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Chapter Two:
The Authority of Poetry in Plato’s Republic
Jill FrankUniversity of South Carolina, Columbia
Prepared for the Montreal Political Theory Workshop, March 7, 2008.
DRAFT. Comments welcome. Please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission.
Republic X opens with Socrates returning to the verdict passed on the imitative poets in Republic
III (398a). This return is generally read as reinforcing the indictments of poetry delivered earlier
(Rep. II-III), now freighted with, and more fully justified in terms of, the elaborated metaphysics
and psychology of Republic IV-IX.1 Indeed, for most readers, the “old quarrel between
philosophy and poetry” (607b) is, in Republic X, decisively won by philosophy.2 In the words of
one scholar, poetry is “overcome.”3 For some, Plato’s charges against imitative poetry and its 1 Challenging this position, Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 58, observes that Rep. X “repeatedly refers back to earlier parts of the dialogue … but provides no direct cross-references to the metaphysics of the middle books.”
2 I have used translations of Plato’s Republic by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968); G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve in Plato’s Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997); and Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935); along with the Greek text and commentary by James Adam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902); and translations of the Apology, Protagoras, Gorgias, Laches, and Euthyphro in Plato’s Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
3See G.R.F. Ferrari, “Plato and Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism 1: Classical Criticism, ed. G.A. Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 92-148,
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ouster from the ideal city emblematize and consolidate his suspicion of imagination, change,
plurality, and particularity, and his philosophical commitment to reason, stability, unity, and
universality. For others, the purge of imitative poetry goes hand in hand with Plato’s political
commitment to securing for philosophy paramount authority in the governance of the city and in
the paideia of the young and, hence, with his opposition to democratic politics.
I see things differently. The Republic, to be sure, excises certain kinds of poetry from the
education of the warriors leading up to the ideal city in Republic V. I have argued elsewhere,
however, that Socrates’ excision of poetry demonstrates and is meant to demonstrate that the
education to, for, and by, war is inadequate preparation for philosophy.4 The dialog, to be sure,
banishes mimetic poetry from the ideal city. But, on my reading, this signals less an indictment
of poetry than an indictment of the perfect city in speech. Against what Stephen Halliwell calls
the “modern orthodoxy,” I take the Republic, in keeping with such dialogs as the Phaedrus, to
make a compelling case for affiliating poetry and philosophy and also (and perhaps more
poignantly and originally to the Republic) a compelling case for what is lost by poetry’s
expulsion.5 These are large and controversial claims. Fully establishing them calls for a lengthier
120. See also Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 5, 7.
4See my “Wages of War: On Judgment in Plato’s Republic,” Political Theory 35 (2007): 443-67.
5For historical figures who see take Plato to be ambivalent about rather than unequivocally hostile to poetry, see Stephen Halliwell, “Antidotes and incantations: is there a cure for poetry in Plato’s Republic?” 1-2, (ms on file with author, forthcoming in Plato and the Poets, ed. P. Destrée and F.-G. Herrman (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Halliwell attends to both the frame and the arguments of Rep. X to make the case that it is an exploration of, among other things, how “it might be possible to be a ‘philosophical lover’ of poetry” (4). See also Haliwell, Mimesis, 55-63 and 133-42. Other contemporary commentators interested in challenging the modern orthodoxy include Ferrari, “Plato on Poetry,” 135, who offers a series of well-placed questions that tell a contrapuntal story to his main theme. See also Grace Ledbetter, Poetics before Plato:
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argument than the one I offer here. Critical to that longer argument is a story about eros, and
specifically about the erotic attachment Socrates claims to feel toward poetry (607e-608b).6 I
leave that story to another chapter.
My aim in this chapter is to lay some of the ground for my larger arguments by looking at
what I take to be an underexplored but key feature of Socrates’ treatments of poetry in Republic I
and X (595a-608b), what I call his distribution of poetic authority away from the poets.7 In short,
I agree with commentators who claim that an aim of the Republic is to unseat the authority of the
poets but I disagree that the dialog’s goal is to replace poetic authority with the authority of
philosophy. Without denying the importance, indeed the necessity, of authority to philosophy
and politics, the dialog, in my view, at the same time cultivates an awareness of the perils of
authority for politics and philosophy. Insofar as authority depends on acquiescence to what those
granted authority assert to be the case just in virtue of their authority, it can, when unquestioned,
pass into tyranny. It is to combat tyranny, of central political and philosophical interest to the
dialog, and in whose “shadow” it is written, that the Republic performs and effects, among other
things, a redistribution of authority, away from the poets (and such other conventional
Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 4-5; Ramona Naddaff, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Arlene Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 6.
6The theme of eros in Rep. X is the subject of Halliwell, “Antidotes and incantations.”
7 I read the Republic as continuous, then, not only with the Phaedrus but also with the Ion whose “subtext,” Halliwell argues in Mimesis, 41, “is an attack on culturally widespread but unexamined, or insufficiently substantiated, claims for the authority and wisdom of the poets.” Ledbetter, Poetics before Plato, 82, also argues that Socrates “attempts to wrest from the poets the authority traditionally attributed to them.”
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repositories of authority as fathers and laws), and to those who invest the poets with their
authority in the first place, namely poetry’s auditors and interpreters.8 I establish the presence
and centrality of this theme in the Republic through close readings of Republic I and X, and then,
by way of an extended analogy between the Republic and the Apology, I conclude with a brief
exploration of some of the consequences of my interpretation for the Republic’s philosophy and
politics.
I. Republic I
Reflecting much of the scholarship on poetry in the Republic, Gerald Else begins his discussion
with the statement that “Book I contains nothing of interest to us.”9 Still, some readers have
observed that Republic I contains multiple references to and quotations from poets.10 Indeed, as
Andrew Ford notes, “as soon as” Socrates steps in the door of Cephalus’ house, “poetic tags and
quotations begin to be tossed back and forth.”11 But even before Socrates enters Cephalus’ house,
and also in the course of his exchange with Thrasymachus, the only character in the dialog who
8G.R.F. Ferrari, City and Soul in Plato’s Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11, among others, notes that the Republic is set in the “shadow of the Thirty” tyrants, brought to power in Athens by Sparta in 404-403.
9Plato and Aristotle on Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 17.
10See, e.g., Halliwell, Mimesis, 49; Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 175.11
? The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 211.
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makes no recourse to poetry at all, Republic I does important work setting the stage for an
adequate appreciation of the dialog’s sustained engagement with poetry.12
Opening with these words, “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon... ,”
(327a), the Republic is Plato’s recounting in Socrates’ voice of the events that occasioned the
conversation that is the dialog and also of the conversation itself. As a representation of a
narrated conversation, the text depicts Socrates speaking in his own person and in the persons of
his interlocutors, in turns. Thus exemplifying the mimetic features characteristic of poetry –
representation and/through self-likening or impersonation – the Republic might itself be called
poetic.13 In any case, it certainly shares important features with poetry. A robust literature
explores the poetic character of the Republic.14 Intersections between the argument of this
12As G.R.F. Ferrari notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xxii, many now “treat [Rep. I] not only as integral to the Republic but as anticipating its argument.” Still, Ferrari goes on, “no single chapter [in his rich and broad collection] is dedicated to that book.” A partial exception in that collection is Roslyn Weiss, “Wise Guys and Smart Alecks in Republic I and 2,” 90-115, 93, who maintains that Socrates’ early case against Thrasymachus “contains the core of all he can and will say in the Republic in defense of justice.” Weiss, however, neglects the importance of the exchanges in Rep. I involving the poets that, as I argue below, even more so than Socrates’ exchange with Thrasymachus, model the dialog’s understanding and practice of justice.
