“What a lot of drivel, Socrates! Why are you deferentially bowing and scraping to each other like simpletons? If you really want to know what morality is, then don’t just ask questions and look for applause by refuting any and every answer you get, because you’ve realized that it’s easier to ask questions than it is to answer them. No, state an opinion yourself: say what you think morality is.”

 (Plato, The Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield, 16)

Imagine that you’re given a turn to be the absolute ruler of the world, and you get to pass one law that will be obeyed and enforced for all time. What would it be? Me, personally? I’d require that every person who aspires to run for elected offices that impact more than 1,000 people – anything above the level of school boards, basically – must take and pass the same exams on history and politics that teenagers take.

For instance, American political candidates would need to score at least a 3 out of 5 on both the AP US History and AP US Government exams. British politicians would have to pass the A-level exams in the same subjects, and so on – if you don’t have the same grasp on your country’s history and governance that a fairly bright 17-year-old does, you shouldn’t get to run things.

I’ve asked friends and listeners this question. Some of the answers are very convoluted. For example, Jim B., a long-time friend of the show, rejects the entire premise of the question: his law would be that nobody is bound to follow laws set by anybody else, so long as their actions are not harmful, which would negate his power as absolute ruler, sure, but would also result in the type of cheerfully anarchic society he would like to live in. Simon N. would establish an actual Ministry of Truth to fight propaganda, which would have the happy result of also eliminating social media, but could also wind up cancelling most fiction and reporting of breaking news.

Some are creatively bloodthirsty, on a par with the Lord High Executioner in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado – you know, the guy who lets the punishment fit the crime? Ed, our disclaimer voice of doom, for instance, would feed wealthy climate change deniers into a biomass generator, turning their bodies into sustainable energy for others.

A lot of the answers centred around parenting or education: one of my cousins (hi, Emily) liked her former college professor’s suggestion that who want to have children should be required to adopt a puppy and spend a few years raising it first. People with well-trained dogs would be granted parenting licenses. Another relative suggested requiring teenagers of all income classes to work in customer-facing foodservice roles for at least two years, in the hopes that this would teach them not to, and I quote, “be dicks to waitresses” in later life.

Friend of the show Matt Brough, however, focused on a different age group: if he were dictator, he would ban retirees from banks, post offices, and other agencies during the hours of 12 noon to 2 p.m. every day, in order to give priority to working people running errands on their lunch breaks.

Several of the answers also focused on driving. Jon Skipp, of the advisory council, suggested legislation that defined maximum decibel levels for engines, with violators to be stripped of their licenses. My father – and this is just one of his many ideas in this vein, mind you – has often said that any driver going more than a certain number of miles per hour over the speed limit on a highway should be picked up by a giant magnet hanging from the belly of a Chinook helicopter and flown back 10 miles from where it was caught. There’d also be a hefty fine, say a minimum of four figures, for the driver.

I like this one because it reveals two of my father’s major influences: American football, which (like rugby) gives 10-yard penalties to the team in the possession of the ball if they do anything against the rules, and Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Which are terrific. And all of our answers tell something about all of us: who we are, what we worry about, what has harmed us or just flat-out annoys us.

“If I ruled the world…” These conversations happen all the time in pubs, at dinner tables, and on building sites or in restaurants when business is slow. If you’ve participated in one – and you probably have – you may have thought you were just killing time or blowing off steam. But I am here to tell you, dear listener, that you were actually participating in an age-old intellectual tradition: one which stretches back to the glories of Ancient Greece.

You were engaged in a thought experiment. How can people best live together? What is moral behaviour? How shall immorality be punished? These are the questions all the greatest philosophers have grappled with – even those who had never imagined Chinook helicopters, or magnets, or highways.

I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.

[intro music – Introduction to Plato and The Republic]

Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 39: Plato, Republic, Part 1 – The Education of Our Heroes. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.

So. I have a confession to make: I’ve been dreading these episodes on Plato’s Republic. I read it as an undergraduate, and I remember being thoroughly exasperated with it. My memory was of a long series of conversations starring a very annoying protagonist – that is, Socrates – who endlessly asks silly and irritating questions of a parade of interlocutors. And I’m not alone in this: friend of the show Dr. Holly Wood – her actual name, and actual title: she has a Ph.D. from Harvard – said that her memory of The Republic was similar to reading the transcript of one long podcast: a bunch of dudes arguing about whether justice is, like, a soup or something.

