Michael S. Kochin : War, "Class and Justice in Plato's Republic", The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 53, 1999
by MICHAEL S. KOCHIN
We scholars who write about the Republic have found much to say about the education of Plato's warriors. We carefully and thoughtfully relate their virtues to those of the Republic's philosopher-kings, and even to those of Plato's Socrates. We have found much less to say about Plato's peculiar account of that for which they are educated--war. I agree with Leon Craig that war and spiritedness are central to the argument of the Republic.(1) Indeed, I will contend, Socrates' three different accounts of war reflect and, in a way, complete the central argument of the Republic. Yet Craig and other modern scholars of the cultivation of Plato's warriors have very little to say on Socrates' three accounts of the city at war.(2)
No doubt this lacuna in our scholarship has a variety of explanations. Probably the most important is that as political theorists we are constitutionally hostile to the transient features of the life-world, and we all half-believe that the world of war is a transient state, to be succeeded by a humanly comprehensible era of permanent peace. Those of us who understand our vocation as eliciting the permanent structure of the human condition do not want to invest our intelligence and education, which ought to go into constructing works "more lasting than bronze," in discussing something so transitory as war.(3) We scholars, allegedly living in a postmodern, that is to say, post-Christian age when "God is dead," are no longer bound by oath or religious test to accept the prophecies of the Bible. Nonetheless we read with delight Kant's parody on "Perpetual Peace," and with great unease Hegel's remarks on the fulfillment of the modern state in war, as though in our innermost thoughts we trust that Isaiah was indeed divinely inspired when he foresaw an age in which the lion would lie down with the lamb. Today, we are somehow inclined to suppose, all right-thinking people believe that the state where wars come--the state in which we all live and always have lived--is as the leaves blowing in the wind.
In the Western world before the reception of revealed scripture, the notion of a perpetual peace in a world of distinct human communities was unimaginable. "War was a part of the fabric of society, on a par with earthquakes, droughts, destructive storms and slavery."(4) We claim to be able to envision a perpetual peace that is not the peace of complete nuclear desolation. Yet this possibility may be imaginable but not ultimately intelligible as a human possibility, if we take human nature as visible in history rather than human potential as depicted in prophecy as our ground for understanding the possibilities of our condition.
Plato imagines a condition without war, as we will see, but in the Republic he limits that condition to a city of sows, or, in the Laws to the survivors of some devastating and worldwide catastrophe that disrupted a prior world of cities and their wars.(5) That condition of peace is thus either illusory for human beings, or a transient moment in the cycle of civilizations.(6) By contrast, the just city of the Republic is a "political act within an existing political order" that is or could be located within our world of warring cities.(7) The city of the Republic exists in time, it was legislated, it will decay.(8) To be in time is to be in motion, and the best city in motion, as Socrates says in a different context, must go to war.(9)
If we attend carefully to the descriptions of the city at war in the Republic we discover that Socrates gives three different accounts, each of which plays a crucial role, in his praise of justice. In the first account, in book 2, the luxurious city engages in wars for expansion. In the second, in book 3, the best city, now seen as the perfectly unified city, fights actual cities that are always riven by class conflict. In the third, in book 5, the strangest and thus, one suspects, the most Platonic, the best city uses war to educate its citizens, and to teach other Greek cities not to enslave Greeks. Each discussion of the city at war comes at a crucial point in Socrates' praise of justice. The first discussion moves us from a city of sows to a city of human beings, from a city that ignores the demands of the love of honor that Glaucon represents, to a city that fulfills them, if at the price of the luxuries that Glaucon professes to desire. The second discussion of war shows that despite the complete separation of the warrior from the economic classes, the just city is not merely another Sparta where the warriors are engaged in perpetual civil war against the farmers and craftsmen. The third account, which Socrates gives seemingly spontaneously, takes us from communism to philosophy, and, I will contend, shows that Socrates' praise of justice indeed praises something that we can recognize as a purification of justice conventionally understood.