13As it was by Aristotle who included “Socratic conversation” as a kind of poetry (Poetics 1447b11). See also Republic, trans. Shorey, xiii, and references therein; Ludwig Edelstein, “Platonic Anonymity,” American Journal of Philology 83 (1962): 1-22, 11; and Myles Burnyeat, “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values 20: 217-324, 269, n. 25, for discussion. On the “concept of mimesis as dramatic representation or impersonation,” see Halliwell, Mimesis, 52.
14This large literature includes: David K. O’Connor, “Rewriting the Poets in Plato’s Characters” in Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, 55-89; Julius A. Elias, Plato’s Defense of Poetry (London: Macmillan Press, 1984); Naddaff, Exiling the Poets; Thomas Shearer Duncan, “Plato and Poetry,” Classical Journal 40 (1945): 481-94; Ludwig Edelstein, “The Function of Myth in Plato’s Philosophy” Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949): 463-81; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato and the Poets” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans.
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chapter and that literature will emerge in the pages that follow. Worth underscoring for now is
that the dialog’s structural mimetics effect a series of displacements of identity and authorship
that have fascinated scholars through the ages. Much ink has been spilled, for example, over the
question of whether Plato’s representations/impersonations of Socrates are true to the real-life
Socrates. This question, one of verisimilitude, relates to another, namely whether Plato’s dialogs
present the philosophy of Plato or that of Socrates.15
Plato does not only impersonate/represent Socrates, however. He also
impersonates/represents Socrates impersonating/representing Cephalus, Polemarchus,
Cleitophon, Thrasymachus, Adeimantus, and Glaucon. Embedding the participants in the dialog
in this way, to say nothing of thus embedding its author, invites readers to lose sight of who is
truly speaking.16 Not only is identity thus destabilized but character is too, for, insofar as
Socrates’ account includes only a small portion of narrative in third-person form and a lot of
and with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 3; John Hartland-Swann, “Plato as Poet: A Critical Interpretation, Parts I-II,” Philosophy 26 (1951): 3-18, 131-41; Blondell, Play of Character, 14-52.
15For examples of these approaches to the study of Plato as well as an overview of the literature, see the first four essays in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992): Richard Kraut, “Introduction to the study of Plato,” 1-50; T.H. Irwin, “Plato: The intellectual background,” 51-89; Leonard Brandwood, “Stylometry and chronology,” 90-130; Terry Penner, “Socrates and the early dialogues,” 121-69. For discussion and additional references, see Blondell, Play of Character, 11-14.16
?An invitation issued in other dialogs as well, notably the Crito in which Plato represents Socrates speaking in the voice of the laws, in the Symposium in which Plato has Apollodorus, via Aristodemus, represent Socrates “reporting” a lengthy speech by Diotima, and in the Menexenus in which Plato represents Socrates offering Aspasia’s funeral oration. For valuable treatments of this feature of Plato’s dialogs, see Edelstein, “Platonic Anonymity”; Paul Plass, “Philosophic Anonymity and Irony in the Platonic Dialogues,” American Journal of Philology 85 (1964): 254-278.
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narrative through mimesis, Socrates is depicted as acting not in the manner of a good man (396e)
but of a common one (397a).17 With Plato impersonating/representing Socrates
impersonating/representing his interlocutors, this observation redounds back on to Plato as well.
And as it redounds on to Plato it redoubles: Plato is at one and the same time all of the characters
he represents and, owing to his authorial “silence” and “anonymity,” he is none of them as well.
By refusing, in this way, to offer an “author of the truth” or any “authoritative guidance” about
how they are to be read, Plato’s dialogs orient inquiry away from the pursuit of the factual
identity of an author (“Plato or Socrates”) and/or authorial intent, and toward a politics of
authority.18
After its opening passages, the Republic’s engagement with poetry continues with
Socrates’ visit to Cephalus’ house where, in a series of brief exchanges, Socrates and his
interlocutors Cephalus and Polemarchus cite from the works of Homer (328e), Sophocles (329b-
c), Pindar (331a), and Simonides (331d). With the exception of Homer, who is recited by
Socrates, the poets are cited by Socrates’ interlocutors for what they have to say about virtues of
enduring concern in the dialog: Cephalus cites Sophocles on moderation and Pindar on courage
and Polemarchus cites Simonides on justice. Commentators broadly agree that these references
signify the important role of the poets as traditional authorities in the lives of the Greeks and the
high regard in which the poets were generally held before and during the period in which the
Republic is set, the last decade of the fifth century B.C.E.19 Commentators also broadly agree that
17Ferrari, “Plato on Poetry,” 119, notes this as well.
18The quoted terms in this sentence and the prior one are from Edelstein, “Platonic Anonymity,” 6-8, 18-19.
19As Debra Nails, The People of Plato: a Prosopography of Plato and other Socratics
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the aim of the Republic is to unseat that authority and to replace it with the authority of
philosophy.20
I disagree. If the mimetics that structure the dialog show it to be a work with poetic
characteristics and it is also, needless to say, a work of philosophy, then this should already open
the possibility that it not only models but also stands for something other than a choice between
poetry and philosophy. I begin to explore what that might be by way of close readings of
Socrates’ exchanges with Polemarchus and Thrasymachus in Republic I.21
1. The Justice of Poetry
Recall that Polemarchus enters conversation with Socrates by invoking Simonides, the fifth-
century poet, to vouchsafe his father’s definition of justice.22 When he is pressed by Socrates to
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 324-26, points out, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise dramatic date of the dialogue because evidence points to 424 or 421 as the dramatic date of Book I, and to “after 411" as the dramatic date of Books II-V. Dating the dialogue as a whole, “as we have it,” to 408/7, she concludes that the dialogue takes place “throughout the Peloponnesian War.”
20See, for example, Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), chap. 13; Ford, Origins of Criticism, 209; Julius Moravcsik, “Noetic Aspiration and Artistic Inspiration” in Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts, eds. Julius Moravcsik and Philip Temko (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), 29-46; Plato on Poetry: Ion, Republic 376e-398b, Republic 595-608b, ed. Penelope Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23-24; Susan B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 5.
21 For a brilliant essay on Socrates’ engagement with Cephalus in Rep. I, especially attentive to the relations between fathers and sons, see Harry Berger, Jr., “More Than a Talking Head: Socrates and Cephalus in Republic I,” ms on file with author.
22 For discussions of Simonides’ controversial reputation as wise poet or greedy poet-for-hire and also of his appearances in Plato’s works, see Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1999), 107-16; H.S. Thayer, “Plato’s Quarrel with Poetry: Simonides,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 3-26; Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Kleos with Paul Celan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
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say what “Simonides said about justice that you assert he said correctly,” Polemarchus answers:
“That it is just to give to each what is owed” or “to render to each his due” (331e). A series of
twists and turns guided by Socrates reconfigures Simonidean justice into “a certain art of
stealing.” Horrified by this outcome, Polemarchus disavows it (334b). Polemarchus’ exchange
with Socrates continues and, through it, he comes to see that he doesn’t really understand what
justice is. This recognition inaugurates the quest for justice that is the dialog as a whole.
Maintaining that the exchange also reveals Simonides’ ignorance, and hence that
Socrates’ opening description of the poet as a “wise and godlike man” whom it “isn’t easy to
disbelieve” (331a) is ironic, some commentators treat this as Plato’s opening salvo in the
dialog’s larger project of displacing the authority of the poets.23 But that conclusion is troubled
by the kinship between the initial definition of justice attributed by Polemarchus to Simonides –
giving to each what is owed – and the one Socrates endorses later in the dialog, in Republic IV,
namely, “the having and doing of one’s own and what belongs to one” (434a), to which I return
below. It is also troubled by the movement of Socrates’ exchange with Polemarchus, to which I
turn next.