Everyone who talks to Socrates in The Republic are either hanging on his every word with puppyish admiration or cartoonish detractors trying to prove what a fool and charlatan he is. They are dazzled or thwarted by his humble, but slyly penetrating, questions, respectively, and forced to admit that his ideas about education and the ordering of society are unassailably logical and rational. I had a lingering impression of encountering the phrase, “You’re absolutely right, Socrates,” every three pages or so, and becoming gradually more and more annoyed by it.

In spite of this, I steeled myself to revisit Republic. I hoped that, as a mature woman with more experience of life, I would be able to engage with it more rationally. Would I see the wisdom of Socrates’ dialectic approach to developing his ideas? Would I be able to peer more deeply into the warp and weft of Plato’s narrative to discern the foundational approaches and concerns of the Western philosophical tradition, a tradition which, according to the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”?

No. Well, not really. I am better able to trace the influence of Plato’s Republic on the ways in which contemporary leaders approach politics or morality today than I was aged 19. I also now have a better appreciation for the historical context in which Plato was operating, thanks to the last 18 months of reading about Greek literature and history for this show. That historical context helps me understand possible motivations Plato may have had for outlining his ideal society the way that he does in The Republic.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start first with who Plato was.

Plato was an Athenian. He was born in either 428 or 427 BCE, and he died in 348 or 347 BCE. To put those dates in context, his life began just after the deaths of Pericles and Herodotus, and about five years after the premier of Aristophanes’ play Clouds, which we discussed in our last episode. Plato was a young man in 404 BCE, when Athens was finally defeated by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, and he died at the age of around 80, about nine years before Alexander the Great burst onto the world stage.

Plato was from a wealthy, influential family – his mother was a descendant of Solon the Law-Giver, who popped up in our first episode on Herodotus back in the spring, and his father’s family claimed to be descended from Poseidon, god of the sea. His older brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, were, like Plato, followers of the philosopher Socrates. In fact, Glaucon and Adeimantus are the people with whom Socrates spends most of his time talking in The Republic. Plato started out trying to be a poet – he apparently even wrote tragic plays, in an attempt to be produced – but he gave all that up when he met Socrates.

You’ll recall that in his play Clouds, Aristophanes lampooned Socrates as a fraud who was misleading his pupils and turning people away from religion. Plato, as Socrates’ most famous and influential pupil would (somewhat ironically) more closely resemble the version of Socrates from Aristophanes’ play than the historical Socrates did. For instance, contrary to how Aristophanes portrayed him in Clouds, Socrates did not have a formal school – he didn’t even write anything down. Instead, he had a loose group of followers who wandered around with him talking about ideas – “me and the boys thinking about thinking,” as a meme I once saw about him goes.

Plato, however, did found a formal school: he established the Academy in 380 BCE. It’s the origin of our word academics, and an ancestor of the modern university: a place where young scholars could engage in advanced study of topics from mathematics to natural science to philosophy with instruction from experts. Plato’s most famous student was Aristotle, the other towering figure in Western Philosophy.

This chain of tuition is part of the foundation of Plato’s legacy, but the bulk of it rests on his large corpus of writings which has managed to survive to the present day. We have 35 philosophical writings of Plato’s, as well as a large number of letters. These works have been copied, recopied, and studied for thousands of years. It’s hard to know the order in which Plato composed his works, but most scholars today place The Republic in the middle of Plato’s career.

Not that Plato would have called it The Republic. We get that name from the Romans – that’s how they referred to it. Plato called it “Politeia”, which can mean many things – a city-state, a commonwealth, or a group of people who have certain rights. It’s his most influential work, and is considered the foundational work of philosophy, political theory, and even to a certain extent psychology. Its admirers span the spectrum from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Benito Mussolini.

