Morgan, Classics of Moral and Political Theory, fifth edition

SOCRATES’ NARRATION BEGINS: I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to say a prayer to the goddess,¹ and [327a] also because I wanted to see how they would manage the festival, since they were holding it for the first time. I thought the procession of the local residents was beautiful, but the show put on by the Thracians was no less so, in my view. After we had said our prayer and watched the procession, we started back toward town. Then [b] Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, saw us from a distance as we were hurrying homeward, and told his slave boy to run and ask us to wait for him. The boy caught hold of my cloak from behind.

SLAVE: Polemarchus wants you to wait.

I turned around and asked where he was.

Shortly after that, Polemarchus caught up with us. Adeimantus, Glaucon’s brother, was with [c] him, and so were Niceratus, the son of Nicias, and some others, all of whom were apparently on their way from the procession.

POLEMARCHUS: It looks to me, Socrates, as if you two are hurrying to get away to town.

POLEMARCHUS: Well, then, either you must prove yourselves stronger than all these people or you will have to stay here.

SOCRATES: Isn’t there another alternative still: that we persuade you that you should let us go?

ADEIMANTUS: You mean to say you don’t know [328a] that there is to be a torch race on horseback for the goddess tonight?

SOCRATES: On horseback? That is something new. Are they going to race on horseback and hand the torches on in relays, or what?

POLEMARCHUS: In relays. And, besides, there will be an all-night celebration that will be worth seeing. We will get up after dinner and go to see the festivities. We will meet lots of young men there and have a discussion. So stay and do as we ask. [b]

So, we went to Polemarchus’ house, and there we found Lysias and Euthydemus, the brothers of Polemarchus, and what is more, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon was there too, and Charmantides of Paeania, and Clitophon, the son of Aristonymus. Polemarchus’ father, Cephalus, was also inside, and I thought he looked quite old. You see, I hadn’t seen him for some time. He was sitting on a sort of chair with cushions [c] and had a wreath on his head, as he had been offering a sacrifice in the courtyard. We sat down beside him, since some chairs were arranged in a circle there. As soon as he saw me, Cephalus greeted me:

Socrates, you don’t often come down to the Piraeus to see us. Yet you should. If it were still easy for me to make the trip to town, you wouldn’t have to come here. On the contrary, we would come to you. But as it is, you ought to come here more often. I want [d] you to know, you see, that in my case at least, as the other pleasures—the bodily ones—wither away, my appetites for discussions and their pleasures grow stronger. So please do as I ask: have your conversation with these young men, and stay here with us, as you would with your close friends and relatives.

SOCRATES: I certainly will, Cephalus. In fact, I enjoy engaging in discussion with the very old. I think we should learn from them—since they are like [e] people who have traveled a road that we too will probably have to follow—what the road is like, whether rough and difficult or smooth and easy. And I would be particularly glad to find out from you what you think about it, since you have reached the point in life the poets call old age’s threshold. Is it a difficult time of life? What have you to report about it?

CEPHALUS: By Zeus, Socrates, I will tell you exactly what I think. You see, a number of us who are [329a] more or less the same age often get together, so as to preserve the old saying.² When they meet, the majority of our members lament, longing for the lost pleasures of their youth and reminiscing about sex, drinking parties, feasts, and the other things that go along with them. They get irritated, as if they had been deprived of important things, and had lived well then but are not living now. Some others, too, even moan about the abuse heaped on old people by their relatives, and for that reason recite a litany of all the [b] evils old age has caused them. But I don’t think they blame the real cause, Socrates. After all, if that were the cause, I too would have had the same experiences, at least as far as old age is concerned, and so would everyone else of my age. But as it is, I have met others in the past who don’t feel that way—in particular, the poet Sophocles. I was once present when he was asked by someone, “How are you as far as sex goes, Sophocles? Can you still make love to a woman?” [c] “Quiet, man,” he replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from all that, like a slave who has escaped from a deranged and savage master.” I thought at the time what he said was sensible, and I still do. You see, old age brings peace and freedom from all such things. When the appetites cease to stress and importune us, everything Sophocles said comes to pass, and we escape from many insane masters. But in these [d] matters, and in those concerning one’s relatives, the real cause isn’t old age, Socrates, but the way people live. If they are orderly and contented, old age, too, is only moderately onerous; if they aren’t, both old age, Socrates, and youth are hard to bear.

I admired him for saying that, and I wanted him to tell me more, so I urged him on.

I imagine when you say that, Cephalus, the masses [e] do not accept it. On the contrary, they think you bear old age more easily, not because of the way you live, but because you are wealthy. For the wealthy, they say, have many consolations.

CEPHALUS: That’s true, they are not convinced. And there is something in their objection, though not as much as they think. Themistocles’ retort is relevant here. When someone from Seriphus insulted him by saying his high reputation was due to his city, not to himself, he replied that, had he been a [330a] Seriphian, he would not be famous; but nor would the other, had he been an Athenian. The same account applies to those who are not rich and find old age hard to bear: a good person would not easily bear old age if it were coupled with poverty, but one who wasn’t good would not be contented himself even if he were wealthy.

SOCRATES: Did you inherit most of your wealth, Cephalus, or did you make it yourself?

CEPHALUS: What did I make for myself, Socrates, you ask. As a moneymaker I am in between my grandfather [b] and my father. You see, my grandfather and namesake inherited about the same amount of wealth as I possess and multiplied it many times. However, my father, Lysanias, diminished that amount to even less than I have now. As for me, I am satisfied to leave my sons here no less, but a little more, than I inherited.

SOCRATES: The reason I asked is that you do not seem particularly to love money. And those who have not made it themselves are usually like that. But those [c] who have made it themselves love it twice as much as anyone else. For just as poets love their poems and fathers their children, so those who have made money take their money seriously both as something they have made themselves and—just as other people do—because it is useful. This makes them difficult even to be with, since they are unwilling to praise anything except money.

SOCRATES: Indeed, it is. But tell me something else. What do you think is the greatest good you have [d] enjoyed as a result of being very wealthy?