Socrates offers a series of reformulations of Polemarchus’ initial attribution which he
checks one by one with Polemarchus, asking again and again: can this be “what Simonides
means” or how “he would answer us”? “Yes,” says Polemarchus each time (331e, 332a, 332b,
332c, 332d). Socrates’ repeated questions underscore that Simonides’ words don’t speak for
1999).
23See Ford, Origins of Criticism, 213-14; Republic, trans. Shorey, 331e, comment d. Contra Ledbetter, Poetics before Plato, 117.
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themselves but require interpretation. By focusing Polemarchus on “what Simonides means,”
Socrates appears to be referring to Simonides’ intention the practice of interpreting the poet’s
words. But this quickly proves futile because, as Socrates’ reformulations, affirmed by
Polemarchus, demonstrate, that practice of interpretation can accommodate a multiplicity of
conflicting meanings.24 It may be possible to do as Polemarchus did, that is, to say what
Simonides said, though, as we’ll see, the dialog calls that into question. But the exchange
between Polemarchus and Socrates suggests that it is not possible for them, not being Simonides,
to say what he meant. Nor, Simonides being dead, can they ask him. And things would not be
otherwise if he were alive. As Socrates says in Plato’s Apology, when they are asked to explain
what their poems mean, the poets are unable to give an account (22b-c; see also Prot. 347e).
Nearly halfway through the discussion, Polemarchus’ response to yet another question by
Socrates about “what Simonides means” changes form. Socrates asks: “Does Simonides mean
then that justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies?” “I think so,” Polemarchus
replies (332d), referring the poet’s meaning to his own opinion. In doing so, Polemarchus
appears to distribute authority away from the poets and to himself. And, indeed, for the next
series of exchanges, Simonides disappears from the conversation. But if we recall that the
24 In Protagoras, 347a-348a, after offering an account of what he thinks “was going through Simonides’ mind when he composed th[e] ode” under discussion, Socrates says: “when a poet is brought up in discussion, almost everyone has a different opinion of what he means, and they wind up arguing about something they can never finally decide.” Reading Socrates’ claims here about the undecidability of poetic interpretation as demonstrating that “no truth of any importance concerning how one ought to live” can emerge from discussion about poetry, Roslyn Weiss, The Socratic Paradox and Its Enemies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 41-43, takes this to represent a rejection of poetry for the sake of philosophy. I see it instead as a critique of establishing the sense of the poem by reference to authorial intent, of a piece with the critique, just discussed, offered by Socrates in his exchange with Polemarchus in Rep. I. Ledbetter, Poetics before Plato, 109, says the same.
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standard formulation of justice in early Greek ethics is “doing good to friends and harm to
enemies,” then we can see that Polemarchus’ response replaces Simonides’ say-so with
conventional morality.25 By ending the brief discussion which follows with an account of justice
as “the art of stealing” “for the benefit of friends and the harm of enemies” (334b), the dialog
poses its initial challenge to convention as a standard of justice. The pull of convention on
Polemarchus remains strong (334b), however, and the dialog defers a thoroughgoing engagement
with that source of authority to Socrates’ final exchange with Polemarchus in Republic I and,
even more so, to his engagement with Thrasymachus, both of which I return to below.
What, in the meantime, has happened to the poets? The movement of Socrates’ and
Polemarchus’ exchange so far suggests a redistribution of authority away from the poets to those
who invoke the poets in the first place. This may look like a deauthorization of the poets and,
insofar as the conversation replaces the poet’s say-so with what people conventionally say, it is.26
But a subsequent exchange between Socrates and Polemarchus suggests, once again, that things
in relation to the poets are more complicated. Socrates asks: “Justice, then, seems, according to
you and Homer and Simonides, to be a certain art of stealing, for the benefit, to be sure, of
friends and the harm of enemies. Isn’t that what you meant” (334b)? There is a lot packed into
this question: first, Socrates not only calls Simonides back into the conversation, but he
redoubles Simonides’ authority by pairing him with Homer. Secondly, and at the same time, by
25See, for discussion, Mary Whitlock Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
26Poetic and conventional authority, here disaggregated, are both targets of the Republic, albeit in different ways.
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presenting Polemarchus and Homer and Simonides as equals, Socrates underscores that a
redistribution of authority has, indeed, been effected. Finally, charging Polemarchus, in his own
person, with ultimate responsibility for the understanding of justice associated up to that point
with the poets and/or with convention, Socrates also inaugurates a redistribution of a different
kind when he presses Polemarchus with: “Isn’t this what you meant? [my emphasis]”
Speaking exclusively on his own behalf for the very first time, Polemarchus demurs:
“No, by Zeus.” Borrowing Homer’s authority, Zeus, to underwrite his own authority,
Polemarchus rejects the say-so of Socrates’ Homer and Simonides. Establishing a different
relation to the poets, he follows his disavowal with the words: “But I no longer know what I did
mean” (334b). This statement may seem like an abdication from the scene of argument. But if we
recall what Socrates says of the poets in the Apology -- that they are unable to say what they
mean -- then this admission actually allies Polemarchus with the poets. It is this, Polemarchus’
aporia or his awareness of the limits of his knowledge, itself a kind of self-knowledge, that
initiates the dialog’s philosophical investigation of justice, which begins in the very next
sentence with Socrates’ introduction of the distinction between being and seeming (334c).27
If the exchanges between Polemarchus and Socrates by way of the poets inaugurate an
investigation of justice, they model and give force to the dialog’s substantive account of justice
as well. By attributing to Homer and Simonides the understanding of justice that Polemarchus
has taken as his own from conventional morality, Socrates not only produces a definition of
justice as the art of stealing; he also, and not too obliquely, accuses Polemarchus of theft. Neither 27In the Apology Socrates is critical of the poets he questions for thinking that because of their poetry, they are wise in other respects which, he says, they are not (22c). If poets themselves thus arguably lack poetic insight, their poetry may nonetheless be a condition of its possibility.
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that definition nor the others that Socrates has come up with over the course of the conversation,
and that Polemarchus has happily appropriated, ever belonged to Polemarchus in the first place.
Polemarchus’ “no,” his rejection of justice as theft, is also his denial of Socrates’ accusation of
theft. Marking his coming into his own, it also models a more promising understanding and
practice of justice than any that has yet been put forward: the having and doing of one’s own and
what belongs to one. This is the definition of justice Socrates offers in Republic IV, its kinship
with the one Polemarchus initially attributed to Simonides – giving to each what is owed – now
more apparent.28
Note that the exchange between Polemarchus and Socrates about poetic authority tells us
very little about what Plato thinks about the wisdom of the poets or, indeed, about the reliability
or “unreliability of the early poets as founts of wisdom.”29 On the contrary, as we have seen,
what Simonides means and/or knows remains in the dialog and must remain, inside and outside
the dialog, an open question. Insofar as the definition of justice Polemarchus attributes to
Simonides appears only in the Republic and not in any of Simonides' extant fragments, what
Simonides says is, moreover, an open question as well.30 In Republic II, Adeimantus recites,
without attribution, a second fragment (365c) generally agreed by scholars to belong to
Simonides.31 Displacing anew questions of identity and authorship to open the way to a
consideration of authority, the dialog thus replays the “Plato or Socrates” question as the “Plato
28See also Ledbetter, Poetics before Plato, 117.
