεινήν τε γάρ … καὶ γελοίαν καὶ θαυμασίαν (620A1-2): The polar emotional reactions give way to a general sense of amazement.

5380

The anaphora of ἰδεῖν (620A3, A6, A7) recalls and imitates the Nekuia of the Odyssey (ἴδον, Od.11.235, 260, 266, 271, etc.).

5381

Reading ὡσαύτως. εἰκοστήν (A8-9) with ms. F (rather than ὡσαύτως εἰκός. τὴν with ADM), a reading corroborated in comments by Plut.(Mor.739E) and Proclus (2.265.20 [Kroll]).

5382

λαβεῖν (B7) varies ἑλέσθαι above. For Atalante cf. Ov.Met.10.560ff.

5383

Hom.Od.8.493,11.522; Verg.Aen.2.264; Hygin.Fab.108.

5384

Hom.Il.2.212-69.

5385

μνήμῃ δὲ τῶν προτέρων πόνων φιλοτιμίας λελωφηκυῖαν (C5): The adversative δέ points up the contrast between its being last to choose and choosing slowly, and its prior modus vivendi of always “being first” (φιλοτιμία). Odysseus' soul is therefore the opposite of the first soul who spent its sojourn in the heavenly realm but then chose the tyrant's life too quickly (619B7-D1): as a pair they illustrate both the remedial effect of punishment and the insecurity of good habits and heavenly rewards (n.5277) unless they have the undergirding of “philosophy” (619D1 and n.).

5386

ὃν (E1), again a relative used as connective in the storyteller's manner.

5387

αὐτήν (E2). The soul (fem.), by getting a “life,” insensibly merges into the masculine λαχών (E4), the man; and once the δαίμων has led him (ἄγειν) to the weaving of Atropos in order to render (ποιοῦντα) irreversible (ἀμετάστροφα ~ Ἄτροπος) what was woven into him (ἐπικλωθέντα ~ Κλώθω), the δαίμων insensibly merges into the man and the man goes on “unavertibly” (ἀμεταστρεπτί, E6, indicates that he has “internalized” the guiding force of the δαίμων), apparently no longer accompanied (ἰέναι). For the subtle and sensitive play with the gender of the soul cf. 611B9-612A6 and n.5188.

5388

τὸ τῆς Λήθης πέδιον (621A2-3) The πέδιον is not an invention of Plato: cf. Ar.Batr.186.

5389

σφᾶς (A5): Er was excluded from the choosing (617E7-8) but now has rejoined the group: cf. n.5314 ad 617B2.

5390

ἀγγεῖον οὐδὲν στέγειν (A6): By a kookie logic, drinking it therefore makes the soul that drinks it unable to hold its contents, and it forgets everything. For the metaphor applied to soul compare the climactic remark at 586B3, where Socrates identifies τὸ στέγον with φρόνησις (cf.586A1), as he implicitly does here (A7).

5391

ὅπῃ μέντοι καὶ ὅπως (B5), another index of experience beyond human ken (cf. 612A4-5).

5392

ἕωθεν (B6) a nice detail that makes the time elapsed exactly twelve days: cf. 616B2 and n.5294. We may imagine that Er, too, was transported back up as a shooting star.

5393

Reading ἀλλ’ οὐκ (B8) with FDM (on καὶ misreported from A by edd. cf. now Slings, Critical Notes,184). Antique testimony on the two expressions is as follows—for μῦθος ἐσώθη, Photius, 279.1: ἐπίρρημά ἐστι λεγόμενον ἐπ’ ἐσχάτῳ τοῖς λεγομένοις μύθοις τοῖς παιδίοις; for ὁ μῦθος ἀπώλετο, Greg.Cypr (Leid.) 290 (=Paroem.Gr.2.83): ἐπὶ τῶν τὴν διήγησιν [καὶ] μὴ ἐπὶ πέρας ἀγόντων (=schol. in Tht.164A); and Greg.Cypr.(Leid.)291: τούτῳ τῷ λόγῳ χρῶνται οἱ λέγοντές τι πρὸς τοὺς μὴ προσέχοντας (schol. Phlb.14A). The theme of a μῦθος preserved (σῴζεσθαι) and perishing (ἀπολλύναι) occurs also at Leg.645B, where the allegory of the golden cord as both best and weakest is “saved” by the telling and continuing corroboration it receives from our moral experience. The redundancy here, that the story was “preserved but not lost,” conveys that the words are meant both literally (the powers that be contrived that Er return to report to mankind: 614D1-3) and figuratively (the story he told has perennial truth, which in fact Socrates stopped to extract: 618B6-9B1). The two senses are wonderfully bound together by the ensuing comment, that the story, preserved, will preserve us, if we believe it (see next note).