And it’s basically a story – a story about a long night of conversation between Socrates and a bunch of dudes, in which Socrates describes how he’d run the world. Actually, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. The Republic asks two questions, which the University of Wisconsin professor Sean McAleer summarises in his 2020 book Plato’s Republic: An Introduction as: “What is justice? and Is a just life happier – more profitable or personally advantageous – than an unjust life?” (McAleer xiv)

Depending on the translation you read – I read Robin Waterfield’s 2008 translation for Oxford World’s Classics – it takes Plato either 10 books or 13 chapters to address these two questions. While The Republic is not anywhere near as long as The Histories of Herodotus, it is far denser – it contains a ton of ideas and allegories that deserve a bit of unpacking. So, as with Herodotus, we’re going to tackle The Republic in three episodes. The first five books talk about politics and the ideal society, and those will be the focus of this episode, along with a very brisk look at historical and philosophical traditions that likely influenced Plato’s view of politics.

The next episode will summarize the remaining books, which discuss Plato’s ideas about universal forms and concepts – including the famous allegory of the cave. That episode will also talk a little bit about the influence of The Republic on other thinkers. Then, episode three, the meta episode, will talk about the life of Socrates as shown through Plato’s entire body of work – including, but not limited to, The Republic.

So, let’s get to it. Let’s find Socrates and his young friends as he walks along the docks in a port town, long ago.

[music – Republic, Books 1 and 2]

 The Republic is told from the point of view of Socrates. As it opens, he and Plato’s brother Glaucon have arrived on a visit to the port city of Piraeus, where there’s going to be a festival honoring a minor goddess. As they’re strolling along, they cross paths with Polemarchus, a wealthy friend of Socrates’, and some other men, including Adeimantus, Plato’s other brother. who insists on inviting him to dinner, and does so in a jokey way which suggests he is familiar with Socrates’ M.O. – that is, he asks him leading questions. Quote:

“‘Socrates,’ Polemarchus said, ‘it looks to me as though the two of you are setting off back to town.’

‘That’s right,’ I replied.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you see how many of us there are?’

‘Of course.’

‘You’d better choose, then,’ he said, ‘between overpowering us and staying here.’

‘Well, there is one further possibility,’ I pointed out. ‘We might convince you to let us leave.’ ‘Can you convince people who don’t listen?’ Polemarchus asked.

‘Impossible,’ Glaucon replied.

‘Then I think you should know that we won’t be listening to you.’” (Plato 327a, Waterfield p. 3-4)

This bit of repartee, and the promise of a torchlight horse-race later in the evening, convinces Socrates to go back to Polemarchus’s for dinner. Once there, he encounters Polemarchus’ father Cephalus, a kindly, elderly fellow who says he doesn’t see enough of Socrates nowadays. Socrates asks him how he is finding aging: “Is it a difficult period of one’s life, would you say, or what?” (Waterfield 4)

Cephalus says it isn’t so bad, in spite of how other men his age grumble about their health and the lost pleasures of youth. He, Cephalus, quite likes the fact that his various appetites and desires have quieted down, and that he can focus on things like preparing his estate and soul for death, and strengthening his relationships, rather than on gaining wealth or pursuing sex or feasts or glory. “If someone is self-disciplined and good-tempered, old age isn’t too much of a burden; otherwise, it’s not just a question of old age, Socrates – such a person will find life difficult when he’s young as well.” (Waterfield 4)

Socrates quite likes this answer, but being a philosopher he can’t let it lie there. Doesn’t your wealth have something to do with your pleasant old age? he asks. Possibly, concedes Cephalus. He then goes on to explain that the main benefit of wealth, for a decent, orderly person like himself, is that it allows you to settle debts, literal and moral, as you prepare to face death, and that this is the essence of “doing right.”

This is the first mention of one of the central issues in The Republic. What does it mean to do right?We need to start by untangling some issues in translation. The specific word used by Plato is dikaiosunê, which doesn’t have a perfect literal match in English. Some translators refer to it as “justice”, others as “morality” – that’s what Robin Waterfield’s translation uses, for instance, and it’s what I’m going to use here. Not because one is more or less correct than the other, but because the word “justice” carries baggage for me – baggage related to my personal experience and historical situation as a citizen of the United States.