29Ford, Origins of Criticism, 216.
30For the statement that “this definition is not found in the fragments of Simonides,” see Republic, trans. Shorey, 331e, comment c.
31See Ford, Origins of Criticism, 97, on this fragment as belonging to Simonides.
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or Socrates or Simonides” question.
Another exchange in Book I supports the reading I’ve been developing so far.32
Polemarchus initially enters into discussion with Socrates by interrupting his father. Assuming
Cephalus’ argument, Polemarchus reinforces a pattern of authority by which the son inherits
from the father. But by bringing in Simonides, a different authority, to shore up his father’s
account of justice, Polemarchus’ intervention undoes his father’s authority at the same time.
With some relief, Cephalus “hands down the argument” to Polemarchus, who claims to be the
“heir of what belongs to” Cephalus and accepts the inheritance. Agreeing that Polemarchus’
inheritance is due, Cephalus laughs and leaves (331d). This exchange effects the transition to
Socrates’ discussion with Polemarchus and prefigures that one in telling ways. Just as
Polemarchus’ interruption silences Cephalus and thus challenges his paternal authority, so too, in
his exchange with Socrates, does Polemarchus turn away from what Simonides means and so
challenge his poetic authority. If Polemarchus’ challenge to Cephalus paves the way for him to
take up his father’s inheritance, his turn away from Simonides’ say-so positions him to take up
the bequest of the poets. Just as Polemarchus’ recourse to Simonides to shore up Cephalus’
account of justice both authorizes and deauthorizes his father, enabling Polemarchus to replace
his father in philosophical conversation, so too does Polemarchus’ poetic insight disavow poetic
authority resting on say-so and prepare him to take up philosophy. All of this suggests that for
Polemarchus to take up his varying inheritances not by blind appropriation or theft but by his
own authority, he must acknowledge their sources, see that, though they may belong to him as a
matter of fact, he must make them his own through understanding. Only by making his
32Thanks to Bonnie Honig for drawing my attention to this exchange.
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inheritances his own in this way, which also opens the possibility of refusing them, does he take
them up justly. And only in this way is what belongs to him owed to him or due.
Let me pause over two features of justice that emerge from this discussion. Socrates is no
innocent when it comes to putting words that do not belong to Polemarchus in Polemarchus’
mouth or when it comes to attributing words to Simonides or Homer. These practices of reverse
misappropriation, along with Socrates’ interjection of theft in his exchange with Polemarchus
about justice, suggest that the path to understanding justice and to its practice proceed by way of
injustice. Socrates says this explicitly when he explains in the middle of Republic III that an
education to virtue requires knowing the different forms of virtue “and their opposites” (402c,
also 409e, 491b-c). It is mirrored in the fact that the dialog’s philosophical discussion of justice
at the political level truly gets under way only with the “feverish city,” in which injustice (372e),
alongside “the poets and their helpers” (373b), makes its first appearance. These observations
throw into question the status of the simple account of virtue offered in the curricula of Republic
II-III from which certain kinds of poetry have been excluded.33 A second feature of justice that
emerges from Socrates’ exchange with Polemarchus, is its reciprocity. Justice is, as we have
seen, the having and doing of one’s own and the giving of what is owed, in combination. The
rest of the dialog gives substance and force to what this understanding and practice entail and
shows it at work psychically, politically, and philosophically. What we get in the remainder of
Republic I, by way of Socrates’ final engagement with Polemarchus over the conventional
definition of justice and by way of his exchange with Thrasymachus over the power of
convention itself, is, among other things, a demonstration of the poverty of approaches to justice 33See my “Wages of War,” 443-67.
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that proceed without recourse to the poets and, hence, a reminder, by way of its absence, of the
importance of poetry for the philosophical project of the Republic.
The traction of conventional authority and its distinction from poetic authority comes to
light when, as we have seen, Polemarchus cleaves to the standard formulation of justice after he
has rejected the say-so of the poets.34 Denouncing justice as the art of stealing, he insists that: “it
is still my opinion that justice is helping friends and harming enemies” (334b). Continuing to
take the conventional account as his own, Polemarchus only sets it aside to appropriate Socrates’
own formulation of justice in their final exchange of Republic I. To Socrates’ statement that a
just man harms no one, Polemarchus responds: “In my opinion, Socrates, what you say is
entirely true” (335d). Polemarchus’ poetic insight is short-lived, to be sure.
Still, the poets have the final say. Bringing them back in to help destabilize convention
for a second time, Socrates says: “If anyone tells us, then, that it is just to give to each what is
owed and understands by this that a just man should harm his enemies and help his friends, he
isn’t wise to say it, since what he says isn’t true... .” (335e). This is generally read as an
indictment of Simonides who, after all, it was claimed, first asserted that it is just to give what is
owed to each man. But, as we have seen, it was Polemarchus not Simonides who took that to
mean “that a just man should harm his enemies and help his friends,” which is the conventional
formulation of justice. What Simonides said and/or understood remains an open question.
Indeed, in the very next sentences Socrates underscores that he is not calling into question the
wisdom or truthfulness of the poet when he allies with Simonides (and Bias and Pittacus, two of
34Polemarchus, in this way, anticipates Adeimantus in Rep. II, who criticizes the poets in the name of what seems to be, at least initially, a conventional view of justice.
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the Seven Sages and both, among other things, poets35) against those who would put such
untruths into the mouths of the poets. Then, offering Polemarchus another opportunity to take up
philosophy with the poets and highlighting once again that the threat of injustice and the promise
of justice go together, Socrates invites Polemarchus to be his partner in the “battle” against
untruth (335e). This time Polemarchus says, “I am ready” (335d).
2. The Silence of Poetry
Socrates may succeed in loosening the hold of convention on Polemarchus. Thrasymachus,
however, remains unconvinced. Bursting in on the discussion (336b) to take up the defense of
convention, he offers justice as the advantage of the stronger (338c).36 In Roslyn Weiss’ words,
for Thrasymachus, justice “consists of the rules that the strong, those who have political power,
impose on the weak, their subjects, who are then obliged to obey the rules, thereby advancing the
interests of the strong.”37 Demonstrating his readiness to partner with Socrates, and mirroring a
move Socrates had executed on him in their earliest exchange about poetic authority,
Polemarchus reveals the inadequacy of Thrasymachus’ definition by showing that it ends in
incoherence: based on claims Thrasymachus has agreed to so far, Polemarchus says, “the
advantage of the stronger would be no more just than the disadvantage” (340a-b).
Cleitophon steps in to deflect Polemarchus’ charge, insisting that what Thrasymachus 35On Bias and Pittacus, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), trans. R.D. Hicks, Book 1.
36If Thrasymachus’ anti-traditional, power-based defense of convention looks prima facie quite different from Polemarchus’ traditional defense of convention as popular morality, they share nonetheless substantial commitments.
37Weiss, “Wise Guys and Smart Alecks,” 93.