5394

With rising conviction the hope is first expressed by an ideal apodosis (the “less vivid” ἂν σώσειεν), its conditional prerequisite then expressed by an anticipatory protasis (the “more vivid” subjunctive, πειθώμεθα ἄν), augmented by what I take to be a continuation of the protasis in confident future indicatives (διαβησόμεθα, μιανθησόμεθα). Hearkening to the story will enhance the prospect (the enhancement expressed by shift from subjunctive to future indicative) of our crossing the river well (εὖ, i.e.,“saved” by φρόνησις: A7-8) and, by retaining thereby some ability to remember (στέγειν), even though we have been made to forget everything, the prospect of protecting our souls from maculation within the life we subsequently enter, here in the world, which, if we achieve it, would in essence constitute “salvation” (ἡμᾶς ἂν σώσειεν, C1).

5395

ἐμοὶ πειθώμεθα (C3): The contrast Socrates draws is between the story (αὐτῷ) and his own interpretation of it (ἐμοί, emphatic oxytone); and yet it was he that offered it in the first place, to confirm his own admonition about the rewards of a just life (begun at 608C1-2: οὐ διεληλύθαμεν). The admonition begins with the casual observation that the soul is deathless (608D3-4), which Socrates repeats here (νομίζοντες ἀθάνατον), along with its particular entailment that the soul sustains itself under the experience of any evil as well as any good (δυνατήν, C4). Thus, it is his own admonition that the story is meant to corroborate, and the belief in this admonition that will save us. In a sense the story Er tells is Socrates's story and therefore a Ἀλκίνου ἀπόλογος after all.

5396

The coupling of κακά and ἀγαθά (C4) recalls the argument for immortality at 608D13-611A4, and states its special moral purpose here: to confirm that neither one’s own evil deeds nor the baneful punishments they provoke can destroy the soul (cf. 609D2-5, 610D5 and n.5151).

5397

τῆς ἄνω ὁδοῦ (C4-5) now a metaphor for the character of the just life in this world, as unsullied (we should associate χθονίαν [619E4] with μιανθησόμεθα [C2]), though the language is “literally” appropriate also to the sojourn in Hades.

5398

δικαιοσύνην μετὰ φρονήσεως (C5): contrast ἔθει ἄνευ φιλοσοφίας ἀρετῆς μετειληφότα (619C7-D1). For the expression cf. 591B5, 431C5-6 and nn.2154 and 3642.

5399

ἀεὶ ἑξόμεθα … ἐπιτηδεύσομεν (C5-6): That is, we shall indeed prevent our souls from being polluted (C2).

5400

ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς φίλοι (C6): cf.586E4-5, 589B1-6, 590D3-6, 591D1-9.

5401

φίλοι … τοῖς θεοῖς (C6-7) implies θεοφιλεῖς (recalling 612E2-613B7).

5402

τὰ ἆθλα αὐτῆς (C7): that is, the reward of a heavenly sojourn in Hades in communion with beauty and goodness (εὐπαθείας καὶ θέας ἀμηχάνους τὸ κάλλος, 615A3-4) lasting ten and twenty times the life of a man (τῇ χιλιέτει πορείᾳ, D2).

5403

ἣν διεληλύθαμεν (D2), announcing that the lacuna mentioned at the beginning of the section (607C2) has now been filled.