I had Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy at my elbow as I re-read The Republic – I strongly recommend you try to do that, too, if you, like me, are a non-specialist who wants to have a go at reading philosophy; more on why at the end of the show. Russell lays out some of the problems with using the word “justice” in this discussion:

“Under the influence of democratic theory, we have come to associate justice with equality, while for Plato it has no such implication. ‘Justice,’ in the sense in which it is almost synonymous with ‘law’ – as when we speak of ‘courts of justice’ – is concerned mainly with property rights, which have nothing to do with equality.” (Russell 114)

Now, Cephalus is largely defining dikaiosunê as a form of property rights in that it involves honesty and settling debts, whether personal or financial. But this isn’t enough for Socrates. If morality is defined as giving back anything you owe someone, are there not instances in which this could be the wrong thing to do? For instance, you borrow a weapon from a friend. The friend becomes a homicidal maniac. Would it still be moral to give him back his weapon when he’s in this dangerous frame of mind? Socrates doesn’t think so, and Cephalus – perhaps out of politeness – agrees with him, then ducks out of the room.

Polemarchus takes up his father’s argument. He insists that morality can still be defined in this way, quoting a poet called Simonides’s definition of morality as giving back to your friends good deeds and to your enemies bad ones. “Oh, so you mean morality is giving back to others what is appropriate to them, rather than what is owed to them,” Socrates says. We then launch into a long tedious series of exchanges between Socrates and Polemarchus. These sound a bit like this:

“‘All right. So which art—the art of giving what to what—might we call morality?’

‘In order to be consistent with what was said earlier, Socrates,’ he replied, ‘it has to be the art of giving benefit and harm to friends and enemies respectively.’

‘So Simonides claims that morality is doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies, does he?’

‘I think so.’

‘Now, where sickness and health are concerned, who is best able to do good to his friends and harm to his enemies when they aren’t well?’

‘A doctor.’

‘And where the risks of a sea voyage are concerned, when friends are on board a ship?’

‘A ship’s captain.’

‘And what about a moral person? In which walk of life or for what activity is he best able to benefit his friends and harm his enemies?’

‘In fighting against enemies and in support of friends, I’d say.’

‘All right. Now, my dear Polemarchus, a doctor is no use unless people are ill.’

‘True.’

‘And a captain is no use unless people are on a sea voyage.’

‘Quite so.’

‘Is a moral person, then, no use to anyone who is not at war?’

‘No, I don’t agree with that.’

‘So morality is useful during times of peace too?’

‘Yes.’” (Waterfield 10)

The upshot of this discussion is twofold: first, Socrates manages to convince Polemarchus that morality is a field of expertise, like shoemaking or sailing a ship: you are either an expert at it or you aren’t. Polemarchus, who’s unable to articulate that this is probably not the case winds up tied in knots over this. Second, Socrates correctly points out that because people sometimes make mistakes about who their friends and enemies are – or misapprehend a friend as having a good nature when they’re secretly a bad person, or vice versa, morality can never be used to harm someone, even a perceived enemy.

It’s at this point that another dinner guest, Thrasymachus, butts in. Thrasymachus was a real person – he was a member of the Sophists and, according to Bertrand Russell, a teacher of rhetoric who also shows up as a character in a play by Aristophanes. (Russell 116). He accosts Socrates with the speech I quoted at the very top of the episode – a speech I obviously vibe with, to a large degree – and says that morality is a sham; it’s nothing more than whatever serves the interest of a stronger party over a weak one. Anyone who commits to acting morally is setting himself up to be duped, cheated, and harmed, while those who act immorally can seize every worldly advantage.

Naturally, Socrates is able to brilliantly prove Thrasymachus wrong by peppering him with still more questions – questions that all avoid Thrasymachus’ main argument, which Bertrand Russell calls “the fundamental question in ethics and politics, namely: Is there any standard of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ except what the man using these words desires?” (Russell 117) If there is no such standard, Thrasymachus has a point. Plato, through Socrates, will spend much of The Republic – and his career – to proving that there is such a standard, and that someone who can’t perceive the capital-G Good is making an objective mistake the same way you can make a mistake in your arithmetic when you add up a column of numbers.