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said was “that the advantage of the stronger is what the stronger believes to be his advantage”
(340b). Thrasymachus, however, rejects Cleitophon’s representation (340c). For Thrasymachus,
unlike for Cleitophon, it seems to matter whether the pronouncements of the powerful really
work to the powerful's advantage. Speaking in the name of power intelligently exercised,
Thrasymachus appears to stand for justice not as a matter of brute force or power alone but as an
art or craft, techne, of power. With the authority of justice lying in the art of power, and the
source of justice being that power made manifest in promulgated laws, there is, for
Thrasymachus, “no justice besides the laws and conventions that the ruled are required by the
rulers to observe.”38 To Thrasymachus, justice is all and only a creature of law (339b) and that
makes him, in contemporary parlance, a legal positivist.39
Noting the difference between Cleitophon and Thrasymachus is important.40 It gives
force to the claim put forward recently, on historical grounds, that Thrasymachus did not endorse
an account of justice as force but was, instead, describing practices he associated with Athenian
imperialism and deplored.41 In real life a diplomat from Chalcedon who spoke out to “prevent
harsh reprisals against his native city” after Chalcedon’s unsuccessful revolt against Athens in
407, the Thrasymachus of the Republic, argues Stephen A. White, is best read not as a realist on
a par with the Athenian generals in the Melian debate for whom “the strong do what they can and
the weak suffer what they must” (History, 5.89), but “as an idealist” expressing “the outrage of a 38Weiss, “Wise Guys and Smart Alecks,” 95.
39 This is also Meletus’ position in the Apology (24b-25a). 40
?Thanks to Gerry Mara for bringing this difference to my attention.
41See Stephen A. White, “Thrasymachus the Diplomat,” Classical Philology 90 (1995): 307-27, cited approvingly in Nails, People of Plato, 289.
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man disillusioned and embittered by the brutal realities of fifth-century power politics.”42
Whether Thrasymachus is “a penetrating critic of contemporary political affairs who is
dismayed by the triumphs of injustice” he is describing or is rather, like Cleitophon, aggressively
prescribing such triumphs matters for an historical appreciation of Thrasymachus.43 What matters
more for my purposes is that Thrasymachus is presented in the dialog, and Socrates responds to
him, in such a way that makes it hard to tell. By making it difficult to tell whether Thrasymachus
is speaking descriptively or prescriptively the dialog presents him as modeling an erasure of the
difference between how things are and how things ought to be. This erasure is underwritten by
both approaches to justice as a matter of power, even when what is (the application of power) is
apparently disengaged from what ought to be (the intelligent application of power). As
Thrasymachus’ discursive practices make plain, when justice is understood as a matter of power
that separation is difficult to maintain. Modeling justice as a techne of power and demonstrating
the proximity of that practice of justice to justice as brute force, Thrasymachus, himself at times
brash, bullying, and violent, offers to persuade Socrates to his way of thinking about justice by
giving Socrates’ soul “a forced feeding” (345b).
When justice is a matter of power, intelligently exercised or not, might (what is) makes
right (what ought to be). Justice, understood in that way, makes impossible justice as “giving to
each what is owed” and “the having and doing of one’s own and what belongs to one,” which
both, separately and in combination, presuppose a gap between how things are and how things
42For the sources of these quotes, in order, see Nails, People of Plato, 289; The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley and ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Touchstone, 1996); White, “Thrasymachus the Diplomat,” 322.
43White, “Thrasymachus the Diplomat,” 324.
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ought to be that it is the job of justice to govern. Justice as power forecloses the understanding of
justice that the dialog has been developing so far and so the exchange between Socrates and
Thrasymachus ends with Socrates maintaining that he does not know what justice is (354b-c).
Having left the question of “what the just is” to one side close to the beginning of his exchange
with Thrasymachus to pursue instead alternative sources of justice to power, namely wisdom and
virtue, Socrates, by the end of Republic I, succeeds in demonstrating only the inadequacy of
power as a source of justice.
Modeling an erasure of the difference between how things are and how things ought to
be, Thrasymachus stands for the erasure of Socratic justice. Thrasymachus also and analogously
stands for the position that what is represented as true is true if it is powerful enough to secure
acquiescence. He thus models an erasure of the difference between truth and representation.44 If,
as we have seen, it was because of their traditional authority that the words of the poets secured
Polemarchus’ early acquiescence, Thrasymachus, as we have also seen, has no need of external
authority at all; he is the embodiment of words-as-authority. That is, of course, the position of
the poetic text when it is treated as authoritative. Thus inhabiting the position of poetry in the
dialog, Thrasymachus displaces the poets, their poetry, and their authority. Standing for a world
from which the poets have been ousted – one in which self-standing authority replaces all other
modes -- Thrasymachus is shown to be on the side of the tyrants in the counterposition Socrates
set up between the poets, with whom Socrates allies in the quest for truth about justice, and the
tyrants, whom he holds responsible for the untruth of conventional morality (336a). That
Thrasymachus’ displacement of poetry is connected with his erasure of the difference between 44Thanks to Amittai Aviram for this point.
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truth and representation raises the possibility that poetry has something to do with preserving that
difference. As I show next, that insight is a key to Socrates’ engagement with poetry in Republic
X.
II. Republic X
In Stephen Halliwell’s assessment, “It is in large part to test once again the established and
widely accredited claim that poets are ethical experts … that Plato constructs the arguments of
595-608” that open Republic X.45 I agree, with the following caveat, namely that, as was the case
in Socrates’ discussions with Polemarchus, Socrates’ exchanges with Glaucon test that claim by
casting the spotlight on those who make it. That poetry’s auditors are the focus is suggested in an
early passage in Republic X, in which Socrates gives as his reason for underwriting the earlier
verdict against mimetic poetry that “it is likely to distort the thought of anyone who hears it.”
Driving the point home, he announces the following exception: poetry is to be excluded, he says,
unless its auditors “possess, as an antidote (pharmakon), knowledge of what it is really like”
(595b).46
3. The Truth of Poetry
45Halliwell, Mimesis, 56
46It is to be noted that pharmakon signifies not only an antidote but a poison as well. For an important discussion of Plato’s use of this term in the Phaedrus, see Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination, 1972, trans. by Barbara Johnson in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 63-171. See also Paul Allen Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 144-51.
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What is knowledge of poetry really like? Choosing as his example a couch, Socrates begins his
investigation of mimesis with reference not to poetry but to painting (596e).47 Producing the
following well-known hierarchy, he explains that there is the “idea” (eidos) of the couch, made
by a god,48 the artifact of the couch, made by a craftsman based on god’s idea, and the imitation
of the appearance of the artifact, made by the painter (597b). Glaucon seems to get to the heart of
the matter when he claims that painted things “look like they are; however they surely are not in
truth” (596e). Indeed, Socrates applauds Glaucon’s words (596e). It is not only that mimetic
things look like they are but are not in truth, however. As only the “look” of an appearance, a
mimetic thing is, more accurately, at a third remove from the idea it represents and, in this way,
fails to be true (597e).49
Judged by the standard of truth appropriate to the idea of the couch, the painted couch is
false, to be sure. By that standard, the artifact of the couch, at a second remove from the idea, is,
of course, false too (597a). But the idea, while the highest, may not be the only criterion of truth.
47I agree with those for whom the analogy the dialog establishes between poetry and painting (597e, 601a, 605a-b) is legitimate. Curiously, the analogy is not infrequently discussed with reference to a Simonidean fragment: “painting is silent poetry; poetry paints the speeches.” See, e.g., Burnyeat, “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” 265; and, especially, Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 46-62. On Socrates’ choice of the couch as his example, see Burnyeat, “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” 231-36, 245-49. The resonance of Socrates’ example with Glaucon’s invocation of couches when he grows the city of pigs into the luxurious city, which, as noted earlier in this chapter, is populated also and for the first time by “poets and their helpers” (373b), is worth noting.48
?For god as a kind of craftsman, see also Timaeus 31a. I leave to one side here a number of metaphysical issues, including: the relation between eidos used here to refer to an artifact and the theory of forms; and what Plato might have in mind when he has Socrates call the creator of that eidos, a god.49
?I take the term “look” from Ferrari, “Plato and Poetry,” 127.