CEPHALUS: What I have to say probably would not persuade the masses. But you are well aware, Socrates, that when someone thinks his end is near, he becomes frightened and concerned about things he did not fear before. It is then that the stories told about Hades, that a person who has been unjust here must pay the penalty there—stories he used to make fun of—twist his soul this way and that for fear they [e] are true. And whether because of the weakness of old age, or because he is now closer to what happens in Hades and has a clearer view of it, or whatever it is, he is filled with foreboding and fear, and begins to calculate and consider whether he has been unjust to anyone. If he finds many injustices in his life, he often even awakes from sleep in terror, as children do, and lives in anticipation of evils to come. But someone who knows he has not been unjust has sweet [331a] good hope as his constant companion—a nurse to his old age, as Pindar says. For he puts it charmingly, Socrates, when he says that when someone lives a just and pious life,

Sweet hope is in his heart
Nurse and companion to his age
Hope, captain of the ever-twisting
Mind of mortal men.

How amazingly well he puts that. It is in this connection I would say the possession of wealth is most valuable, not for every man, but for a good and orderly one. Not cheating someone even unintentionally, not [b] lying to him, not owing a sacrifice to some god or money to a person, and as a result departing for that other place in fear—the possession of wealth makes no small contribution to this. It has many other uses, too, but putting one thing against the other, Socrates, I would say that for a man with any sense, that is how wealth is most useful.

SOCRATES: A fine sentiment, Cephalus. But speaking of that thing itself, justice, are we to say it [c] is simply speaking the truth and paying whatever debts one has incurred? Or is it sometimes just to do these things, sometimes unjust? I mean this sort of thing, for example: everyone would surely agree that if a man borrows weapons from a sane friend, and if he goes mad and asks for them back, the friend should not return them, and would not be just if he did. Nor should anyone be willing to tell the whole truth to someone in such a state.

SOCRATES: Then the following is not the definition of justice: to speak the truth and repay what one has borrowed.

CEPHALUS: Well, then, I will hand over the discussion to you, since it is time for me to look after the sacrifices.

SOCRATES: Then tell us, heir to the discussion, just what Simonides said about justice that you think [e] is correct.

POLEMARCHUS: He said it is just to give to each what is owed to him. And a fine saying it is, in my view.

SOCRATES: Well, now, it is not easy to disagree with Simonides, since he is a wise and godlike man. But what exactly does he mean? Perhaps you know, Polemarchus, but I do not understand. Clearly, he does not mean what we said a moment ago—namely, giving back to someone whatever he has lent to you, even if he is out of his mind when he asks for it. And yet what he has lent to you is surely something that [332a] is owed to him, isn’t it?

SOCRATES: But when he is out of his mind, it is, under no circumstances, to be given to him?

SOCRATES: Then it seems Simonides must have meant something else when he says that to return what is owed is just.

POLEMARCHUS: Something else indeed, by Zeus! He meant friends owe something good to their friends, never something bad.

SOCRATES: I understand. You mean someone does not give a lender what he is owed by giving him gold, when the giving and taking would be harmful, and both he and the lender are friends. Isn’t that what [b] you say Simonides meant?

SOCRATES: Now what about this? Should one also give to one’s enemies whatever is owed to them?

POLEMARCHUS: Yes, by all means. What is in fact owed to them. And what an enemy owes an enemy, in my view, is also precisely what is appropriate—something bad.

SOCRATES: It seems, then, Simonides was speaking in riddles—just like a poet!—when he said what justice is. For what he meant, it seems, is that it is [c] just to give to each what is appropriate to him, and this is what he called giving him what he is owed.

SOCRATES: Then what, in the name of Zeus, do you think he would answer if someone asked him: “Simonides, what owed or appropriate things does the craft we call medicine give, and to which things?”

SOCRATES: And what owed or appropriate things does the craft we call cooking give, and to which things?

SOCRATES: Good. Now what does the craft we would call justice give, and to whom or what does it give it?

POLEMARCHUS: If we are to follow the previous answers, Socrates, it gives benefit to friends and harm to enemies.

SOCRATES: Does Simonides mean, then, that treating friends well and enemies badly is justice?

SOCRATES: And who is most capable of treating sick friends well and enemies badly in matters of disease and health?

SOCRATES: What about the just person? In what actions and what work is he most capable of benefiting friends and harming enemies?

SOCRATES: All right. Now when people are not sick, Polemarchus, a doctor is useless to them.

SOCRATES: Tell me, then, what is justice useful for using or acquiring in peacetime?

SOCRATES: So is it a just man who is a good and useful partner in a game of checkers, or an expert [b] checkers player?

SOCRATES: And in laying bricks and stones, is a just person a better and more useful partner than a builder?

SOCRATES: Well, in what kind of partnership, then, is a just person a better partner than a builder or a lyre player, in the way a lyre player is better than a just person at hitting the right notes?

SOCRATES: Except, I presume, Polemarchus, in using money. You see, whenever one needs to buy or sell a horse jointly, I think a horse breeder is a more useful partner. Isn’t he? [c]

SOCRATES: In what joint use of silver or gold, then, is a just person a more useful partner than anyone else?

SOCRATES: So when money is not being used, that is when justice is useful for it? [d]

SOCRATES: And when one needs to keep a pruning knife safe, justice is useful both in partnerships and for the individual. When you need to use it, however, it is the craft of vine pruning that is useful?

SOCRATES: And would you also say that when one needs to keep a shield and a lyre safe and not use them, justice is a useful thing, but when you need to use them it is the soldier’s craft or the musician’s that is useful?

SOCRATES: And so in all other cases, too, justice is useless when they are in use, but useful when they are not?

SOCRATES: Then justice cannot be something excellent, can it, my friend, if it is only useful for useless [e] things. But let’s consider the following point. Isn’t the person who is cleverest at landing a blow, whether in boxing or any other kind of fight, also cleverest at guarding against it?

SOCRATES: And the one who is clever at guarding against disease is also cleverest at producing it unnoticed?

SOCRATES: And the one who is a good guardian of an army is the very one who can steal the enemy’s [334a] plans and dispositions?

SOCRATES: So whenever someone is a clever guardian of something, he is also clever at stealing it.

SOCRATES: So if a just person is clever at guarding money, he must also be clever at stealing it.

SOCRATES: It seems, then, that a just person has turned out to be a kind of thief. You probably got that idea from Homer. For he loves Autolycus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, whom he describes [b] as better than everyone at stealing and swearing false oaths.³ According to you, Homer, and Simonides, then, justice seems to be some sort of craft of stealing—one that benefits friends and harms enemies. Isn’t that what you meant?

POLEMARCHUS: No, by Zeus, it isn’t. But I do not know anymore what I meant. I still believe this, however, that benefiting one’s friends and harming one’s enemies is justice.