5404

The closing sentence announces Socrates’s purpose in presenting Er’s story, and states it twice by an elaborate binary construction that makes a closing. There are two purpose clauses after ἵνα, the second a result or generalization of the first (φίλοι ὦμεν, C6 / εὖ πράττωμεν, D2-3). They flank two compound adverbial phrases to form a chiasm, phrases that themselves twice state the two spatio-temporal worlds in which the drama of human life takes place (αὐτοῦ τε μένοντες ἐνθάδε … / ἐπειδάν … κομιζώμεθα, C7-D1; ἐνθάδε / ἐν χιλιέτει πορείᾳ, D2). The first goes with the subjunctive before and the second with the subjunctive after. καί at D1 links the two adverbial phrases and therefore the two purpose clauses as well. In its balanced amplitude the sentence is more beautiful than the famous sentence with which the First Book opened; on the other hand, in his attempt to say everything Socrates tolerates a halting rhythm (esp. ἣν διεληλύθαμεν), as if regretting the end, perhaps. It is probably better that he omits a second envoi, to the audience that heard him say κατέβην at the beginning, so many hours ago!

5405

It is Crito's nous that is “set” (διατίθεμαι) or ordered by being with Socrates; just above he confessed he felt embarrassed (it was laughable: ) trying to give advice to Socrates (again a matter of setting one's nous: νουθετεῖν, 304D3) about his admiration for Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, which advice he was stimulated to give Socrates by a man that walked up to him afterward, who ended up being a speechwriter, who like Callicles needed only to remove the philosophers from competition (Gorg.484CD).

5406

A fuller analysis of Adeimantus as answerer is presented in Appendix 8, infra.

3426 3427 3429 3430 3432 3435

5407

The numbers do not add up exactly because the Stephanus edition left blank but numbered pages between the Books.

5408

Homer was poor. His scholars live at ease, / Making as many Homers as you please. And every Homer furnishes a book. / Though guests be parasitic on the cook / The moral is: It is the guest that dines./ I'll write a book to prove I wrote these lines. -- J.V.Cunningham.

5409

Cf. M.Dixsaut's sensitive and wonderful presentation of the problem in "L'Analogie intenable" and N.Bloessner's judicious and balanced account of the analogy of City and Soul.

5410

Rather than criticizing deficiencies of one or another aspect of it as for instance Jowett's long note arguing that the sequence of the regimes is not historical (ad 545B, p.363-4; also ad 546D p.373; ad 550C pp.378-9; ad 559D p.392), and then praising other passages for succeeding to be historical (e.g., Jowett ad 548C, 548E), or citing historical parallels just for the fun of it, without following up why Socrates did not raise them or why Plato would make him or not make him do so (e.g. Jowett ad 551B, 551D). Adam's treatment is much more judicious (cf. 2.199, his note on ἐφεξῆς γιγνομένη, 544C5-6), going so far as to argue that "historical narrative" is merely a form Plato has adopted as a vehicle for a psychological analysis of the decline.

5411

Setting the number at four is not at all a matter of convention. Cf. Shorey 2.236. note d.

5412

He cites their previous agreement to this effect (B3), itself a very weak argument (cf. 368D-8A and my nn. ad loc.), though in fact it is a significant variation of that method. The larger city was to make justice more easy to see, not the man who corresponded to it in temperament or character. There is no talk here of the difficulty of seeing character in man: to the contrary the axiom is enunciated that the character of the larger is derived from the character of the smaller.

5413

The function of the proverb about oak and stone (544D7-8) is to dismiss all cavil. Cf. 435E1-36A3, where he uses the same axiom to divide the soul and dismisses disagreement as ridiculous (γέλοιον, E3).

5414

It is a common error among the commentators to presume that the aristocratic man, for instance, lives and rules in the aristocratic state (despite οὐκ εὖ πολιτευομένῃ and φεύγοντος … τὰς ἀρχάς, 549C3-4), which forces them to wonder why Socrates has their wives act the way normal wives do (cf. for instance Adam's notes ad 549C); and likewise common to overlook that the reason the "timocratic" father holds an office paradigmatically military (553B2-3) is that it his own private life of honor his son is meant to see him fall from.

5415

λειτουργία. Cf. 554E7-555A3, of the oligarchical man.