This tension is not something we can ever resolve, but Plato is happy to act as if it is. Socrates sends Thrasymachus packing by again framing morality as a craft or a skill, like shoemaking. Immoral people, Plato has Socrates say, can be seen as bad, stupid shoemakers while moral people are good ones. This, as Robin Waterfield notes in an aside, is an unfair framing, because immoral and moral people have totally different goals. (Waterfield 31)

Glaucon and Adeimantus, while pleased that their friend has triumphed, want Socrates to explain himself better. Glaucon points out that while he inclines to Socrates’ views about morality, beliefs like Thrasymachus’s are common, and he wants Socrates to help him frame better arguments against such beliefs. Quote:

“I’ve never yet heard the kind of support for morality, as being preferable to immorality, that I’d like to hear, which is a hymn to the virtues it possesses in and of itself. If I can get this from anyone, it’ll be you.” (Waterfield 45-46)

For instance, Glaucon says, most people find morality to be a nuisance: something they have to put up with if they want to earn a living or have a good reputation, but which they’d really rather not have to follow along with. Adeimantus, on the other hand, says some people only value morality because it supports things like your social reputation, or your reputation with the gods.

Glaucon decides to play devil’s advocate and spend some time talking at length in favor of immorality over morality. He frames morality as having its origins in “a compromise [which] is endorsed because, while it may not be good, it does gain value by preventing [other] people from doing wrong.” (Waterfield 46). He also claims, that, given the opportunity to act without consequences, even moral people would do bad things. Glaucon illustrates this second claim with the story of the Ring of Gyges. In this story, a shepherd – an ancestor, we are told, of King Gyges of Lydia – finds a magic ring which turns him invisible. In spite of having lived a perfectly honest life up to this point, the shepherd immediately goes on a crime spree, seducing the king of Lydia’s wife, conspiring to have him murdered, and then taking over the throne.

“There is no one, on this view,” says Glaucon, “who is iron-willed enough to maintain his morality and find the strength of purpose to keep his hands off what doesn’t belong to him, when he is able to take whatever he wants . . . and generally to act like a god among men.” (Waterfield 47-48)

Socrates thanks his young friends for laying this all out. Then he begins his defense of morality in a rather surprising way: “Let’s imagine a city,” he says.

[music – Republic, Books 2 – 4]

Socrates’ rationale for examining morality at the community level is that societies will reflect the morality of the people in them. By starting with large groups, you can deduce general trends, then apply them to individuals.

First, Socrates states that societies form when people realize they aren’t self-sufficient on an individual or family-unit basis. So people gather together and each of them specialises in filling a need the community has: farming, building, weaving, shoe-making – Plato does obsess a bit about shoes – along with people to make the farming implements, raise the animals that supply the leather for the shoes, and so on.

This rough-draft of an ideal community is rustic and has a very simple way of life, but it illustrates one of Plato’s primary beliefs about what moral or just living is – everyone is suited to a specific role, and morality consists of performing that role, and only that role, to the best of their abilities.

This isn’t enough for Glaucon. He doesn’t want this weird, largely vegetarian communal life. Surely people like us, people who recline on couches at banquets and eat nice pastries now and then, can also be moral? So Socrates walks through what an “indulgent” community like theirs would need. This includes such fripperies as artists, people who make women’s cosmetics, fancy bakers, actors, and so on. “That healthy community will no longer do; it must become bloated and distended with occupations which leave the essential requirements of a community behind,” says Socrates. (Waterfield 64)

The upshot of this bloated community is that it soon demands more resources than its land provides, and so has to go to war to fulfil those demands. This, Socrates explains, necessitates the existence of a large specialist army – remember that one of the rules we are operating under is the belief that people can only ever be one thing. Socrates refers to these fighters as “the guardians.”

These guardians present a special problem. It is necessary to have fighters, but no nation is always at war, so unoccupied fighters will be dangerous to everyone else. Socrates decides that the best guardians will be like well-bred dogs: strong, brave, and physically impressive, while also loyal and trainable. He then begins to outline how he would educate the guardians to shape their aptitudes into something inclined to morality – an outline which rests entirely on an oppressive regime of censorship.

Socrates makes this all sound very reasonable and benevolent. Quote:

“Shall we, then, casually allow our children to listen to any old stories, made up by just anyone, and to take into their minds vies which, on the whole, contradict those we’ll want them to have as adults?” (Waterfield 70)

The stories Socrates would not let children hear include Hesiod’s Theogony, because it describes incest and patricide among the gods. “No young person is to hear stories which suggest that were he to commit the vilest of crimes . . . he wouldn’t be doing anything out of the ordinary, but would simply be behaving like the first and the greatest gods.” (Waterfield 71) Hesiod should be restricted to religious initiates only.