SOCRATES: Speaking of friends, do you mean those a person believes to be good and useful, or [c] those who actually are good and useful, even if he does not believe they are, and similarly with enemies?

POLEMARCHUS: Probably, one loves those one considers good and useful and hates those one considers bad.

SOCRATES: But don’t people make mistakes about this, so that lots of those who seem to them to be good and useful aren’t, and vice versa?

SOCRATES: All the same, it is then just for them to benefit bad people and harm good ones? [d]

SOCRATES: According to your account, then, it is just to do bad things to those who do no injustice.

SOCRATES: Then it follows, Polemarchus, that it is just for many people—the ones who are mistaken in their judgment—to harm their friends, since they [e] are bad for them, and benefit their enemies, since they are good. And so we will find ourselves claiming the very opposite of what we said Simonides meant.

POLEMARCHUS: Yes, that certainly follows. But let’s change our definition. For it looks as though we did not define friends and enemies correctly.

POLEMARCHUS: Someone who is both believed to be good and is good is a friend; someone who is believed to be good, but is not, is believed to be a friend but is not. And the same goes for enemies. [335a]

SOCRATES: According to that account, then, a good person will be a friend and a bad one an enemy.

SOCRATES: So you want us to add something to what we said before about the just man. Then we said that it is just to treat friends well and enemies badly. Now you want us to add to this: to treat a friend well, provided he is good, and to harm an enemy, provided he is bad?

SOCRATES: With respect to the virtue that makes dogs good, or to the one that makes horses good?

SOCRATES: And when dogs are harmed, they become worse with respect to the virtue that makes dogs, not horses, good?

SOCRATES: And what about human beings, comrade; shouldn’t we say that, when they are harmed, [c] they become worse with respect to human virtue?

SOCRATES: Then, my dear Polemarchus, people who have been harmed are bound to become more unjust.

SOCRATES: Well, then, can just people use justice to make people unjust? In a word, can good people use their virtue or goodness to make people bad? [d]

SOCRATES: For it isn’t the function of heat to cool things down, I imagine, but that of its opposite.

SOCRATES: Nor the function of dryness to make things wet, but that of its opposite.

SOCRATES: So the function of a good person isn’t to harm, but that of his opposite.

SOCRATES: So it isn’t the function of a just person to harm a friend or anyone else, Polemarchus, but that of his opposite, an unjust person.

SOCRATES: So if someone tells us it is just to give to each what he is owed, and understands by this that [e] a just man should harm his enemies and benefit his friends, the one who says it is not wise. I mean, what he says is not true. For it has become clear to us that it is never just to harm anyone.

SOCRATES: You and I will fight as partners, then, against anyone who tells us that Simonides, Bias, Pittacus, or any of our other wise and blessedly happy men said this.

SOCRATES: Do you know whose saying I think it is, that it is just to benefit friends and harm enemies? [336a]

SOCRATES: I think it is a saying of Periander, or Perdiccas, or Xerxes, or Ismenias of Thebes, or some other wealthy man who thought he had great power.

SOCRATES: All right. Since it has become apparent, then, that neither justice nor the just consists in benefiting friends and harming enemies, what else should one say it is?

Now, while we were speaking, Thrasymachus had tried many times to take over the discussion [b] but was restrained by those sitting near him, who wanted to hear our argument to the end. When we paused after what I had just said, however, he could not keep quiet any longer: crouched up like a wild beast about to spring, he hurled himself at us as if to tear us to pieces. Polemarchus and I were frightened and flustered as he roared into our midst:

What nonsense you two have been talking all this time, Socrates! Why do you act like naïve people, [c] giving way to one another? If you really want to know what justice is, don’t just ask questions and then indulge your love of honor by refuting the answers. You know very well it is easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say the just is. And don’t tell me it is the right, the beneficial, the profitable, the gainful, or [d] the advantageous, but tell me clearly and exactly what you mean. For I won’t accept such nonsense from you.

His words startled me and, looking at him, I was afraid. And I think if I had not seen him before he looked at me, I would have been dumbstruck.⁴ But as it was, I happened to look at him just as he began to be exasperated by our argument, so I was able to answer; and trembling a little, [e] I said:

Do not be too hard on us, Thrasymachus. If Polemarchus and I made an error in our investigation of the accounts, you may be sure we did so involuntarily. If we were searching for gold, we would never voluntarily give way to each other, if by doing so we would destroy our chance of finding it. So do not think that in searching for justice, a thing more honorable than a large quantity of gold, we would foolishly give way to one another or be less than completely serious about finding it. You surely must not think that, my friend, but rather—as I do—that we are incapable of finding it. Hence it is surely far more appropriate for us to be pitied by you clever people than to be given rough treatment. [337a]

When he heard that, he gave a loud sarcastic laugh:

By Heracles! That is Socrates’ usual irony for you! I knew this would happen. I even told these others earlier that you would be unwilling to answer, that you would be ironic and do anything rather than give an answer, if someone questioned you.

SOCRATES: That is because you are a wise fellow, Thrasymachus. You knew very well if you ask someone how much twelve is, and in putting the question you warn him, “Don’t tell me, man, that twelve is [b] twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three; for I won’t accept such nonsense from you”—it was obvious to you, I imagine, that no one could respond to a person who inquired in that way. But suppose he said to you: “What do you mean, Thrasymachus; am I not to give any of the answers you mention, not even if twelve happens to be one of those things? You are amazing. Do you want me to say something other than the truth? Or do you mean something else?” What answer would you give him? [c]

SOCRATES: Why shouldn’t I? But even if they are not alike, yet seem so to the person you asked, do you think he is any less likely to give the answer that seems right to him, whether we forbid him to do so or not?

THRASYMACHUS: Is that what you are going to do, give one of the forbidden answers?

SOCRATES: I would not be surprised—provided it is the one that seems right to me after I have investigated the matter.

THRASYMACHUS: What if I show you another answer about justice, one that is different from all these and better than any of them? What penalty would [d] you deserve then?

SOCRATES: The very one that is appropriate for someone who does not know—what else? And what is appropriate is to learn from the one who does know. That, therefore, is what I deserve to suffer.

THRASYMACHUS: What a pleasant fellow you are! But in addition to learning, you must pay money.

GLAUCON: He has it already. If it is a matter of money, speak, Thrasymachus. We will all contribute for Socrates.

THRASYMACHUS: Oh yes, sure, so that Socrates can carry on as usual: he gives no answer himself, [e] and if someone else does, he takes up his account and refutes it.