5416

The assertion may call to mind the statement at the end of Book Four that constitutions as well as men degenerate because a stasis among the constituent elements disturbs their proper configuration and a lower element arrogates to itself the work of a higher one (444B1-8). But the treatment in Book Eight narrates an evolution, or devolution, in which one thing follows another according to an internal logic of events, and forgoes to describe the several temporary states of affairs as reconfigurations of the constituent elements, with two exceptions that only prove the rule. The first exception is in the transition of the polis from aristocracy to timocracy (547B2-8) when we are told that the λογιστικόν fights with the ἐπιθυμητικόν; although the compromise they reach (εἰς μέσον, B8) is tantamount to placing the θυμοειδές in charge (the element "in the middle" between the λογιστικόν and the ἐπιθυμητικόν in both state and soul) the point is made only to be forgotten (548C5-7). The second exception comes in the personal transition from timocratic youth to oligarchic adult (553C1-D7) where the ἐπιθυμητικόν is explicitly said to take charge and to press the λογιστικόν and the θυμοειδές into its own service but nothing more is made of it. In the other fourteen parts of the treatment the description is concrete and the three elements are not mentioned as such. Of course the human and political behavior described are amenable to an analysis that employs the tripartition, but to do so is left to the reader.

5417

Shorey is misled by an expectation of consistency on this point (2.lii) to worry that whereas the individual corresponding to democracy is a member of the deme, the individual corresponding to tyranny is not the tyrant but the tyrannized.

5418

Though the idea has conventional support (cf. Shorey 2.244, note a) the narrative does not need it to be true.

5419

And as such provides still another occasion for commentators to criticize this Book, just as the hyper-idealism of the curriculum allowed them to criticize Book Seven, and the paradoxes allowed them to find Plato venting about Greek politics in Book Five, and the partition of the soul in Book Four might have failed in logic, and the criticism of the poets in Book Two and Three make Plato a bowdlerizer. The Republic would not have survived in our literary canon if these criticisms were true; and conversely the fact that it has survived suggests they are false, or irrelevant.

Aristotle's criticism that the account of Socrates οὐ καλῶς λέγεται (Pol.5.12, 1316A2-3,ff) on the grounds that the sequence of πόλεις is not an historical account, if indeed it is sincere, is simply an ignoratio elenchi. How seriously can anybody imagine that Socrates is interested in the history of political regimes, or that Plato would depict him as being so, or that such a history would serve Plato's purpose here? And even if one could imagine this might be the case, how could he continue to think it was the case, once he had read the account? Because he holds Socrates and Plato to this paltry standard, Aristotle is forced to ignore the central message of the narrative as a whole, that with the arrival of the tyrant who will kill his father and eat his children, the entire race will be wiped out: instead he blithely remarks that Socrates fails to tell what tyranny turns into (1316A25-29)!

The value, purpose and worth of the account all become evident at the end. They have nothing to do with an historical development, but just the range of depravation that a single individual is capable of undergoing, even in one lifetime, as Nettleship (p.295) saw a long time ago, even though this is nowhere the stated program of Socrates or of Plato. Adam in his opening note (543Aff, 2.195-6) agrees to take exception to Plato's stated program and accepts Nettleship's position, saying, truly, that the treatment gives a psychological account of the state; but then he also goes beyond the explicit program as well as Plato's true intentions when he says that Plato has here attempted the first Philosophy of History, which would be not only unmeaning to Plato but, more importantly, irrelevant to his (i.e., Socrates's) purpose here.

5420

Socrates also shifts his manner of speaking when Adeimantus interrupts in Book Six. Cf. Appendix 3.

5421

E.g. εἶναι, διάγειν, ζῆν.

5422

In the Commentary, ad loc. For other instances cf.359D2-60B2, 363C4-D2, 390B6-C6, 395D-6B, 396D, 399A5-C4, 406AB and 406DE, 409B4-C1, 411D, 416B, 420E, 439E, 441E9-442A2, 443DE, 504A4-C2, 540D1-541A7.

