Plato: 'The Republic' (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) by Plato

Author:Plato [Plato]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000-09-25T06:00:00+00:00

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1 The reference is to 423e–424a.

2 The Greek expression used by Thrasymachus, meaning ‘to prospect for gold’, was similarly proverbial of engaging in a wasteful task with little chance of success.

3 In Athenian law the relatives of a murder victim could pardon the murderer and so acquit him – that is, free him of penalties – if it was determined at trial that the murder was involuntary.

4 There may be an allusion to the classification of mimes (dramatised scenes from everyday life) as ‘men’s performances’ and ‘women’s performances’, according to whether the fictional characters were male or female. Plato’s dialogues are thought to have been influenced by the mimes of the fifth-century Sicilian writer Sophron, which were so classified.

5 The comparison was introduced in Book 2, 375a, and developed at 416a and 440d.

6 Although women of the Athenian elite had at least basic literacy, girls were not normally given the education of boys. As in most other Greek states, they were trained for the dual roles of household management and raising children, and had no political rights as individuals. Spartan women, exceptionally, were given a gymnastic training equivalent to that of males. This is the first of a number of ways in which Socrates’ proposals for social reform in Book 5 resemble, with much exaggeration, existing social arrangements at Sparta: see pp. xiv-xvi of the introduction. Some women apparently managed to participate in the philosophic life – two women are reported to have been students at Plato’s Academy, and Pythagorean communities may have included them as equals.

7 Since the late sixth or early fifth century it had become standard in the Greek world for men to take their physical exercise naked.

8 369e–370c.

9 The tale of the minstrel Arion’s ride to safety on a dolphin after being made to jump overboard by a corrupt crew is the most famous account of such an incident to have come down from antiquity. See Herodotus 1.24.

10 451e.

11 450c.

12 The quotation adapts a fragment of the poet Pindar that was originally directed against the philosophic speculation of his day, with its unripe wisdom, rather than against satire.

13 Various forms of communal sexuality and family life among exotic non-Greek tribes are noted already by the early fifth-century historian Herodotus, but the Greek world could offer, as a distant parallel, only the custom at Sparta that men who lacked heirs were permitted to produce them from others’ wives, or from their own wives but using other men as fathers.

14 The communal dwellings and mess halls of the guardians, and their lack of private property, were discussed at the end of Book 3 (416d–417b). Communal mess halls were a distinctive feature of domestic life at Sparta, as also in Crete. But they were reserved for men, and were not residences.

15 The Greek word for ‘marriage’ could also be used to refer to sexual liaisons in general. Throughout the Greek world, legitimate marriage was sanctified by a religious ritual. There may also be an allusion to the

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