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After all, Socrates and Glaucon are pursuing knowledge about mimesis and their quest implies
that there is a truth proper to mimesis. What might mimesis be in its truth? Emphasizing that “the
picture shows only how the couch appears when viewed from a particular angle – from the side,
the front, or some other perspective (598ab),” Socrates suggests that the truth proper to the
painted couch is the look of the artifact of the couch as it appears to the artist from where he
stands when he paints it.50 Judging a mimetic product in its truth, this means, calls for
recognizing the partiality of the mimetic thing. And having knowledge of what mimesis is really
like is a matter of knowing that the mimetic product is all and only a “look.” As an imitation of
an appearance of what is, the mimetic thing’s truth lies in its falsity (to the idea and to the
artifact), which it wears, so to speak, on its face.
Consider a painting showing a couch with three legs. The painted three-legged couch is
false to the idea of the couch and it is false to the carpenter’s couch as well. But insofar as the
three-legged couch is true to the look of the couch as it appears to the artist who paints it, it is
both false and true at the same time. The truth of mimesis is that its truth and/or falsity depend on
what one is looking for when one looks at a mimetic thing.51 Knowing what mimesis is really
like, then, is understanding and recognizing the difference between its truth and the truth proper
to ideas and the truth proper to artifacts. If all of this seems obvious enough, Socrates’
discussions with Glaucon in the passages that follow suggest otherwise.
50See Myles Burnyeat, “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values 20: 217-324, 263.51
?Which isn’t the same as saying that truth is merely subjectivist or relativist.
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Underscoring the importance of perspective and partiality to the truth and knowledge of
mimesis, Socrates switches standpoints in his very next exchange with Glaucon. Instead of
continuing to look at what mimesis is really like, from the standpoint of someone with
knowledge of its truth, he first considers the standpoint of one who, encountering “some wizard
or imitator” and “lacking the ability to put knowledge and lack of knowledge and mimesis to the
test,” fails to see the mimetic thing for what it is and is deceived (598c-d). And then, in a move
that appears to promise an implementation of the “test” of knowledge of mimesis, he switches
perspective once again. Under discussion in the next passages is no longer the truth of mimesis
as it is known by one with knowledge of mimesis, or the deception by mimesis of those lacking
that knowledge, but the sort of knowledge possessed by the mimetic artist himself, now
represented by the poet. Interrogating, in particular, Homer’s knowledge, Socrates asks: if the
poet truly has knowledge of the things he imitates, won’t he use that knowledge to bring about
benefit rather than merely imitating in words the things he appears to know? In other words,
Homer’s poetry may tell of governance and laws and inventions and war, but has Homer himself
improved the administration of cities or changed practices of warfare (599aff)? The answer is
“no.” And so Homer’s knowledge and, indeed, Homer himself, emerge from this exchange as
utterly useless (600b).
With this outcome, the Republic’s demonstration of the ethical and political bankruptcy
of poetic expertise is often taken to be complete. As Bloom observes, however, “a moment’s
reflection makes one aware that these charges against Homer apply at least as well to Socrates.”52
52
?Bloom, Republic, 430.
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Indeed, Socrates’ uselessness, along with the more general uselessness of the knowledge
characteristic of philosophy, punctuate this dialog and others (Rep. 487e-489d; Gorg. 484c-
486d). That the knowledge proper to the poet is, in its uselessness, akin to that of the philosopher
and that, as counterexamples to Homer’s uselessness, Socrates invokes the activities of famed
sophists (600c-d) and lawgivers (599d-e), who, in this dialog and others, are objects of humor
and derision (Rep. 492a-d; Gorg. 515dff.; Laches 186b-d; Laws 858e; Phaedr. 258a-c, 278c;
Prot. 315a-b, 343a), point to the inadequacy of any test of poetic and/or philosophic knowledge
that takes utility as its standard. This opens the possibility that the true subject of Socrates’
interrogation here may not be what the poet knows. Rather, the multiple appearances of
references in these passages to what “is told,” what “the many say,” and what “is reported” (ta
legomena) (598c, 600a, b, c) suggest instead that under scrutiny is the knowledge of those who
advocate utility as the test of the poet’s knowledge. And these, of course, are poetry’s auditors. If
Socrates thus brings to light the inadequacy of the conventional standard of judgment when it
comes to poetic knowledge, he is silent on the knowledge of the poet. Homer’s knowledge, like
that of Simonides in Republic I, remains, and must remain, an open question.
Despite Socrates’ shifts of perspective in the passages just discussed, then, his main
target of scrutiny throughout are those who look at or hear mimetic things: those with knowledge
of mimesis see the mimetic thing in its truth, namely, as the look of an appearance of what is; if
those who lack knowledge of mimesis are deceived, they’re deceived, it turns out, not by the
“wizard or imitator” but owing to their own inability to judge well (598d); and although it
initially seems that the passage about what Homer knows aims to undermine the poet’s claim to
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expertise, the reading just offered shows that the poet makes no claim on his own behalf and that
it is rather the judgment of poetry’s auditors that is called into question.
Insisting that “we must not leave things half said but see them adequately” (601c)
Socrates revisits the question of use. Maintaining that it is the user who has knowledge (601e),
he returns specifically to the poet, claiming that, as one who neither uses the things he imitates
nor listens to those who use them, the poet has neither knowledge nor right opinion (602a). If my
interpretation is right and the focus of Republic X is not on what the poet knows but on the
knowledge of poetry’s auditors, why then does Socrates return to the poet’s knowledge? I’m not
sure he does. Solicited by Socrates’ examples, we might ask: who exactly is the knowledgeable
user, in the case of a poem, in the way that a flute player is the knowledgeable user of a flute and
a horseman is the knowledgeable user of a rein and bit (601c-e)? The answer, it seems to me, is
not the poet but rather those to whom belongs the judgment about the poem’s beauty, rightness,
and excellence (601d), namely, once again, the poem’s auditors.53
Answering in this way, however, produces a bind: on the one hand, a poem’s auditors are
best positioned to judge the poem because, as its users, they know it best; on the other hand, a
poem’s auditors are, in Socrates’ words, those to whom the poet looks to imitate what appears
fair to them and, he goes on, they don’t know anything at all (602b). Are poetry’s auditors its
knowledgeable users or not? No and yes. Those who test poetry by its utility, for example, are, as
we saw earlier and just for that reason, not knowledgeable users. By contrast, those who know
that a poem, like any other mimetic thing, is third from the truth, a point Plato has Socrates
repeat at precisely this juncture (602c), are knowledgeable users. Knowing that a poem is third 53I’m not sure what to make of the shift from “excellence, beauty, and rightness” at 601d to “beauty and badness” at 602a.