5423

Cf. 548A5-C2, 548E4-549A7, 549C6-E1, 550A1-B7, 551D9-E4, 551E5-552A1, 553B1-C7, 553D1-7, 554A5-B1, 554B7-C2, 554E7-555A6, 555D7-E1, 555E3-556A2, 556B6-C2, 560D8-561A1, 561C6-D7, 562C8-D9, 565E3-556A4, 566A6-10, 569B6-C4, 571D6, 572B1, 572B10-C4, 572C6-D3, 572D8-E4, 573A4-B4, 573B12-C5. The commentators barely remark upon it: at 559D which describes the devolution of the oligarchic man into the democratic, Jowett speaks, at last and in passing, of "the rhetorical and grandiloquent character of this part of the Republic," though he had not noted the style in his comments on the previous 16 pages of Book Eight (except to note a "load" of participles at 555A; thereupon he compliments the paragraph at 560A); and Adam says that this passage "is one of the most royal and magnificent pieces of writing in the whole range of literature, whether ancient or modern," citing Longinus's praise at 12.2 ipsissimis verbis and 33-36 (he did cite Longinus earlier, at 549D5 to beg us to excuse Plato for anacoluthon [αἰσθάνηται] for the "fire" he achieves in the expression that would be unavailable to mere correctness), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus's criticism (Pomp.2 [= Dem.5-8]), for what may be the same sort of floridity of style (n.b. neither of these ancient critics illustrates his comments with particular citations from Book Eight nor anywhere else in the Platonic corpus). Thesleff in his voluminous work on Plato's style does not isolate or characterize this style nor notes its presence in Book Eight.

5424

Commentators, failing to see the ecphrastic balancing, explain that demiurge and soldier are listed because they are required to supply tools and weapons which a poor man could not afford.

5425

κακήν goes with both τροφήν and κατάστασιν (cf. Leg.800C2-3).

5426

I do not excise βλαπτόμενον with Burnet (B4). D.Lee (Penguin 370) takes the circumstantial participles στρατηγήσαντα … ἄρξαντα (553B2-3) to describe the activity in which the father lost his fortune; I take them to describe the high office he falls from; the ecphrastic style per se supplies no cues to determine the question. This is a good example how the style requires that the reader or audience supply their own prejudices to arrive at a meaning.

5427

With θεώμενοι (D1) the syntax is eclipsed by the semantics: this participle envisages the event of the comparison hypothesized at the beginning (ὅταν παραβάλλωσιν, C8) and becomes the springboard for the second subjunctive καταφρονῶνται (D1: n.b. there is no καί) as if this were now the protasis.

5428

The two terms represent the category of periodic civic duties with a "sample slice" consisting of two cases. Notably ἄρχειν can be repeated with a new meaning (E6, hold a particular office; cf. E3, be ruler rather than ruled).

5429

Adam ad loc. fails to see that μηδέν (E6) is sympathetic with μηδέ (E5) and then he gets tangled up, as he acknowledges, in an oversubtle double negative.

5430

Thuc. 3.82.4-83.4; cf. Isoc.Antid.283-5, Areop.20.

5431

The triad probably represents the three categories of "goods" (external, bodily, psychic) so that the sense is, he is spending everything that is worth anything on pleasures.

5432

πῶς τὸ τοιοῦτον λέγομεν (562E6) evinces consternation.

5433

τὸ ἐμόν γ’ ἐμοὶ λέγεις ὄναρ, 563D2.

5434

The overall structure again includes an extended protasis and a conclusion that appeals to the interlocutor for agreement: cf. 571C3-C6 with 565E3-566A2, and οἶσθ’ ὅτι (571C7) with ἆρα … ἀνάγκη (566A2).

5435

The tripartite analysis lies behind all of the regimes and men of Book Eight, but since the treatment of oligarchy and democracy it has been submerged (cf. n.5416, supra), so that it seems almost new in this paragraph (cf. also αἰσχύνης καὶ φρονήσεως (C9) and its obverse οὔτε ἀνοίας … οὔτε ἀναισυντίας (D3-4).

5436

βρῶμα suggests the ἀνθρώπινον σπλάγχνον of 565D9, just as μιαιφονεῖν recalls 565E6.

5437

ὡσαύτως δὲ καί (572A3-4), the first connective between the participial phrases so far, needed to point the parallelism of the thumoeidetic with the epithumetic above.

5438

There is anacoluthon here (καθεύδων would have been more consistent with πραΰνας and ἐλθών), mitigated by the resemblance of the verb to the leading expression (εἰς ὕπνον ἴῃ), an anacoluthon similar to the one at 556D1 (cf. n.3954, supra).

5439

His responses merely effect a transition to Socrates's next point, e.g., 547E1, 548A5, 548B4, 549A9, 549C8, 549E3, 553B7, 553D1, 555E3, 556A4, 556B6, 556C4, 557E2, 558B1, 558D4, 560D8, 561B7, etc.