Most of Homer is also right out, because he shows the gods acting disreputably – as the authors of all that is good, Socrates asserts, the gods can only be responsible for good things. Stories which depict the gods as changing shape or telling lies are also forbidden, because it is immoral to pretend to be something you’re not or to deceive someone, and the gods can never behave immorally.

Homer, Hesiod, and other poets also encourage people to fear death by describing Hades as a frightening place full of monsters – our guardians must be utterly fearless in the face of death, Socrates argues, so they must never hear stories like this. They must also never hear stories which show admirable characters indulging in lust (no poems by Sappho, sorry), grief over the death of a loved one (goodbye to most stories about Achilles), wrath over the death of a loved one (also goodbye to Achilles), or almost any kind of deception (Odysseus: who he?).  The only permissible type of lying is that done by the guardians when there is a threat to the community.

Furthermore, poets cannot write in anything other than their own voices – pure narrative, no speeches (it’s hard to believe the irony of this rule didn’t occur to Plato, writing, as he was, in the voice of Socrates). Actors cannot portray women, animals, or base men – in fact, it’s better to dispense with theatre entirely. Music is allowed, as long as it does not overstimulate undesirable emotions like lust, laziness, or sadness – martial, energetic music is permitted. Public speeches are to be controlled along similar lines.

This purging of any negative influences even extends to artwork, to household objects, and to personal relationships – here, almost in passing, Socrates outlines the principles of Platonic love:

“Although a lover can (if he can persuade his boyfriend to let him) kiss and spend time with and touch his boyfriend, as he would his son—which is to say, for honourable reasons—still his relationship with anyone he cares for will basically be such that he never gives the impression that there is more to it than that. Otherwise, he’ll be liable to condemnation for lacking culture and moral sensibility.” (Waterfield 102)

On the cusp of adolescence, the child-guardians must be carefully exposed to bad images and ideas to see whether they can resist showing any undesirable emotions. Then, and only then, can they move on to higher academic training – training which will fit them to become rulers of the city-state. Those who fail the test can continue as soldiers, but nothing more.

Socrates then goes on to describe the physical training of the guardians, which includes a spare diet of roasted meat and simply prepared vegetables – no sauces or sweets are allowed. This will, according to Socrates, produce a state of such physical hardiness that the guardians will never need to see doctors unless they are injured or caught up in an epidemic. Socrates was, by all accounts, a very physically vigorous man, and Plato has him speak of people with chronic illnesses vitriolically:

“People are, thanks to inactivity and the diet we described, as full of fluids and gases as a marsh . . . Doesn’t this strike you as contemptible?” (Waterfield 105-106)

Socrates also expresses his admiration for doctors who don’t waste their time treating people who lack self-discipline or who are deformed or disabled. I wish this did not sound like such a contemporary argument.

Glaucon – I think it’s Glaucon; at times Plato does not apply tags identifying speakers other than Socrates, and the replies are almost always variations of “I take your point, Socrates,” or “I agree entirely, Socrates”, so it’s easy to lose track – Glaucon rather sensibly asks how we can expect the guardians to accept being divided into higher and lower classes.

Socrates introduces the idea of the “noble lie” – the one allowable myth which will work to reinforce morality among the community, even though myths like this are, strictly speaking, immoral. The noble lie is a spin on Hesiod’s story about the men of gold, silver, bronze, and lead: it teaches the guardians that the gods mixed a certain measure of metal into the souls of men: gold for the rulers, silver for the soldiers, iron and copper for the workers. While children will typically be of their parents’ grade, exceptions occur, and children can be demoted or upgraded as appropriate.