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from the truth, knowledgeable users do not mistake its mimetic representations for artifacts or for
ideas: recognizing the difference between mimetic things and artifacts, they don’t subject poetry
to the test of utility, for example (599d); and recognizing the difference between mimetic things
and ideas, they understand that what the poem says shouldn’t be taken for the truth (proper to
ideas) (602b). What distinguishes knowledgeable users from auditors who “don’t know anything
at all,” then, is that they understand the limitations of the knowledge of poetry. For this reason,
they are well-positioned to preserve the difference between truth and representation and to
safeguard themselves against mimetic poetry’s distorting effects (602c-605c).54
Things are a bit more complicated, however, because, as Socrates says, the very part of
the soul that mimetic poetry appeals to (602c), the appetitive part, is opposed to knowledge
(603a). And so he concludes: “Thus we should at last be justified in not admitting [the mimetic
poet] into a city that is well-governed, because he awakens [the inferior] part of the soul and
nourishes it, and, by making it strong, destroys the calculating part; just as in a city when
someone, by making wicked men mighty, turns the city over to them and corrupts the better sort
of citizen. Similarly, we’ll say that a poet puts a bad constitution in the soul of each individual by
making images that are far removed from the truth and by gratifying the soul’s irrational part…”
(605b-c). I return briefly to the opposition of appetite to knowledge in the final section of this
chapter.55 My focus for the remainder of this section is on the force and sense of the analogy 54With knowledge of mimesis amounting to partial knowledge of partial truth rather than knowledge of truth as such, it is possible, contra Halliwell, “Antidotes and incantations,” 6, to take the knowledge referred to at 595b to be contained in Rep. X itself.
55 I leave for my next chapter discussion of the relations among the parts of the soul, the sort of knowledge the appetites possess, the relations the parts of the soul bear to mimesis, and also my treatment of the “offspring,” eros.
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between soul and city introduced by Socrates in the passage just cited because the justification of
the exclusion of the mimetic poet depends in no small part on it.
Socrates says that mimetic poets put a bad constitution in the soul of each individual just
as bad constitutions destroy cities. How exactly do bad constitutions destroy cities? And who is
responsible for them? Who or what, in other words, is the political analog to the mimetic poet?
To answer these questions we must look back to Republic VIII and to its account of
constitutional change and decline, which, in any case, establishes its own relevance to the subject
matter of Republic X when it offers Socrates’ opening account of constitutional deviation from
the ideal city in the voices of the Muses (545d-e). In an epic gesture to Homer (who regularly
signals the introduction of difficult subject matter by invoking the Muses), Plato casts Socrates in
a position analogous to Homer, if not as the poet himself. Is Socrates, then, the political analog to
the mimetic poet of Republic X? Or is it Plato? Is it the Muses? Or is it Homer? The answer is:
none of the above. For neither the Muses nor Homer nor Plato nor Socrates is the source or cause
of bad political constitutions. All they do is tell of the origin of those constitutions. And what
they say, or what Plato has Socrates ventriloquize the Muses as saying, is that constitutional
decline arises from faction, which itself arises because of a failure of an artificial breeding
technique. In the absence of this technique, known as the “nuptial number,” the rulers of the
ideal city are unable to judge well the quality of the guardians, and that results in a “chaotic
mixing of iron with silver and of bronze with gold,” which breeds the war and hatred at the root
of constitutional degeneration (547a).56
56It is noteworthy that both the “nuptial number” and the “mixing” (which refers back to the noble lie, a “Phoenician thing,” deriving its authority from the poets (414b-415d)), are truths of the Muses, which is to say, representations at a third remove from the truth of ideas.
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Responsibility for bad political constitutions, this means, lies with those holding political
offices, whose knowledge is lacking (545d). Are the political rulers, then, the analog of the
mimetic poet of Republic X? Not exactly. For although their incapacity to judge well is
responsible for deviation from the perfect city in speech, it is not they, or at least not they alone,
who are responsible for the bad constitutions described in Republic VIII. In Socrates’ words
(some of them, Homer’s), constitutions are born not “from oak or rock” (Iliad, XXII, 126;
Odyssey, XIX, 163) but from “the characters of the people who live in the cities governed by
them, which tip the scales, so to speak, and drag the rest along with them” (544d-e).57 It is the
ways of life of the people living in the cities governed by the constitutions that bring about the
changes in them that give rise to bad constitutions (547b, 550d-551b, 555b-d, 562c-563d).58 The
engines of the bad political constitutions depicted in Republic VIII are thus those who strengthen
the office holders and surrender their cities to the vicious, namely, the people. For the city/soul
analogy Socrates invokes in Republic X to hold, the engines of bad psychological constitutions
must be those who empower the poets by surrendering their internal cities to them (592b, 608b),
that is to say, poetry’s auditors. The project, begun in Republic I, of redistributing authority away
from the poets and to those who invest the poets with authority in the first place, culminates, in
my view, with this passage in Republic X.
57
? Socrates invokes this same phrase in Apology, 34d, using it there to refer to the formation and development not of political institutions but of the human soul, specifically, his own.
58 The Republic may at times appeal to the regime “as the most important political fact and the cause of all other facts” (Bloom, Republic, 414), and Rep. VIII may open with Socrates and his interlocutors maintaining that they will follow their plan and examine constitutions, as the engines of regime change first. But, as in the rest of the dialog, Rep. VIII depicts a more complex and bidirectional relation between soul and city.
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4. The Law of Poetry
After repeating, at the start of Republic X, that the earlier verdict excluding mimetic poetry from
the ideal city was correct (595a), Socrates asks Glaucon not to “denounce” him “to the tragic
poets and all the other imitators” (595b). Scholars have noted the legal resonances in this request
and in the frame of Republic X, as a whole. Bloom, for example, maintains that “Homer and the
other great poets constitute the respectable tribunal before which philosophy is tried. Socrates is
afraid of being denounced to them, as though they were the law; and in a sense they do reflect
that law and determine the opinions that make it.”59 Commenting on the “judicial imagery” in
Republic X, Halliwell maintains that its arguments around poetry are cast as “a ‘defense speech’
(apologia) for the earlier banishment of mimetic poetry from the ideal city” and, at the same
time, as an invitation to poetry to defend itself against those arguments.60 Both Bloom and
Halliwell ask: “Who exactly is on trial – poetry for its/her power to harm the soul, or Socrates
and Glaucon for seeming to repudiate such a fundamental component of Greek culture …?” Both
see the legal and judicial imagery as expressing “the idea of an unfinished series of trials and
retrials, as well as the possibility of accuser and accused changing places.”61
59
?Bloom, Republic, 426-27.
60Halliwell, “Antidotes and incantations,” 11, 10.
61These are Halliwell words, “Antidotes and incantations,” 12-13; Bloom, Republic, 427, puts it this way: “However Book X attempts to reverse this situation. Socrates begins by making an apology to the poets and ends by opening the way for them to make an apology to him. Socrates does not wish to destroy poetry; he only wishes to judge it and reform it, rather than be judged by it.”
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I agree that it is important to pay attention to the legal and judicial imagery prevalent in
this portion (and other portions) of the dialog.62 A good place to look to help illuminate that
imagery is Socrates’ defense speech (apologia), as it is presented in Plato’s Apology. Like the
Republic, the Apology is a dialog in which exactly who is on trial is in question: is it Socrates or
the people of Athens? Or both? Halliwell and Bloom see Socrates (and Glaucon) and/or the poets
as possible defendants in the Republic but, as I have been arguing, these options leave out
another key player in the courtroom drama of that dialog, namely, as in the Apology, the people
of Athens. Just as by displacing conventional morality and the laws, the Apology distributes
authority away from its traditional repositories and holds Socrates’ accusers to account, so too
does the Republic distribute authority away from its conventional repository in the poets and
hold poetry’s auditors to account. By these displacements and redistributions, the dialogs render
those responsible for poetic authority, conventional authority, and the laws in democratic Athens,
namely, the people, accountable for these modes of authority and also for the formations of soul
and city they inform.63
If my emphasis in this chapter has been on shifting the target of prosecution in the
Republic away from the poets and to poetry’s auditors, it is more accurate to say that poetry’s
auditors are on trial and so are the poets and so are Socrates and Glaucon. At issue in the dialog,
as in any trial, is justice. At issue is also, and therefore, truth, which the Apology treats as the
basis of justice.64 Justice and truth, together, make up the guiding analogy of the Apology: as 62See my “Wages of War” for discussion of the judicial imagery in Rep. I.63
?This is, in my view, is one of the points of Socrates’ cross-examination of Meletus (24d-25a) and of his account of his own defiance of Athenian laws during the Peloponnesian War (32b-32e).64
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judge is to justice, so speaker is to truth (18a), an analogy that is embodied in the word “verdict”
(from truth-saying) itself. Issued by those who fail to see the truth of Socrates’ knowledge or
human wisdom, the verdict in the Apology silencing Socrates speaks to the injustice of (a slim
majority of) the people of Athens (36a, 39b). Issued against those who fail to see the truth of
mimesis (595b), the verdict in the Republic silencing mimetic poetry speaks to those lacking
knowledge of poetry. Just as after Socrates is condemned to death, he continues to orient to truth,
now about death (by way of poetry), those who voted against the verdict (39e-42a) and whom he
specifically names “judges” (dikastai) (40a, 40e, 41b, 41c), so too may poetry, by the verdict of
the Republic, continue to be heard by those capable judges who understand its truth, which, as
we have seen, lies in its partiality and in its falsity to the idea of truth.