5440

For such "bridged" syntax cf. 548B4, 549C8, 558B1.

5441

The δέ goes really with the ensuing apodosis and it is needed. Stallb. is misled by the unusual ecphrastic style and deletes it (as he does the τε at 575A2). Nowhere does he note or acknowledge the imposing style Socrates has adopted (except to notice the interesting καί between the participles at 549D2).

5442

Another of the meanings of ἀναγκαῖος in this passage: cf. Shorey ad loc., citing Eur. Androm. 671.

5423

5443

Cf.441A2-3.

5444

The betweenness is described at 439E-441C.

5445

547E.

5446

548AB.

5447

ὥσπερ παῖδες πατέρα τὸν νόμον ἀποδιδράσκοντες, 548B6-7.

5448

548B7-C2.

5449

550D10-E2, properly interpreted: τὸ πλῆθος τοιοῦτον αὑτῶν ἀπηργάσατο means "they bring it about (empiric aorist) that their own amount of wealth (τὸ πλῆθος αὑτῶν) should be comparable (τοιοῦτον) to that of the others" (τοιοῦτον eagerly proleptic).

5450

Placing it, as it were, onto the scales by which value (τιμή) is assessed in the market: 550E4-8.

5451

554B7-C2, 555D3-5, 555E5-6A1-2.

5452

Note the repeated use of τιμ- words, straddling in their meaning value, honor, and monetary worth: τιμιώτερον / ἀτιμώτερον, 550E5-6; τιμωμένου / ἀτιμώτερον, 551A1-2; ἐπαινοῦσιν / θαυμάζουσιν / εἰς ἀρχὰς ἄγουσιν // ἀτιμαζουσι, A9-10.

5453

The ἐπιθυμητικόν τε καὶ φιλοχρηματικόν: the connection was first made at 436A1, then described at 442A5-B3, and then explained at 580.

5454

The guidance gained from paideia is absent since paideia itself has been abandoned as unprofitable: the λογιστικόν that had known logos blended with music (549B6-7) is confined to bookkeeping, and the θυμοειδές that had admired at least the gymnastic half of the paideia (548B7-C2, 549A6-7) may now honor and praise only wealth: 533D1-7.

5455

One is reminded of the demiurges at their leisure, 420D5-E7.

5456

Hence the oxymoronic juxtaposition of ἐπιμέλεια and βία (552E2, 553C1-2), and the expression ἐπιεικεῖ τινι ... βίᾳ, 554C12.

5457

553B8-C4.

5458

554A11.

5459

αἴθωσι θηρσὶ καὶ δεινοῖς κτλ 559D9-10; 560B7-10.

5460

ἐξ ἴσου, 557A4; ἀπὸ κλήρων, A5; potentially ominous ἐπίῃ, 558A1; ἰσότητά τινα κτλ, C5-6; 561A8-9; 561B3-4.

5461

The pleasures install ἀλαζόνες λόγοι into the acropolis of the young man's soul, but the λόγοι are false, inverting the meaning of all moral terms (560C2-1A4).

5462

558B1-C1, C5-6; 561C3-4.

5463

The democratic sons are neglectfully (ἠμεληκότας, 556C4) brought up by their money-loving fathers ἀπαιδεύτως (559D7), which means both incompetently (cf. ἀνεπιστημοσύνην τροφῆς πατρός, 560B1) and destitute of the paideia (κενὴν μαθημάτων τε καὶ ἐπιτηδευμάτων καλῶν καὶ λόγων ἀληθῶν, 560B8-9) that a competent upbringing would include and that might equip the young man to know what is happening inside him (ὑποτρεφόμεναι, 560A9). While the wealthy fathers generally could keep their son's desires under control half the time, the democratic re-compromise of the sons rendered the sons they subsequently raised only one chance in four against the bad appetites (compare εἰς μέσον ἀμφοῖν, 572D1, with ταῖς ἐν μέσῳ ταύταις ἐπιθυμίαις, E2).

5464

Sexual pleasure is suggested by the imagery of 573A4-B1: ἐπὶ τὸ ἔσχατον αὔξουσαί τε καὶ τρέφουσαι πόθου κέντρον ἐμποιήσωσι τῷ κηφῆνι, τότε δὴ δοροφορεῖταί τε ὑπὸ μανίας καὶ οἰστρᾷ ...