SOCRATES: How can someone give an answer, my excellent man, when, first of all, he does not know and does not claim to know, and then, even if he does have some opinion about the matter, is forbidden by no ordinary man to express any of the things he thinks? No, it is much more appropriate for you to answer, since you say you do know and can tell us. [338a] Don’t be obstinate. Give your answer as a favor to me and do not begrudge your teaching to Glaucon and the others.

While I was saying this, Glaucon and the others begged him to do as I asked. Thrasymachus clearly wanted to speak in order to win a good reputation, since he thought he had a very good answer. But he pretended to want to win a victory at my expense by having me do the answering. However, he agreed in the end, and then said:

That is Socrates’ wisdom for you: he himself isn’t [b] willing to teach but goes around learning from others and isn’t even grateful to them.

SOCRATES: When you say I learn from others, you are right, Thrasymachus; but when you say I do not give thanks, you are wrong. I give as much as I can. But I can give only praise, since I have no money. And just how enthusiastically I give it, when someone seems to me to speak well, you will know as soon as you have answered, since I think you will speak well.

THRASYMACHUS: Listen, then. I say justice is nothing other than what is advantageous for the stronger. [c] Well, why don’t you praise me? No, you are unwilling.

SOCRATES: First, I must understand what you mean. For, as things stand, I do not. What is advantageous for the stronger, you say, is just. What on earth do you mean, Thrasymachus? Surely you do not mean something like this: Polydamas, the pancratist, is stronger than we are. Beef is advantageous for his body. So, this food is also both advantageous and just for us who are weaker than he? [d]

THRASYMACHUS: You disgust me, Socrates. You interpret my account in the way that does it the most evil.

SOCRATES: That’s not it at all, my very good man; I only want you to make your meaning clearer.

THRASYMACHUS: Don’t you know, then, that some cities are ruled by a tyranny, some by a democracy, and some by an aristocracy?

THRASYMACHUS: And each type of rule makes laws that are advantageous for itself: democracy makes [e] democratic ones, tyranny tyrannical ones, and so on with the others. And by so legislating, each declares that what is just for its subjects is what is advantageous for itself—the ruler—and it punishes anyone who deviates from this as lawless and unjust. That, Socrates, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities: what is advantageous for the established rule. Since the established rule is surely stronger, anyone who [339a] does the rational calculation correctly will conclude that the just is the same everywhere—what is advantageous for the stronger.

SOCRATES: Now I see what you mean. Whether it is true or not, I will try to find out. But you yourself have answered that what is just is what is advantageous, Thrasymachus, whereas you forbade me to answer that. True, you have added for the stronger to it.

SOCRATES: It isn’t clear yet whether it is significant. What is clear is that we must investigate whether or not it is true. I agree that what is just is something advantageous. But you add for the stronger. I do not know about that. We will have to look into it.

SOCRATES: That is just what I am going to do. Tell me, then, you also claim, don’t you, that it is just to obey the rulers?

SOCRATES: And are the rulers in each city infallible, or are they liable to error? [c]

SOCRATES: So, when they attempt to make laws, they make some correctly, others incorrectly?

SOCRATES: And a law is correct if it prescribes what is advantageous for the rulers themselves, and incorrect if it prescribes what is disadvantageous for them? Is that what you mean?

SOCRATES: And whatever laws the rulers make must be obeyed by their subjects, and that is what is just?

SOCRATES: According to your account, then, it isn’t only just to do what is advantageous for the [d] stronger, but also the opposite: what is not advantageous.

SOCRATES: The same as you, I think. But let’s examine it more closely. Haven’t we agreed that the rulers are sometimes in error as to what is best for themselves when they give orders to their subjects, and yet that it is just for their subjects to do whatever their rulers order? Wasn’t that agreed?

SOCRATES: You will also have to suppose, then, that you have agreed that it is just to do what is [e] disadvantageous for the rulers and those who are stronger, whenever they unintentionally order what is bad for themselves. But you say, too, that it is just for the others to obey the orders the rulers gave. You are very wise, Thrasymachus, but doesn’t it necessarily follow that it is just to do the opposite of what you said, since the weaker are then ordered to do what is disadvantageous for the stronger?

POLEMARCHUS: Who needs a witness? Thrasymachus himself agrees that the rulers sometimes issue orders that are bad for them, and that it is just for the others to obey them.

CLITOPHON: That, Polemarchus, is because Thrasymachus maintained that it is just to obey the orders of the rulers.

POLEMARCHUS: Yes, Clitophon, and he also maintained that what is advantageous for the stronger is just. And having maintained both principles, he [b] went on to agree that the stronger sometimes order the weaker, who are subject to them, to do things that are disadvantageous for the stronger themselves. From these agreements it follows that what is advantageous for the stronger is no more just than what is not advantageous.

CLITOPHON: But what he meant by what is advantageous for the stronger is what the stronger believes to be advantageous for him. That is what he maintained the weaker must do, and that is what he maintained is what is just.

SOCRATES: It makes no difference, Polemarchus. If Thrasymachus wants to put it that way now, let’s [c] accept it. But tell me, Thrasymachus, is that what you intended to say, that what is just is what the stronger believes to be advantageous for him, whether it is in fact advantageous for him or not? Is that what we are to say you mean?

THRASYMACHUS: Not at all. Do you think I would call someone who is in error stronger at the very moment he errs?

SOCRATES: I did think you meant that, when you agreed that the rulers are not infallible but sometimes make errors.

THRASYMACHUS: That is because you are a quibbler in arguments, Socrates. I mean, when someone [d] makes an error in the treatment of patients, do you call him a doctor in virtue of the fact that he made that very error? Or, when someone makes an error in calculating, do you call him an accountant in virtue of the fact that he made that very error in calculation? I think we express ourselves in words that, taken literally, do say that a doctor is in error, or an accountant, or a grammarian. But each of these, to the extent that he is what we call him, never makes errors, so that, according to the precise account (and [e] you are a stickler for precise accounts), no craftsman ever makes errors. It is when his knowledge fails him that he makes an error, and, in virtue of the fact that he made that error, he is no craftsman. No craftsman, wise man, or ruler makes an error at the moment when he is ruling, even though everyone will say that a physician or a ruler makes errors. It is in this loose way that you must also take the answer I gave just now. But the most precise answer is this: a ruler, to the extent that he is a ruler, never makes errors and unerringly decrees what is best for himself, and that [341a] is what his subject must do. Thus, as I said from the first, it is just to do what is advantageous for the stronger.