“If one of [the guardians’] own children is born with a nature tinged with copper or iron, they shall at all costs avoid feeling sorry for it: they shall assign it the status appropriate to its nature and banish it to the workers or the farmers. On the other hand, if a child born to a worker or a farmer has a nature tinged with gold or silver, they shall honour it and elevate it to the rank of either guardian or auxiliary, because of an oracle which states that the community will be destroyed when it has a copper or iron guardian.” (Waterfield 119)

Socrates concedes that it will be difficult to get the first generation of this society to go along with this noble lie, but succeeding generations, having known nothing else, will buy into it wholeheartedly. Sure they will, Socrates. And compelling people to believe something on pain of banishment is totally compatible with the pursuit of truth.

[Music – Republic, Books 4 – 5]

Skipping blithely away from the big lie at the heart of what Socrates is now calling Kallipolis, the just city, Plato has Socrates describe the circumstances under which the guardians of Kallipolis will live. It is completely communist: nobody has any wealth or personal property; they all live in shared housing; nobody has any privacy. Interestingly, Socrates also declares that women should afforded equal rights with men, as long as they demonstrate a gold- or silver-tinged nature.

Then we get to the weird sex stuff and the eugenics, because of course there is going to be some of that. To ensure that the guardians are totally dedicated to advancing the interests of the community, they have no nuclear families. Men between the ages of 25 and 55 and women between 20 and 40 are paired off at specific times of year in a free-love lottery – one that is secretly rigged to match the best men with the best women.

Children will be taken away from their parents at birth and raised – provided they are not in any way defective – by specialist child-rearers. This is intended to avoid anyone showing favouritism or excessive affection toward their kindred. Socrates acknowledges that this system puts people at risk of committing incest, and says that “we” (it’s never clear who “we” are – who guards the guardians against Oedipal entanglements, eh?) would carefully manage the love lottery to prevent this.

Adeimantus finally musters up a substantial objection:

“‘Tell me, Socrates,’ he said. ‘How are you going to reply to the accusation that you’re not making these men at all happy, and moreover you’re making it their own fault? In a real sense, the community belongs to them, but they don’t derive any benefit from the community.” (Waterfield 122)

Socrates responds to this by saying that the guardians have been educated and trained to be motivated only by public spirit – ensuring the happiness of the community as a whole, rather than worrying about individual happiness. “Please don’t force us to graft the sort of happiness on the guardians which will make them anything but guardians,” he says. (Waterfield 123) But he acknowledges that, to avoid any jealousy of the other citizens arising in the guardians, the entire community must all be kept to a similar income level, and the population strictly controlled.

This will also inoculate the community against warfare, except in very extreme circumstances. They’ll be living modestly enough that they won’t be driven to acquire other people’s resources; and their relative lack of resources (as well as the ferocity of their fighters) will make them a less attractive target. In addition, if Kallipolis is threatened, it can persuade other city-states to become its allies by letting them have any treasure they win in their battles, as Kallipolis has no use for gold and silver. Mmhm. I’m sure you’re right, Socrates.

Plato waves away defining further aspects of Kallipolis’ governance – such as what to do about contracts – by having Socrates assert that once the proper form of education is in place, this ideal society will be self-perpetuating as long as everyone agrees not to try anything innovative – or let any poets and actors come to stay.

Having satisfactorily designed his perfectly just society, Socrates then moves on to see if he can determine what morality is based on how it operates. The city, he says, embodies wisdom, courage, and self-discipline or temperance as well as morality. The guardian class embodies wisdom. The military class embodies courage. Everyone in the city agrees to abide by self-discipline or temperance by upholding the social order about who rules and who is ruled. Morality, then, must be the thing which holds these three other virtues together: accepting one’s role in society and pursuing it to the best of one’s ability.

Socrates expresses what seems to me like sham surprise at this finding:

“It looks as though it’s been curled up at our feet all the time, right from the beginning, my friend, and we didn’t see it, but just made absolute fools of ourselves. You know how people sometimes go in search of something they’re holding in their hands all the time? That’s what we’ve been like. We’ve been looking off into the distance somewhere, instead of at our quarry, and that was why we didn’t notice it, I suppose.” (Waterfield 140)

Yes, Socrates, I agree completely.

Having devised this three-part society, Socrates goes on to apply the model to the soul. Humans have inner guardians, in that they are capable of rationality. The part of them that is spirited, which is courageous and able to bear hardships, corresponds to the warrior class. The appetites – hunger, thirst, warmth, sex, and so on – can be matched with the farmers and producers. Immorality has its root in conflict among these three parts – that is, when the spirit or the appetites try to go against the commands of the rational part of the mind. As in Kallipolis, morality is present when these three parts of the soul know their roles and stick to them.