5465

καθήρῃ σωφροσύνης, 573B4.

5466

ἀρχόμενον, 559D1.

5467

568E-9C; 574BC.

5468

ἀπὸ σκοπιᾶς, 445C4.

5469

Shorey very succinctly asserts that what gives the analogy between man and state cogency here "is the cumulative impression of the detail it makes possible" (2.lii).

5470

As he did in Books 2 through 4, searching for the best state.

5471

Her charge of ἀνανδρία (549D6) will leave an especially indelible mark on him.

5472

οἱ δοκοῦντες εὖνοι εἶναι (549E4-5) describes exactly his innocent naivete as to his familiars.

5473

This is what ἐγγύθεν means at 550A7.

5474

ἐξ ἐλαττόνων χρημάτων πλείω 553D4; ἀπὸ παντὸς περιουσίαν ποιούμενος (554A10-11)

5475

554C4-D3.

5476

555A3.

5477

μόνος, in the clause ὃς μόνος ἐγγενόμενος σωτὴρ ἀρετῆς διὰ βίου ἐνοικεῖ τῷ ἔχοντι (549B6-7), goes with σωτήρ, not ἐγγενόμενος as it is often taken.

5478

The son is among the unspecified ἄλλα that the father neglects: this is what makes Socrates's continual use of the expression τῶν ἄλλων, ambivalent even of gender (556C4, 562B6, 562C5; and contrast τῆς ἄλλης, 554C1 and D3), so poignant (it is not equal to "all else" as it is almost universally translated: there is no πάντα [πάντες?]).

5479

ὀρθοῦν (Lach.181A4).

5480

Cf. T.H.Chance, Plato's Euthydemus: Analysis of What Is and What Is Not Philosophy (Univ.Calif. 1992).

5481

ὀρθοῖς, 181A4.

5482

Conversely the precious description we have of Sophroniscus, that he was “best of men” (181A5) without reference to any exploits, suggests the model Socrates has in mind as a father to his own sons, which we hear something about at the very close of his defense speech (41E2-42A2), to hear which would certainly bring his sons to tears.

5483

Apol.41E1-42A2.

5484

Everyone is brought in toward the end of his speech: 366D5-367A4.

5485

This is why it is structured as it is, in the form of three run-throughs: cf. Commentary. §2A2.

5486

His manner, to scold Socrates for thinking his brother had already said enough (362D2-E1), suggests he is deliberately unconscious of what he is doing! Cf. nn.3129 and 5497, infra.

5487

I hope we will someday say that in Plato's Republic justice in the city is “uncle” to justice in the man!

5488

Or, in the dialogical context, “As he plays answerer (ἀποκρινόμενος), so is he.”

5489

E.g., 371C5-D3, τῶν πολλῶν 426D5-6 (and n.); καὶ μάλα γελοίως at 505B11 (with n. ad loc.).

5490

Cf. esp.366B7-D7 and nn. ad loc.; and nn. ad 367C1, D8.

5491

Cf. nn. ad 365A6, 366C1, 487D8, 504E8-5A1.

5492

For a fuller statement cf. Commentary §2.A.2.

5493

Thus ἄλλα (363E3) for which cf. n. ad loc. and notes ad 364A4, B2; 366D6.

5494

Cf. 362D2-3, 362E1 and n., 504A7-8 and n., 548D8-9, 549D6 and n., and n. ad 369B4.

5495

Not only the prosopopoeia of the young man arguing with himself but also the τις at Book Four (419A2: cf. n. ad 419A9) and Book Six 487C5 (cf. n. ad 487B3 and nn.ad 506B9 and C2) and the presumption at 498C that Socrates will have to argue with Thrasymachus. Cf. also nn. ad 449D1, 489B2, 491C10, 495C7, 498C7-8, and 498C9,D2. Recognizing his tendency to project his own thoughts onto someone else Socrates criticizes the behavior of a “them” when in truth his remarks are directed toward Adeimantus's (498-501, passim).