SOCRATES: And you think that I asked the questions I did in a premeditated attempt to do you evil in the argument?

THRASYMACHUS: I am certain of it. But it won’t do you any good. You will never be able to do me evil by covert means, and without them, you will [b] never be able to overpower me by argument.

SOCRATES: Bless you, Thrasymachus; I would not so much as try! But to prevent this sort of confusion from happening to us again, would you define whether you mean the ruler and stronger in the ordinary sense or in what you were just now calling the precise sense, when you say that it is just for the weaker to do what is advantageous for him, since he is the stronger?

THRASYMACHUS: I mean the ruler in the most precise sense. Now do that evil, if you can, and practice your quibbling on it—I ask no favors. But you will find there is nothing you can do.

SOCRATES: Do you think that I am crazy enough to try to shave a lion⁵ and quibble with Thrasymachus? [c]

THRASYMACHUS: Well, you certainly tried just now, although you were a good-for-nothing at it, too!

SOCRATES: That’s enough of that! Tell me: is a doctor—in the precise sense, the one you mentioned before—a moneymaker or someone who treats the sick? Tell me about the one who is really a doctor.

SOCRATES: What about a ship’s captain? Is the true captain a ruler of sailors, or a sailor?

SOCRATES: In other words, we should not take any account of the fact that he sails in a ship, and [d] he should not be called a sailor for that reason. For it is not because he is sailing that he is called a ship’s captain, but because of the craft he practices and his rule over sailors?

SOCRATES: And isn’t it also the case that the natural aim of the craft is to consider and provide what is advantageous for each?

SOCRATES: And is anything advantageous for each of the crafts themselves besides being as perfect as possible?

SOCRATES: It is like this: suppose you asked me whether it is satisfactory for a body to be a body, or whether it needs something else. I would answer, “Of course it needs something. In fact, that is why the craft of medicine has been discovered—because a body is deficient and it is not satisfactory for it to be like that. To provide what is advantageous, that is what the craft was developed for.” Do you think I am speaking correctly in saying this, or not?

SOCRATES: What about medicine itself? Is it deficient? Does a craft need some further virtue, as the [342a] eyes are in need of sight and the ears of hearing, so that another craft is needed to consider and provide what is advantageous for them? Does a craft have some similar deficiency itself, so that each craft needs another to consider what is advantageous for it? And does the craft that does the considering need still another, and so on without end? Or does each consider by itself what is advantageous for it? Does it need neither itself nor another craft to consider what—in [b] light of its own deficiency—is advantageous for it? Indeed, is there no deficiency or error in any craft? And is it inappropriate for any craft to consider what is advantageous for anything besides that with which it deals? And since it is itself correct, is it without fault or impurity so long as it is wholly and precisely the craft it is? Consider this with that precision of language you mentioned. Is it so or not?

SOCRATES: Doesn’t it follow that medicine does not consider what is advantageous for medicine, but for the body? [c]

SOCRATES: And horse breeding does not consider what is advantageous for horse breeding, but for horses? Indeed, no other craft considers what is advantageous for itself—since it has no further needs—but what is advantageous for that with which it deals?

SOCRATES: Now surely, Thrasymachus, the various crafts rule over and are stronger than that with which they deal?

SOCRATES: So no kind of knowledge considers or enjoins what is advantageous for itself, but what is advantageous for the weaker, which is subject to it. [d]

He finally agreed to this too, although he tried to fight it. When he had agreed, however, I said:

Surely then, no doctor, to the extent that he is a doctor, considers or enjoins what is advantageous for himself, but what is advantageous for his patient? For we agreed that a doctor, in the precise sense, is a ruler of bodies, not a moneymaker. Isn’t that what we agreed?

SOCRATES: So a ship’s captain, in the precise sense, is a ruler of sailors, not a sailor?

SOCRATES: Doesn’t it follow that a ship’s captain and ruler won’t consider and enjoin what is advantageous for a captain, but what is advantageous for a sailor and his subject?

SOCRATES: So then, Thrasymachus, no one in any position of rule, to the extent that he is a ruler, considers or enjoins what is advantageous for himself, but what is advantageous for his subject—that on which he practices his craft. It is to his subject and what is advantageous and proper for it that he looks, and everything he says and does, he says and does for it.

When we reached this point in the argument and it was clear to all that his account of justice [343a] had turned into its opposite, instead of answering, Thrasymachus said:

SOCRATES: What is that? Shouldn’t you be giving answers rather than asking such things?

THRASYMACHUS: Because she is letting you run around sniveling and doesn’t wipe your nose when you need it, since it is her fault that you do not know the difference between sheep and shepherds.

THRASYMACHUS: You think that shepherds and cowherds consider what is good for their sheep and [b] cattle, and fatten them and take care of them with some aim in mind other than what is good for their master and themselves. Moreover, you believe that rulers in cities—true rulers, that is—think about their subjects in a different way than one does about sheep, and that what they consider night and day is something other than what is advantageous for themselves. You are so far from understanding justice and what [c] is just, and injustice and what is unjust, that you do not realize that justice is really the good of another, what is advantageous for the stronger and the ruler, and harmful to the one who obeys and serves. Injustice is the opposite, it rules those simpleminded—for that is what they really are—just people, and the ones it rules do what is advantageous for the other who is stronger; and they make the one they serve happy, but they do not make themselves the least bit happy.

You must consider it as follows, Socrates, or you [d] will be the most naïve of all: a just man must always get less than does an unjust one. First, in their contracts with one another, when a just man is partner to an unjust, you will never find, when the partnership ends, that the just one gets more than the unjust, but less. Second, in matters relating to the city, when taxes are to be paid, a just man pays more on an equal amount of property, an unjust one less; but when the city is giving out refunds, a just man gets nothing while an unjust one makes a large profit. Finally, when each of them holds political office, a [e] just person—even if he is not penalized in other ways—finds that his private affairs deteriorate more because he has to neglect them, that he gains no advantage from the public purse because of his justice, and that he is hated by his relatives and acquaintances because he is unwilling to do them an unjust favor. The opposite is true of an unjust man in every respect. I mean, of course, the person I described before: the man of great power who does better than everyone else. He is the one you should consider if you want to figure out how much [344a] more advantageous it is for the individual to be unjust than just. You will understand this most easily if you turn your thoughts to injustice of the most complete sort, the sort that makes those who do injustice happiest, and those who suffer it—those who are unwilling to do injustice—most wretched. The sort I mean is tyranny, because it uses both covert means and force to appropriate the property of others—whether it is sacred or secular, public or private—not little by little, but all at once. If someone commits a part of this sort of injustice and gets caught, he is punished and [b] greatly reproached—temple robbers,⁶ kidnappers, housebreakers, robbers, and thieves are what these partly unjust people are called when they commit those harms. When someone appropriates the possessions of the citizens, on the other hand, and then kidnaps and enslaves the possessors as well, instead of these shameful names he is called happy and blessed: not only by the citizens themselves, but even [c] by all who learn that he has committed the whole of injustice. For it is not the fear of doing injustice, but of suffering it, that elicits the reproaches of those who revile injustice.

