Plato and Aristophanes by Marina Marren;

Author:Marina Marren;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Distribution Center (CDC Presses)

The Founders of the New Cities—Sex, Law, and Honor in the Republic and the Birds

The opening of the Republic and the opening of the Birds appear to indicate two opposite directions. Sallis provides several pieces of evidence for his claim that the “Republic begins with Socrates’ descent into Hades.”14 The comedy, on the other hand, opens with the search for one Tereus, a king whose spattered personal history and rapacious desire led to his transformation into a “Hoopoe-Bird” (16).15 To find this creature, two searchers, Peisthetairos and Euelpides, have armed themselves with birds—a jackdaw and a crow. Both birds end up taking the two elderly men outside of Athens. At a place that neither of them finds to be familiar (9), the birds give their sign and that is–up! (49–51). Heraclitus’s saying holds true both for the Republic, where descent into Hades lays the ground for several ascents, and for the Birds, where, while aiming for the high-life of the birds, the characters are—from the start—on the road to the underworld. Peter Meineck remarks on the desolation of the no-man’s land with which the play opens.16 We see it as a visual image of the two old men’s wish “to go to the birds,” which in fifth-century Greek means “to go to hell.”17 The upward thrust which marks the opening of the Birds and will eventuate in the founding of the sky-high bird city—is also the road down. The glorious city in the heavens, in which Peisthetairos eventually comes to hold absolute rule, is Aristophanes’s symbol for a plutocratic regime where a select few, or perhaps even a self-appointed one, enjoy tremendous splendor while the others suffer under the yoke of tyranny. Likewise, Kallipolis and the education and training prescribed by its founders for those who are meant to enjoy life in the best city, might hold a similar commentary on our penchant for power and our love of leisure, the latter being, of course, and no less precariously, a prerequisite for a philosophical life.

Socrates reverses the course of philosophical education from its form in the actual cities—or more specifically, we must assume, from an actual city of Athens—to the shape that he thinks it should take if the best regime, in which philosophers rule, is to come to pass. Socrates, speaking to Adeimantus, indicates that instead of learning philosophical matters in youth and in passing, one ought to wait until one’s ripe age, and only then engage in the serious study of philosophy. At that point, “when the strength begins to fail and they are beyond political and military duties . . . they ought to be let loose to graze and do nothing else, except as a spare-time occupation” (498b–c). This leisure is for the sake of the philosophical life; this is the conclusion suggested by the context of the passage. However, Socrates ends his excursus on the proposed changes in the education and training of citizens under the best regime not by detailing the philosophical pursuits of

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