I
Fever and Purgation. To defend justice as the good for human beings against the arguments of Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, Socrates draws his famous analogy between soul and city.(10) The attacks on justice have shown that both the city and the soul have within them varying and seemingly contradictory intentions or desires.(11) The city includes rulers and ruled, the naturally strong and the naturally weak. The soul contains appetites for food and for sex, desires to rule and dominate, and an acquired opinion of what is best for the individual. Yet difference need not mean disharmony. We are each different in nature and suited for different jobs, so to fulfill our natural wants we must come together, Socrates claims, in a city that is simply a collection of artisans.(12)
We will recognize the partiality, and thus the inhumanity, of the citizens of the first city, when we realize that despite Socrates' apparent claim,(13) justice cannot be found in the first city. The citizens will live, while they control their population, under a regime of abundance relative to their wants. Since everyone has enough, no one will want more; thus, no one will commit any unjust act for the sake of gain. Without justice the first city has no internal politics, and because it lives in peace it has no external affairs either. The first city is attractive to Adeimantus, whose implicit account of the individual in his attack on justice portrayed us as simple slaves of our opinion of what is best for us, and mentioned nothing of any illimitable desire, in particular the unquenchable thirst for rule and reputation.(14) The citizens of the first city have comforts without honor, since honor can be won only in political competition within the city and military action beyond its boundaries. This first city fails to be the good city for us, because we have the desire or honor that Adeimantus' understanding of human nature neglects.(15) We will fail to find the true justice that is human excellence in the first city, because its inhabitants fail to be human.(16) If you were furnishing a city of sows, Socrates, with what other food than
these would you fatten them?
But how, Glaucon, is it necessary to feed them? I said.
Feed them the customary things, he said. I suppose that those who are not
to suffer hardship are to recline on couches, and to dine from tables, and
to eat delicacies [opsa], the ones they have now, and also desserts.(19)
The Athenians denoted by opsa the variety of foods one could eat with
bread, including the whole range of seafood from the sprats eaten by
the poor to the choice eels and grey-fish consumed by the sybaritic rich.(20)
Glaucon's desires for luxuries are not desires for pleasant tastes simply, but
also desires for the distinction involved in being a consumer of refined
luxuries, which by definition only some can have. Whereas Adeimantus
was satisfied with a life of bodily comforts without honor, Glaucon will,
it turns out, be satisfied with a life of honor that lacks bodily comforts.(21)
Glaucon's honor-bearing luxuries bring on honorable war. The necessary
goods, those that ,satisfy the healthy, and consequently strictly appetitive,
desires, are available in abundance, but the desire for luxuries creates scarcity
and scarcity leads to war.(22) Since war presumes warriors who will be guardians
of the city, suddenly the nature of the citizens of our city has altered radically.
No longer can we imagine that our city is made up of men and women
participating according to their natures in the necessary arts. Instead,
Socrates has introduced a class of artisans whose excellence appears exclusively male. Skill in soldiering seems most closely tied to physical strength, and the moral qualities of the
good soldier are those that actual Greek cities put at the core of their ideal of the masculine.(23) Human excellence has no place in the city at war, it seems; instead, there is the
manly excellence of citizen-soldiers, and the excellence of women, about which the city prefers to say nothing.(24)
But manly anger is not the sole attribute that the warriors of the just city are
to manifest. These warrior-guardians must somehow combine in a single soul,
gentleness toward their fellow citizens and great-spirit toward the city's enemies.(25)
To inculcate both spiritedness and gentleness the guardians must be educated in
both gymnastics and music, but they will begin first with music, which conduces to gentleness.(26)
This first music consists of the false speeches and tales of gods and heroes, but the existing myths that form the education of all actual cities, the tales told by Hesiod and Homer, are unsuitable. The inherited poetry must be purged before it can be incorporated into the education of (so far male) warrior-guardians, because it encourages its listeners to become excessively spirited, that is, to become excessively manly in defending themselves from injustices done by city or kin.(27) The reformed poetic education will teach the guardians moderation (sophrosune), "to be obedient to rulers, and themselves to be rulers over the pleasures concerned with drinks, and sex, and concerning feasting."(28) In actual cities the poetry teaches immoderate indulgence: even the reward of virtue is said by the official poets to be an eternal drunk.(29) The reformed poetry of the just city will teach moderation instead, though moderation conflicts with the heroic conception of masculinity as promulgated in the myths told by actual cities. There will be no terrible rapes of Perithous or Theseus to warm the loins of our guardians, Socrates says.(30)
(1) Leon Harold Craig, The War Lover: A Study of Plato's Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
(2) Thomas Pangle has recently discussed the problem of justice as it appears in the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of the causes of war. He considers the "implications for foreign policy of the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of healthy domestic republican life"; Thomas Pangle, "Justice Among Nations in Platonic and Aristotelian Political Philosophy," American Journal of Political Science 42 (1998): 377-397. I focus on the implications of the need to survive in an uncertain and violent interrepublican order for Plato's understanding of a good and just republic, as well as the implications for his understanding of a good and just individual life. Political justice for Plato (and indeed, for Aristotle, as the Politics shows on virtually every page) is primarily the just regard for the different segments within the city's population. Unlike Pangle, I take up the problems of justice and injustice toward foreigners in the light of this primacy of justice toward fellow city dwellers.