So you see, Socrates, injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterful than justice. And, as I said from the beginning, justice is what is advantageous for the stronger, while injustice is profitable and advantageous for oneself.

Having, like a bath attendant, emptied this great flood of words into our ears all at once, Thrasymachus [d] was thinking of leaving. But those present wouldn’t let him. They made him stay and give an account of what he had said. And I myself was particularly insistent:

You are marvelous, Thrasymachus; after hurling such a speech at us, you surely cannot be thinking of leaving before you have adequately instructed us—or learned yourself—whether you are right or not. Or do you think it is a trivial matter you are trying [e] to determine, and not rather a way of life—the one that would make living life that way most profitable for each of us?

SOCRATES: Either that, or you care nothing for us and so are not worried about whether we will live better or worse lives because of our ignorance of what you claim to know. No, be a good fellow and show some willingness to teach us—you won’t do badly for yourself if you help a group as large as ours. For my [345a] own part, I will tell you that I am not persuaded. I do not believe that injustice is more profitable than justice, not even if you should give it full scope to do what it wants. Suppose, my good fellow, that there is an unjust person, and suppose he does have the power to do injustice, whether by covert means or open warfare; nonetheless, he does not persuade me that injustice is more profitable than justice. Perhaps someone here besides myself feels the same as I do. [b] So, blessed though you are, you are going to have to fully persuade us that we are wrong to value justice more highly than injustice in deliberating.

THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to persuade you? If you are not persuaded by what I said just now, what more can I do? Am I to take my argument and pour it into your very soul?

SOCRATES: No, by Zeus, do not do that! But first, stick to what you have said, or, if you change your position, do it openly and do not try to deceive us. You see, Thrasymachus, having defined the true doctor—to continue examining the things you said before—you did not consider it necessary to maintain [c] the same level of exactness when you later turned to the true shepherd. You do not think a shepherd—to the extent that he is a shepherd—fattens sheep with the aim of doing what is best for them. But you think that, like a guest about to be entertained at a feast, his aim is to eat well or to make a future sale—as if he were a moneymaker rather than a shepherd. [d] But of course, the only concern of the craft of shepherding is to provide what is best for that with which it deals, since it itself is adequately provided with all it needs to be at its best, as we know, when it does not fall short in any way of being the craft of shepherding. That is why I, at any rate, thought it necessary for us to agree before that every kind of rule—to the extent that it is a kind of rule—does not seek anything other than what is best for the thing it rules and cares for, and this is true both in political and in private rule. But do you think that those who [e] rule cities—the ones who are truly rulers—rule willingly?

SOCRATES: But, Thrasymachus, don’t you realize that in other kinds of rule there is no willing ruler? On the contrary, they demand to be paid on the assumption that their ruling will benefit not themselves, but their subjects. For tell me, don’t we say that each craft differs from every other in what it is [346a] capable of doing? Blessed though you are, please don’t answer contrary to your belief, so that we can come to some definite conclusion.

SOCRATES: And doesn’t each craft provide us with a particular benefit, different from the others? For example, medicine provides us with health, captaincy with safety at sea, and so on with the others?

SOCRATES: And doesn’t wage-earning provide us with wages, since that is what it is capable of doing? Or [b] would you call medicine the same craft as captaincy? Indeed, if you want to define matters precisely, as you proposed, even if someone who is a ship’s captain becomes healthy because what is advantageous for him is sailing on the sea, you would not for that reason call what he does medicine, would you?

SOCRATES: Nor would you call wage-earning medicine, even if someone becomes healthy while earning wages?

SOCRATES: Nor would you call medicine wage-earning, even if someone earns pay while healing?

SOCRATES: We are agreed then, aren’t we, that each craft brings its own special benefit?

SOCRATES: So whatever benefit all craftsmen jointly receive must clearly derive from their joint practice of some additional craft that is the same for each of them.

SOCRATES: And we say that the additional craft in question, which benefits the craftsmen by earning them wages, is the craft of wage-earning?

SOCRATES: Then this very benefit, receiving wages, is not provided to each of them by his own craft. On the contrary, if we are to examine the matter [d] precisely, medicine provides health and wage-earning provides a wage; house-building provides a house, and wage-earning, which accompanies it, provides a wage; and so on with the other crafts. Each of them does its own work and benefits that with which it deals. So, wages aside, is there any benefit that craftsmen get from their craft?

SOCRATES: Then, it is clear now, Thrasymachus, that no type of craft or rule provides what is beneficial for itself; but, as we have been saying for some time, it provides and enjoins what is beneficial for its subject, and aims at what is advantageous for it—the weaker, not the stronger. That is why I said just now, my dear Thrasymachus, that no one chooses to rule voluntarily and take other people’s troubles in hand and straighten them out, but each asks for wages. You see, anyone who is going to practice his type of craft well never does or enjoins what is best for himself—[347a] at least not when he is acting as his craft prescribes—but what is best for his subject. It is because of this, it seems, that wages must be provided to a person if he is going to be willing to rule, whether they are in the form of money or honor or a penalty if he refuses.

GLAUCON: What do you mean, Socrates? I am familiar with the first two kinds of wages, but I do not understand what penalty you mean, or how you can call it a wage.

SOCRATES: Then you do not understand the sort of wages for which the best people rule, when they are willing to rule. Don’t you know that those who love honor and those who love money are despised, [b] and rightly so?

