Republic (Focus Philosophical Library) by Plato

Author:Plato [Plato]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-28T05:00:00+00:00

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94 Glaucon appears to want to hedge his answer the way a practical person would, rather than displaying the erotic desire for truth that Socrates attributed to his nature (474C-475C).

95 Is this in conflict with the need to go along with the noble lie of 414B-C and the abundance of falsehoods and deceptions mentioned at 459C-D, or does it perhaps determine the difference between those things and the true lie described in 382A-B? This may not be easy to decide.

96 This is a more civilized version of the complaint Thrasymachus made in anger in Bk. I, when he claimed Socrates had to lie and twist the words of others to defeat them in arguments (340D).

97 Literally “stickily.” The point is generally missed in translations that take the word in the sense of either of its common uses, to mean “eagerly” or “stingily,” rather than as a live metaphor. The image Socrates is about to use was not new (see for example Sophocles’ Antigone, lines 162-163), but it was probably never elaborated with so much painstakingly chosen detail as it is here.

98 A narcotic plant.

99 Reportedly the poet Simonides.

100 See the note to 409A on the force of this word. It is meant to sum up the qualities of character listed in 487A, when Adeimantus was moved to object.

101 This seems to mean you pay for your pleasures one way or another. Various attempts have been made to explain who the Diomedes in question was and whether he paid the price or forced others to.

102 Notice that Socrates is not saying that most people are incapable of philosophy, but only that a large group of people has no such capacity when acting or thinking as one mass. Socrates would probably say that, given enough time in one-on-one discussion with someone who has begun to grasp philosophic possibilities, there would be hope for anyone. See Plato’s Gorgias, 471E-472D.

103 Everyone who has been around the academic world has known some of these overgrown whiz kids whose careers reached their peaks before they actually happened, but the details of this passage point particularly to one young man named Alcibiades. Xenophon (Memorabilia I, ii, 39-46) displays Alcibiades’ arrogance toward his guardian, Pericles. Almost half of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, from Bk. V, Chap. 43 on, is dominated by an account of Alcibiades’ ambitions, which successively destroyed chances for peace between Athens and Sparta, led Athens to a disastrous expedition that proved to be its downfall, and took Alcibiades himself over to the side of the Spartans and then to that of the King of Persia. Plato, in his Symposium (216D-219D), makes Alcibiades reveal his belief in his irresistible good looks. During Socrates’ lifetime, Alcibiades was considered the most promising of his young associates, while a younger man named Plato went almost unnoticed in the background.

104 In Plato’s Apology (31C-32A), this is described as “something like a voice” that came to Socrates when he was about to make a bad choice, and always kept him out of ordinary political life.

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