(3) In her justly well-known essay on Arendt's The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Hanna Pitkin writes, "The Greeks deliberated much about warfare; surely that is not what Arendt recommends for us"; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating Private and Public," Political Theory 9 (1981): 337. Even if Pitkin is correct about what Arendt would or would not recommend, Arendt's encomium of Athenian public life forces us to ask if political participation requires the highest possible stakes in order to achieve its full perfection. Perhaps a genuine life of action for many is impossible without a mode of warfare that enables many to participate on a scale that they can see and understand.
(4) W. Kendrick Pritchett, The Greek State at War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971-91), pt. 5, 312; compare pt. 1, 82.
(5) Laws 678e-679e. References to Plato are to the text of John Burnet, ed., Platonis Opera, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900-1902), and all translations are my own. 6) In an image used both in the Laws and in the Statesman, Plato describes the peaceful age of Cronus, when human beings were ruled by superhuman daimons under the supervision of the god (Laws 713a-714b, Statesman 268d-274e). Although the age of Cronus is supposed to depict human life, it is a life in which speech and thus human reason have no place; see my "Plato's Eleatic and Athenian Sciences of Politics," The Review of Politics 61 (1999): 57-84. As the Eleatic stranger states gently and euphemistically, we cannot tell if the human beings of that age engaged in philosophy (Statesman 272b-d). The age of Cronus is a condition of peace, but like the city of sows in Republic 2, it fails to be a human condition.
(7) Adi Ophir, Plato's Invisible Cities: Discourse and Power in The Republic (Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1990), 83. See also Republic 499c-d.
(8) Republic 546a-547a.
(9) Timaeus 19c.
(10) Republic 368c-369a.
(11) Republic 344a-c, 360a-c, and 366c-d.
(12) Republic 369-371.
(13) Republic 369a.
(14) Republic 367a. Note that Adeimantus' description of the happiness the guardians will forego includes no political goods (Republic 419a; Ophir, Invisible Cities, 65).
(15) Compare Darrell Dobbs, "Choosing Justice: Socrates' Model City and the Practice of Dialectic," American .Political Science Review 88 (1994): 266.
(16) The inhabitants of this first city "sing to the gods" (Republic 372b),
but the uniquely human response to the gods is not to praise them but to question them. See my "The Unity of Virtue and the Limitations of Magnesia," History of Political Thought 19, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 125-141. Birds and beasts too praise the Lord, but even the most devout and grateful man is wont to ask "O Lord, who is like you?" (Compare Psalm 148, with Psalm 35:10).
(17) Republic 360a-b.
(18) Republic 372c.
(19) Republic 372d-e.
(20) See the masterful discussion of this passage in its social context in James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 3-35.
(21) Mary P. Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 81. It is Adeimantus, not Glaucon, who later will question the happiness of the auxiliaries because they live an existence purged of every luxury (Republic 419). Unlike his brother, Adeimantus wants the material goods in themselves--Adeimantus seeks the honor-bearing pleasures because they are pleasant, not because they are honored. (22) Republic 373e.
(23) See A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 208; idem, From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 78. See also Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 73-74.
(24) Thucydides 2.45. Compare Lysias 2.4-2.6.
(25) Republic 375c.
(26) Republic 377a.
(27) Republic 377e-378d.
(28) Republic 389d9-e1.
(29) Republic 363c-d. Compare 390a-b, and Jacob Howland, The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 85.