SOCRATES: Well, then, that is why good people won’t be willing to rule for the sake of money or honor. You see, if they are paid wages openly for ruling, they will be called hirelings, and if they take them covertly as the fruits of their rule, they will be called thieves. On the other hand, they won’t rule for the sake of honor either, since they are not ambitious honor-lovers. So, if they are going to be willing to rule, [c] some compulsion or punishment must be brought to bear on them—that is probably why wanting to rule when one does not have to is thought to be shameful. Now, the greatest punishment for being unwilling to rule is being ruled by someone worse than oneself. And I think it is fear of that that makes good people rule when they do rule. They approach ruling, not as though they were going to do something good or as though they were going to enjoy themselves in it, but as something necessary, since it cannot be entrusted to anyone better than—or even as good as—[d] themselves. In a city of good men, if it came into being, the citizens would fight in order not to rule, just as they now do in order to rule. There it would be quite clear that anyone who is really and truly a ruler does not naturally seek what is advantageous for himself, but what is so for his subject. As a result, anyone with any sense would prefer to be benefited by another than to go to the trouble of benefiting him. So I cannot at all agree with Thrasymachus that justice is what is advantageous for the stronger. But [e] we will look further into that another time. What Thrasymachus is now saying—that the life of an unjust person is better than that of a just one—seems to be of far greater importance. Which life would you choose, Glaucon? And which of our views do you think is closer to the truth?

SOCRATES: Did you hear all the good things Thrasymachus attributed a moment ago to the [348a] unjust man?

SOCRATES: Then do you want us to persuade him, if we can find a way, that what he says is not true?

SOCRATES: Well, if we oppose him with a speech parallel to his speech enumerating in turn the many good things that come from being just, and he replies, and then we do, we will have to count and measure the good things mentioned on each side, and we will need a jury to decide the case. But if, on the other [b] hand, we investigate the question, as we have been doing, by seeking agreement with each other, we ourselves can be both jury and advocates at once.

SOCRATES: Come on then, Thrasymachus, answer us from the beginning. You say, don’t you, that complete injustice is more profitable than complete justice?

SOCRATES: Well, then, what do you say about this? Do you call one of the two a virtue and the other a vice?

THRASYMACHUS: Is that likely, sweetest one, when I say that injustice is profitable and justice is not?

THRASYMACHUS: Yes, if they do complete injustice and can bring cities and whole nations under their power. Perhaps, you thought I meant pickpockets? Not that such crimes aren’t also profitable, if they are not found out. But they are not worth discussing by comparison to what I described.

SOCRATES: Yes, I am not unaware of what you mean. But this did surprise me: that you include [e] injustice with virtue and wisdom, and justice with their opposites.

SOCRATES: That is now a harder problem, comrade, and it is not easy to know what to say in response. If you had declared that injustice is more profitable, but agreed that it is a vice or shameful, as some others do, we could be discussing the matter on the basis of conventional views. But now, obviously, you will say that injustice is fine and strong and apply to it all the attributes we used to apply to justice, since you [349a] dare to include it with virtue and wisdom.

SOCRATES: All the same, we must not shrink from pursuing the argument and looking into this, just as long as I take you to be saying what you really think. You see, I believe that you really are not joking now, Thrasymachus, but saying what you believe to be the truth.

THRASYMACHUS: What difference does it make to you, whether I believe it or not? Isn’t it my account you are supposed to be refuting?

SOCRATES: It makes no difference. But here is a further question I would like you to try to answer: do you think that a just person wants to do better than [b] another just person?

THRASYMACHUS: Not at all. Otherwise, he would not be the civilized and naïve person he actually is.

SOCRATES: And does he claim that he deserves to do better than an unjust person and believe that it is just for him to do so, or doesn’t he believe that?

THRASYMACHUS: He would want to do better than him, and he would claim to deserve to do so, but he would not be able.

SOCRATES: That is not what I am asking, but whether a just person wants, and claims to deserve, to do better than an unjust person, but not than a [c] just one?

SOCRATES: What about an unjust person? Does he claim that he deserves to do better than a just person or a just action?

THRASYMACHUS: Of course he does; he thinks he deserves to do better than everyone.

SOCRATES: Then will an unjust person also do better than an unjust person or an unjust action, and will he strive to get the most he can for himself from everyone?

SOCRATES: Then let’s put it this way: a just person does not do better than someone like himself, but someone unlike himself, whereas an unjust person does better than those who are like and those who are unlike him. [d]

SOCRATES: So isn’t an unjust person also like a wise and good person, while the just person is not?

THRASYMACHUS: Of course. How could he fail to be like people who have such qualities, when he has them himself? But the unjust person is not like them.

SOCRATES: All right, Thrasymachus. Do you call one person musical and another non-musical? [e]

SOCRATES: And in the things in which he is wise, he is good; and in the things in which he is not wise, he is bad?

SOCRATES: Do you think, then, Thrasymachus, that a man who is a musician, when he is tuning his lyre and tightening and loosening the strings, wants to do better than another musician, and does he claim that that is what he deserves?

SOCRATES: What about a doctor? When he is prescribing food and drink, does he want to do better [350a] than another doctor or than medical practice?

SOCRATES: In any branch of knowledge or ignorance, do you think that a knowledgeable person would intentionally try to take more for himself than another knowledgeable person, or to do or say more, and not rather exactly what the one like himself would do in the same situation?

SOCRATES: And what about an ignorant person? Doesn’t he want to do better than both a knowledgeable person and an ignorant one? [b]

SOCRATES: So, a good and wise person does not want to do better than someone like himself, but someone both unlike and opposite to him.

SOCRATES: But a bad and ignorant person wants to do better than both his like and his opposite.

SOCRATES: Well, Thrasymachus, we found that an unjust person tries to do better than those like him and those unlike him. Didn’t you say that?

SOCRATES: And that a just person won’t do better than those like him, but those unlike him? [c]

SOCRATES: Then a just person is like a wise and good person, and an unjust person is like an ignorant and bad one.

SOCRATES: Moreover, we agreed that each has the qualities of the one he resembles.

SOCRATES: A just person has turned out to be good and wise, then, and an unjust one ignorant and bad.

Thrasymachus agreed to all this, not easily as I am telling it, but reluctantly, with toil, trouble, [d] and—since it was summer—a quantity of sweat that was amazing to behold. And then I saw something I had never seen before—Thrasymachus blushing. But in any case, after we had agreed that justice is virtue and wisdom and that injustice is vice and ignorance, I said:

All right, let’s take that as established. But we also said that injustice is a strong thing, or don’t you remember that, Thrasymachus?