The Apology suggests that the pool of capable judges is potentially large indeed. As
Socrates puts it, the oracular pronouncement may have designated him the wisest, but the god
“merely uses my name as an example, as if he were to say: “This one of you, O human beings, is
wisest, who, like Socrates, recognizes that he is in truth worth nothing in respect to wisdom””
(23a-b). Human wisdom, this means, is available to all who, like Socrates, see that it “is of little
or no value” (23a), no small minority of Athens’s citizens by the evidence of the narrow margin
of the verdict in Socrates’ trial. Analogously, the knowledgeable users of poetry are those who
understand the partiality of mimetic truth, and this understanding is available to all who see that
mimetic things are at a third remove from the truth of ideas. Knowledge of poetry, like human
wisdom, undoes its own authority by its acknowledged partiality. Inspiring questioning and
?See R.E. Allen, Socrates and Legal Obligation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 11; and, for discussion, Gerald Mara, Socrates’ Discursive Democracy: Logos and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 1997) 33-35.
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scrutiny, both open those practitioners who are conscious of that partiality to the practice of
philosophy.
Not so fast. As we saw in the passage cited in the last section, Socrates claims that poetry
destroys the rational part of the soul by awakening, nourishing, and strengthening the appetitive
part (605b-c). Any connection between poetry and philosophy, and especially any synergistic
connection like the one I just proposed seems absolutely foreclosed by Socrates’ insistence that
the part of the soul that mimetic poetry appeals to is opposed to knowledge (603a). Maybe not.
For the knowledge Socrates refers to here and all the way until the end of the treatment of poetry
in Republic X, is of a particular kind. Under consideration is calculative (logistikon, 602d)
knowledge, what Socrates also calls prudence (phronesis) (603a). The role of this kind of
knowledge, whose home is the part of the soul responsive to “argument (logos) and law
(nomos)” (604b), is to regulate the displays of pain and pleasure triggered and fostered by poetry
(606b-d), and to keep them quiet.
Appearing to force a choice -- calculation or desire, law and argument or mimetic poetry
– Socrates announces: “if you admit the honeyed muse in lyrics or epics, pleasure and pain will
jointly be kings of your city instead of law and that argument which in each instance is best in
the opinion of the community” (607a). Socrates is, to be sure, warning against setting up pain
and pleasure to rule any city, psychological or political. And he is, to be sure, associating the
power of mimetic poetry with its impact on desire, which threatens to give unbridled rein to pain
and pleasure as “kings.” In my view, however, he is not, thereby, arguing in favor of calculation
in the soul or in favor of “law and arguments defended by common opinion” in the city. In the
soul, at least, neither desire on its own nor calculation on its own is an adequate guide to the
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good (431c, 439d-441a).65 Socrates refers to “measuring, counting, and weighing” as modes of
calculation and treats them as “charming (charieistatai) helpers” (602d), using the same
language he used to describe the mimetic artist just lines before (charieis, 602a). In this dialog
and others, these modes of calculation are, along with prudence, treated as inadequate measures
of things like “right and wrong, and noble and disgraceful, and good and bad” (Euth. 7b-d; Rep.
505a-c). In this dialog and others, laws may produce obedience but they don’t always produce
justice (Rep. 380c-d, 383a, 403b-c, 417b, 459e, 461b, 468c, 471b; Ap. 32a-e). And arguments
defended by common opinion often, as in the test of utility examined earlier, fall short of truth.
Instead, the references to faction, stasis, in the passages opposing calculation and desire
(603d) recall and model what Republic VIII named as the source and cause of constitutional
deterioration, here relocated to the internal city of the soul. Like most factional conflict, the
choice Socrates appears to force -- desire or calculation, in the soul; poetry or law and argument
defended by common opinion, in the city -- leaves room for only one winner. As noted at the
start of this chapter, for most readers that winner is not poetry. That is certainly true. But for the
reasons just adumbrated, I think the winner is not law and argument defended by common
opinion either. Despite Socrates’ claim that “the argument (logos) determined us” to reach the
verdict against poetry (607b) or, better, in the light of that claim, I think we are meant to read
Socrates’ announcement as posing false choices for the city and for the soul. Factionalism of the
65I agree with Burnyeat, “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” 225, that “there is no excuse for supposing that book X replaces an earlier three-part division [of the soul] with a vaguer bipartite one.” In my view, what appears to be a two-part division via the opposition between calculation and appetite in Rep. X, invites us to ask after the third part of Rep. IV, namely, thumos. For excellent work on this difficult topic, see Christina Tarnopolsky, “Power’s Passionate Pathologies,” and “The Logic of Thumos and Mimesis in Plato’s Republic,” presented to the 2006 and 2007 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association.
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soul, he says, leaves out “what is best in us,” which is to say, what “has not yet been adequately
educated by argument or habit” (606a-b). “What has not yet been adequately educated by
argument or habit” is offered in the Republic as poetic knowledge. In the Apology, it is offered as
human wisdom. Orienting neither to the rule of law and argument nor to the rule of pain and
pleasure, these dialogs offer educations to something that is both and neither, what one might
call the law of poetry or a poetic practice of philosophy.66
What might that look like? I cannot answer this question here. But, as may be clear
enough by now, I think that the philosophy of the Republic is actualized not in Books VI-VII as
is usually claimed, with its hierarchical ascent to authoritative knowledge, for that would be to
replace poetic authority with the authority of a kind of calculative or rationalist philosophy,
which I don’t think is the aim of the dialog. Instead, I think that the philosophy of the Republic is
most fully modeled by and understood by way of the dialog’s structural mimetics -- the dialog as
Plato’s mimesis of Socrates’ diegesis which itself contains a mimesis of dialogue -- and its
extensive use of poetic knowledge. As we have seen, this way of thinking about the philosophy
of the dialog invites a different orientation to the dialog’s politics. Socrates’ counterposition
between the poets and the tyrants at the end of his exchange with Polemarchus, the dialog’s
representation of Thrasymachus as an ally of the tyrants, the ouster of the poets from the world
of Thrasymachean justice, and the redistribution of poetic authority to poetry’s auditors together
open the question of how poetic knowledge might offer an antidote to authoritarian politics and
its (in)justice. That question, particularly urgent for the politics of the period in which the
Republic is set, is no less urgent for us today.66
?Obviously, an adequate justification of this claim will rest on my fuller treatment of eros.
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