(30) Republic 391c. See also Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53. Stephen Salkever and Wendy Brown give useful accounts of the critique of Greek understandings of masculinity implicit in Socrates' education for the warrior class. See Stephen Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Wendy Brown, "Supposing Truth Were a Woman: Plato's Subversion of Masculine Discourse," Political Theory 16 (1988): 594-616.
by MICHAEL S. KOCHIN
We scholars who write about the Republic have found much to say about the education of Plato's warriors. We carefully and thoughtfully relate their virtues to those of the Republic's philosopher-kings, and even to those of Plato's Socrates. We have found much less to say about Plato's peculiar account of that for which they are educated--war. I agree with Leon Craig that war and spiritedness are central to the argument of the Republic.(1) Indeed, I will contend, Socrates' three different accounts of war reflect and, in a way, complete the central argument of the Republic. Yet Craig and other modern scholars of the cultivation of Plato's warriors have very little to say on Socrates' three accounts of the city at war.(2)
No doubt this lacuna in our scholarship has a variety of explanations. Probably the most important is that as political theorists we are constitutionally hostile to the transient features of the life-world, and we all half-believe that the world of war is a transient state, to be succeeded by a humanly comprehensible era of permanent peace. Those of us who understand our vocation as eliciting the permanent structure of the human condition do not want to invest our intelligence and education, which ought to go into constructing works "more lasting than bronze," in discussing something so transitory as war.(3) We scholars, allegedly living in a postmodern, that is to say, post-Christian age when "God is dead," are no longer bound by oath or religious test to accept the prophecies of the Bible. Nonetheless we read with delight Kant's parody on "Perpetual Peace," and with great unease Hegel's remarks on the fulfillment of the modern state in war, as though in our innermost thoughts we trust that Isaiah was indeed divinely inspired when he foresaw an age in which the lion would lie down with the lamb. Today, we are somehow inclined to suppose, all right-thinking people believe that the state where wars come--the state in which we all live and always have lived--is as the leaves blowing in the wind.
In the Western world before the reception of revealed scripture, the notion of a perpetual peace in a world of distinct human communities was unimaginable. "War was a part of the fabric of society, on a par with earthquakes, droughts, destructive storms and slavery."(4) We claim to be able to envision a perpetual peace that is not the peace of complete nuclear desolation. Yet this possibility may be imaginable but not ultimately intelligible as a human possibility, if we take human nature as visible in history rather than human potential as depicted in prophecy as our ground for understanding the possibilities of our condition.
Plato imagines a condition without war, as we will see, but in the Republic he limits that condition to a city of sows, or, in the Laws to the survivors of some devastating and worldwide catastrophe that disrupted a prior world of cities and their wars.(5) That condition of peace is thus either illusory for human beings, or a transient moment in the cycle of civilizations.(6) By contrast, the just city of the Republic is a "political act within an existing political order" that is or could be located within our world of warring cities.(7) The city of the Republic exists in time, it was legislated, it will decay.(8) To be in time is to be in motion, and the best city in motion, as Socrates says in a different context, must go to war.(9)
If we attend carefully to the descriptions of the city at war in the Republic we discover that Socrates gives three different accounts, each of which plays a crucial role, in his praise of justice. In the first account, in book 2, the luxurious city engages in wars for expansion. In the second, in book 3, the best city, now seen as the perfectly unified city, fights actual cities that are always riven by class conflict. In the third, in book 5, the strangest and thus, one suspects, the most Platonic, the best city uses war to educate its citizens, and to teach other Greek cities not to enslave Greeks. Each discussion of the city at war comes at a crucial point in Socrates' praise of justice. The first discussion moves us from a city of sows to a city of human beings, from a city that ignores the demands of the love of honor that Glaucon represents, to a city that fulfills them, if at the price of the luxuries that Glaucon professes to desire. The second discussion of war shows that despite the complete separation of the warrior from the economic classes, the just city is not merely another Sparta where the warriors are engaged in perpetual civil war against the farmers and craftsmen. The third account, which Socrates gives seemingly spontaneously, takes us from communism to philosophy, and, I will contend, shows that Socrates' praise of justice indeed praises something that we can recognize as a purification of justice conventionally understood.