Having neatly solved this question – what is morality, or justice? – Socrates and his friends can now move on to the second question: whether morality, in and of itself, confers any benefits. But first, he has to field a great many follow-up questions. This involves long digressions about how, exactly, the sharing of sex partners is to work, what Socrates means by equality of women (he means they can fight wars as well as rule, as long as they are hardy and well-educated enough), and finally, and most importantly, whether or not any of this is feasible at all.

Socrates thinks this is irrelevant: they are having a discussion about theories; they’re engaging in a thought experiment to examine ideas. If an artist paints a beautifully lifelike portrait of an imaginary person, you don’t think they’re a bad artist just because the person doesn’t exist, do you? But he gives in to his audience and admits that he thinks there is one change that could be made in society which has the best chance of making Kallipolis a reality. Quote:

“‘Unless communities have philosophers as kings,’ I said, ‘or the people who are currently called kings and rulers practise philosophy with enough integrity—in other words, unless political power and philosophy coincide, and all the people with their diversity of talents who currently head in different directions towards either government or philosophy have those doors shut firmly in their faces—there can be no end to political troubles, my dear Glaucon, or even to human troubles in general, I’d say, and our theoretical constitution will be stillborn and will never see the light of day.’” (Waterfield 193)

This is, of course, a wildly anti-social idea in a democratic society. Glaucon jokes that it would get Socrates killed if he said it in the street, but he’s willing to hear Socrates’ justification for this statement. That justification kicks off the second half of The Republic, in which Plato explains his ideas about universal forms. We’ll save that for our next episode.

[music – Wrap-Up: How the Peloponnesian War May Have Influenced Plato’s Republic]

So there we are; that is Plato’s ideal society – an authoritarian communist sorta-kinda-aristocracy where there is no poetry, no art, no science, and no passionate love affairs to be had – at least not among the ruling class. As I re-read the description of Kallipolis, I began to realise it sounded familiar: it sounded, in fact, like Sparta.

And that is likely no accident. Bertrand Russell notes that all Kallipolis is likely to produce is a society that rarely suffers from famines, and is able to achieve victory in warfare against other societies of a comparable size. (Russell 115) He notes that while this seems underwhelming to us, quote, “Plato had lived through famine and defeat in Athens; perhaps, subconsciously, he thought the avoidance of these evils the best that statesmanship could accomplish.” (115)

Certainly this ideal society has no room for the democracy which, for decades, had so spectacularly failed to secure peace and prosperity for an entire generation. The Republic in this sense seems less like the documentation of a thought experiment than a cry from the soul of a man who thinks his country is rotten to the core – and not without reason.

But it is not comforting to me that people see censorship and oppressive levels of social control as the remedy to a flawed democracy just because very famous philosophers did so thousands of years ago. No method of training leaders for their roles, however cleverly devised, can result in a perfectly functioning, moral state – Confucius also believed this, and was just as wrong about it. Russell, again:

“It is clear that no legally definable selection of citizens is likely to be wiser, in practice, than the whole body. It might be suggested that men could be given political wisdom by a suitable training. But the question would arise: what is a suitable training? And this would turn out to be a party question. The problem of finding a collection of ‘wise’ men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.” (Russell 107)

That’s it for this episode. Join me on Sunday, September 28^th for Episode 40: Plato, The Republic, Part 2 – Out of the Cave.

Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and everyone who contributed ideas for the opening this week, including the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.

References and Works Cited:

Barney, Rachel. “Callicles and Thrasymachus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 31 Aug. 2017, plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/callicles-thrasymachus/.

Brown, Eric. “Plato’s Ethics and Politics in the Republic.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 12 Sept. 2017, plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/plato-ethics-politics/. 

Fine, Gail. The Oxford Handbook of Plato: Second Edition. Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2019. 

McAleer, Sean. Plato’s Republic: An Introduction. Openbook Publishers, 2020. 

Robin Waterfield, and Plato. Oxford World’s Classics: Plato: Republic. Oxford University Press, 2008. 

Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. Simon and Schuster, 1972.