5496

Cf. n. ad 487B7; 424D7-E2, 426A1-7A1, 487B7 (and n.), and ἀλλὰ διδάξω at 489B2 (though he quoted the nay-sayer he will now be first to enlighten him). At 498C5-8 (ἀπὸ Θρασυμάχου ἀρξάμενος) he passes on the final responsibility to others at the same time that he insulates himself from Socrates’s theme by condescending to his sincerity (though indeed Socrates set himself up for such treatment [σκόπει ..., 497E5-6] Adeimantus singles out Thrasymachus because he is a teacher of rhetoric, just the sort to be hired by the rich to teach their lads how to become top people, and also because he is the most likely to jump in at this point and exonerate himself from having to agree in his own person). Cf. also 499D7-E1 (and n. ad D10); and cf. ἀλλ’ ἔμοιγε μετρίως ... (504B8), soon followed by σύχνοι πάσχουσιν διὰ τὴν ῥᾳθυμίαν (C5).

5497

Cf. 495C7 and n. ad 367D5.

5498

The paradigm of his in-betweenness is shown in his ability to argue with himself 365A4-366B2. Cf. also nn. ad 364C2, 365A3, 420A1, 501E6, and 504E8-505A1.

5499

He answers by turning one of the questioner's words back upon him, overmuch (nn. ad 371A10, 549C3, 550C3, and 571B2); and continues with bluffing indirection and litotes a little too long (423C5 and D7, 424D7, 487E6, 498D5, 575C1 and nn. ad locc.; also n. ad 504E5-6). In the presence of superiors such behavior can border on impertinence).

5500

οὐ πάνυ χαριέν (426B3 and n.); cf. 426C5.

5501

504E4-6,ff. Cf. nn. Several aspects of his behavior combine in this crucial passage, as they do again at 563C1-2 and 563D2 (cf. nn.).

5502

The μέγιστον μάθημα, which Glaucon, too, recognizes to be the overall goal: 506D2-3. Cf. n. ad 506B5. Adeimantus pushes Socrates but Glaucon pleads: the two of them act the same way as they did in Book Two.

5503

506B2: note Adeimantus's importunate ἀλλὰ σὺ δή.

5504

As he had at 427D8-E2. In giving him carte blanche Glaucon indirectly offers himself up as a sympathetic and cooperative interlocutor: Even the ugliest best guess can be redeemed now be presented as an hypothesis shared by persons pursuing beauty.

5505

What Socrates called ὁρμή at 506E2. Cf. οὐκέτι at 533A1.

5506

I have accordingly added a special appendix analyzing its form and content and trying to ascertain its purpose (Appendix 7).

5507

This is the significance of the “keynote” technique described in Appendix 7 (passim).

5508

After all that has happened in the dialogue it is clear that it is Adeimantus rather than Glaucon who cares about what people think of him. The choice of honor or reputation over virtue is exactly the dilemma he depicted so painfully in Book Two, whereas Glaucon was tempted not by others seeing him but by slaking his passions unseen.

5509

372E2-8.

5510

549C2: γίγνεται δὲ ὧδέ πως.

5511

πῇ δή, ἔφη, γίγνεται (C7) repeats the first words of Socrates's paragraph and the subject of the verb is the same, the νέος. Adeimantus is impatient with the talk about the father.

5512

ὅταν (C8) indicates that an anticipatory subjunctive is coming (almost “as soon as”), but the anticipation is immediately postponed by the next words, (πρῶτον μέν) which introduce more preliminary conditions!

5513

And indeed the drama consists of how long he will go on witnessing the horror story before being overwhelmed with disgust (cf. n. ad 576A10). The moment comes with the vision of the dog asserting his right to the man's path, during the discussion of democracy (563B4-E2 and nn. ad loc.).

5514

γνώσεταί γε νὴ Δία τότ’ ἤδη ὀ δῆμος οἷος οἷον θρέμμα γεννῶν ἠσπάζετό τε καὶ ηὖξεν (569A8-B1).

5515

οὐ πάνυ θαρρῶ ἔγωγε περὶ τῶν γονέων τοῦ τοιούτου (574B10-11).

5516

Socrates says πρὸς Δίος (574A12) but Adeimantus μὰ Δία (574C6), just as he had said νὴ Δία at 569A8. For the difference between the genitive and the accusative cf. Gildersleeve, SCG §11.

5517

Though only putatively, as we saw near the beginning of this Appendix.