I
Fever and Purgation. To defend justice as the good for human beings against the arguments of Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, Socrates draws his famous analogy between soul and city.(10) The attacks on justice have shown that both the city and the soul have within them varying and seemingly contradictory intentions or desires.(11) The city includes rulers and ruled, the naturally strong and the naturally weak. The soul contains appetites for food and for sex, desires to rule and dominate, and an acquired opinion of what is best for the individual. Yet difference need not mean disharmony. We are each different in nature and suited for different jobs, so to fulfill our natural wants we must come together, Socrates claims, in a city that is simply a collection of artisans.(12)
We will recognize the partiality, and thus the inhumanity, of the citizens of the first city, when we realize that despite Socrates' apparent claim,(13) justice cannot be found in the first city. The citizens will live, while they control their population, under a regime of abundance relative to their wants. Since everyone has enough, no one will want more; thus, no one will commit any unjust act for the sake of gain. Without justice the first city has no internal politics, and because it lives in peace it has no external affairs either. The first city is attractive to Adeimantus, whose implicit account of the individual in his attack on justice portrayed us as simple slaves of our opinion of what is best for us, and mentioned nothing of any illimitable desire, in particular the unquenchable thirst for rule and reputation.(14) The citizens of the first city have comforts without honor, since honor can be won only in political competition within the city and military action beyond its boundaries. This first city fails to be the good city for us, because we have the desire or honor that Adeimantus' understanding of human nature neglects.(15) We will fail to find the true justice that is human excellence in the first city, because its inhabitants fail to be human.(16) If you were furnishing a city of sows, Socrates, with what other food than
these would you fatten them?
But how, Glaucon, is it necessary to feed them? I said.
Feed them the customary things, he said. I suppose that those who are not
to suffer hardship are to recline on couches, and to dine from tables, and
to eat delicacies [opsa], the ones they have now, and also desserts.(19)
The Athenians denoted by opsa the variety of foods one could eat with
bread, including the whole range of seafood from the sprats eaten by
the poor to the choice eels and grey-fish consumed by the sybaritic rich.(20)
Glaucon's desires for luxuries are not desires for pleasant tastes simply, but
also desires for the distinction involved in being a consumer of refined
luxuries, which by definition only some can have. Whereas Adeimantus
was satisfied with a life of bodily comforts without honor, Glaucon will,
it turns out, be satisfied with a life of honor that lacks bodily comforts.(21)
Glaucon's honor-bearing luxuries bring on honorable war. The necessary
goods, those that ,satisfy the healthy, and consequently strictly appetitive,
desires, are available in abundance, but the desire for luxuries creates scarcity
and scarcity leads to war.(22) Since war presumes warriors who will be guardians
of the city, suddenly the nature of the citizens of our city has altered radically.
No longer can we imagine that our city is made up of men and women
participating according to their natures in the necessary arts. Instead,
Socrates has introduced a class of artisans whose excellence appears exclusively male. Skill in soldiering seems most closely tied to physical strength, and the moral qualities of the
good soldier are those that actual Greek cities put at the core of their ideal of the masculine.(23) Human excellence has no place in the city at war, it seems; instead, there is the
manly excellence of citizen-soldiers, and the excellence of women, about which the city prefers to say nothing.(24)
But manly anger is not the sole attribute that the warriors of the just city are
to manifest. These warrior-guardians must somehow combine in a single soul,
gentleness toward their fellow citizens and great-spirit toward the city's enemies.(25)
To inculcate both spiritedness and gentleness the guardians must be educated in
both gymnastics and music, but they will begin first with music, which conduces to gentleness.(26)
This first music consists of the false speeches and tales of gods and heroes, but the existing myths that form the education of all actual cities, the tales told by Hesiod and Homer, are unsuitable. The inherited poetry must be purged before it can be incorporated into the education of (so far male) warrior-guardians, because it encourages its listeners to become excessively spirited, that is, to become excessively manly in defending themselves from injustices done by city or kin.(27) The reformed poetic education will teach the guardians moderation (sophrosune), "to be obedient to rulers, and themselves to be rulers over the pleasures concerned with drinks, and sex, and concerning feasting."(28) In actual cities the poetry teaches immoderate indulgence: even the reward of virtue is said by the official poets to be an eternal drunk.(29) The reformed poetry of the just city will teach moderation instead, though moderation conflicts with the heroic conception of masculinity as promulgated in the myths told by actual cities. There will be no terrible rapes of Perithous or Theseus to warm the loins of our guardians, Socrates says.(30)
(1) Leon Harold Craig, The War Lover: A Study of Plato's Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
(2) Thomas Pangle has recently discussed the problem of justice as it appears in the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of the causes of war. He considers the "implications for foreign policy of the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of healthy domestic republican life"; Thomas Pangle, "Justice Among Nations in Platonic and Aristotelian Political Philosophy," American Journal of Political Science 42 (1998): 377-397. I focus on the implications of the need to survive in an uncertain and violent interrepublican order for Plato's understanding of a good and just republic, as well as the implications for his understanding of a good and just individual life. Political justice for Plato (and indeed, for Aristotle, as the Politics shows on virtually every page) is primarily the just regard for the different segments within the city's population. Unlike Pangle, I take up the problems of justice and injustice toward foreigners in the light of this primacy of justice toward fellow city dwellers.
(3) In her justly well-known essay on Arendt's The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Hanna Pitkin writes, "The Greeks deliberated much about warfare; surely that is not what Arendt recommends for us"; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating Private and Public," Political Theory 9 (1981): 337. Even if Pitkin is correct about what Arendt would or would not recommend, Arendt's encomium of Athenian public life forces us to ask if political participation requires the highest possible stakes in order to achieve its full perfection. Perhaps a genuine life of action for many is impossible without a mode of warfare that enables many to participate on a scale that they can see and understand.
(4) W. Kendrick Pritchett, The Greek State at War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971-91), pt. 5, 312; compare pt. 1, 82.
(5) Laws 678e-679e. References to Plato are to the text of John Burnet, ed., Platonis Opera, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900-1902), and all translations are my own. 6) In an image used both in the Laws and in the Statesman, Plato describes the peaceful age of Cronus, when human beings were ruled by superhuman daimons under the supervision of the god (Laws 713a-714b, Statesman 268d-274e). Although the age of Cronus is supposed to depict human life, it is a life in which speech and thus human reason have no place; see my "Plato's Eleatic and Athenian Sciences of Politics," The Review of Politics 61 (1999): 57-84. As the Eleatic stranger states gently and euphemistically, we cannot tell if the human beings of that age engaged in philosophy (Statesman 272b-d). The age of Cronus is a condition of peace, but like the city of sows in Republic 2, it fails to be a human condition.
(7) Adi Ophir, Plato's Invisible Cities: Discourse and Power in The Republic (Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1990), 83. See also Republic 499c-d.
(8) Republic 546a-547a.
(9) Timaeus 19c.
(10) Republic 368c-369a.
(11) Republic 344a-c, 360a-c, and 366c-d.
(12) Republic 369-371.
(13) Republic 369a.
(14) Republic 367a. Note that Adeimantus' description of the happiness the guardians will forego includes no political goods (Republic 419a; Ophir, Invisible Cities, 65).
(15) Compare Darrell Dobbs, "Choosing Justice: Socrates' Model City and the Practice of Dialectic," American .Political Science Review 88 (1994): 266.
(16) The inhabitants of this first city "sing to the gods" (Republic 372b),
but the uniquely human response to the gods is not to praise them but to question them. See my "The Unity of Virtue and the Limitations of Magnesia," History of Political Thought 19, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 125-141. Birds and beasts too praise the Lord, but even the most devout and grateful man is wont to ask "O Lord, who is like you?" (Compare Psalm 148, with Psalm 35:10).
(17) Republic 360a-b.
(18) Republic 372c.
(19) Republic 372d-e.
(20) See the masterful discussion of this passage in its social context in James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 3-35.
(21) Mary P. Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 81. It is Adeimantus, not Glaucon, who later will question the happiness of the auxiliaries because they live an existence purged of every luxury (Republic 419). Unlike his brother, Adeimantus wants the material goods in themselves--Adeimantus seeks the honor-bearing pleasures because they are pleasant, not because they are honored. (22) Republic 373e.
(23) See A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 208; idem, From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 78. See also Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 73-74.
(24) Thucydides 2.45. Compare Lysias 2.4-2.6.
(25) Republic 375c.
(26) Republic 377a.
(27) Republic 377e-378d.
(28) Republic 389d9-e1.
(29) Republic 363c-d. Compare 390a-b, and Jacob Howland, The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 85.
(30) Republic 391c. See also Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53. Stephen Salkever and Wendy Brown give useful accounts of the critique of Greek understandings of masculinity implicit in Socrates' education for the warrior class. See Stephen Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Wendy Brown, "Supposing Truth Were a Woman: Plato's Subversion of Masculine Discourse," Political Theory 16 (1988): 594-616.