THRASYMACHUS: I remember. But I am not satisfied with what you are now saying. I could make a speech about it, but if I did, I know that you would say I was engaging in demagoguery. So, either allow me to say as much as I want to say or, if you want [e] to keep on asking questions, go ahead and ask them, and I shall say to you—as one does to old women telling stories—“All right,” and nod or shake my head.

THRASYMACHUS: Then I will answer to please you, since you won’t let me make a speech. What else do you want?

SOCRATES: Nothing, by Zeus. But if that is what you are going to do, do it, and I will ask the questions.

SOCRATES: All right, I will ask precisely what I asked before, so that we may proceed in an orderly fashion with our argument about what sort of thing justice is, as opposed to injustice. For it was claimed, [351a] I believe, that injustice is stronger and more powerful than justice. But now, if justice is indeed wisdom and virtue, it will be easy to show, I suppose, that it is stronger than injustice, since injustice is ignorance—no one could now be ignorant of that. However, I, at any rate, do not want to consider the matter in such simple terms, Thrasymachus, but to look into it in some such way as this: would you say that a city may be unjust and try to enslave other cities unjustly, [b] and succeed at enslaving them, and hold them in subjection which it enslaved in the past?

THRASYMACHUS: Of course. And that is what the best city will especially do, the one that is most completely unjust.

SOCRATES: I understand that that is your argument, but the point I want to examine is this: will the city that becomes stronger than another achieve this power without justice, or will it need the help of justice?

THRASYMACHUS: If what you said a moment ago stands, and justice is wisdom, it will need the help [c] of justice; but if things are as I stated, it will need the help of injustice.

SOCRATES: I am impressed, Thrasymachus, that you are not merely nodding or shaking your head, but giving these fine answers.

SOCRATES: You are doing well at it, too. So please me some more by answering this question: do you think that a city, an army, a band of robbers or thieves, or any other group with a common unjust purpose would be able to achieve it if its members were unjust to each other?

SOCRATES: Because, Thrasymachus, injustice causes factions, hatreds, and quarrels among them, while justice brings friendship and a sense of common purpose. Isn’t that so?

SOCRATES: You are still doing well on that front, which is very good of you. So tell me this: if the function of injustice is to produce hatred wherever it occurs, then whenever it arises, whether among free men or slaves, won’t it make them hate one another, form factions, and be unable to achieve any common purpose? [e]

SOCRATES: What if it arises between two people? Won’t they be at odds, hate each other, and be enemies both to one another and to just people?

SOCRATES: Well, then, my amazing fellow, if injustice arises within a single individual, will it lose its power or will it retain it undiminished?

SOCRATES: Apparently, then, its power is such that whenever it comes to exist in something—whether in a city, a family, an army, or anything else whatsoever—it makes that thing, first of all, incapable of acting in concert with itself, because of the faction [352a] and difference it creates; and, second of all, an enemy to itself, and to what is in every way its opposite: namely, justice. Isn’t that so?

SOCRATES: And in a single individual, too, I presume, it will produce the very same effects that it is in its nature to produce. First, it will make him incapable of acting because of inner faction and not being of one mind with himself; second, it will make him his own enemy as well as the enemy of just people. Isn’t that right?

SOCRATES: Then an unjust person will also be an enemy of the gods, Thrasymachus, while a just person [b] will be their friend?

THRASYMACHUS: Feast yourself confidently on the argument! Don’t worry, I won’t oppose you, so as not to arouse the enmity of our friends here.

SOCRATES: Come on, then, complete the banquet for me by continuing to answer as you have been doing now. We have shown that just people are wiser and better and more capable of acting, while unjust ones are not even able to act together. For whenever we speak of men who are unjust acting [c] together to effectively achieve a common goal, what we say is not altogether true. They would never have been able to keep their hands off each other if they were completely unjust. But clearly there must have been some sort of justice in them that at least prevented them from doing injustice among themselves at the same time as they were doing it to others. And it was this that enabled them to achieve what they did. When they started doing unjust things, they were only halfway corrupted by their injustice. For those who are wholly bad and completely unjust are also completely incapable of acting. All this I now see to be the truth, and not what you first maintained. However, we must now examine the question, as we [d] proposed to do before,⁸ of whether just people also live better and are happier than unjust ones. I think it is clear even now from what we have said that this is so, but we must consider it further. After all, the argument concerns no ordinary topic, but the way we ought to live.

SOCRATES: I will. Tell me, do you think there is such a thing as the function of a horse?

SOCRATES: And would you take the function of [e] a horse or of anything else to be that which one can do only with it, or best with it?

SOCRATES: Let me put it this way: is it possible for you to see with anything except eyes?

SOCRATES: Would it be right, then, for us to say that these things are their functions?

SOCRATES: Again, couldn’t you use a dagger, a carving knife, or lots of other things in pruning a vine? [353a]

SOCRATES: But nothing would do a better job than a pruning knife designed for the purpose?

SOCRATES: Now I think you will understand better what I was asking earlier when I asked whether the function of each thing is what it alone can do or what it can do better than anything else.

THRASYMACHUS: I do understand, and I think that that is the function of anything. [b]

SOCRATES: All right. Does there seem to you also to be a virtue for each thing to which some function is assigned? Let’s go over the same ground again. We say that eyes have some function?

SOCRATES: Well, then. Could eyes perform their function well if they lacked their proper virtue but [c] had the vice instead?

THRASYMACHUS: How could they? For don’t you mean if they had blindness instead of sight?

SOCRATES: Whatever their virtue is. You see, I am not now asking about that, but about whether it is by means of their own proper virtue that their function performs the things it performs well, and by means of vice badly?

SOCRATES: So, if ears are deprived of their own virtue, they too perform their function badly?

SOCRATES: Come on, then, and let’s next consider this: does the soul have some function that you could not perform with anything else—for example, taking care of things, ruling, deliberating, and all other such things? Is there anything else besides a soul to which you could rightly assign these and say that they are special to it?

SOCRATES: Then what about living? Don’t we say that it is a function of a soul?

SOCRATES: Will a soul ever perform its functions well, then, Thrasymachus, if it is deprived of its own [e] proper virtue, or is that impossible?

SOCRATES: It is necessary, then, that a bad soul rules and takes care of things badly, and that a good soul does all these things well?

SOCRATES: Now, didn’t we agree that justice is a soul’s virtue and injustice its vice?

SOCRATES: And surely anyone who lives well is blessed and happy, and anyone who does not is the [354a] opposite.

SOCRATES: So then, blessed Thrasymachus, injustice is never more profitable than justice.

SOCRATES: Given by you, Thrasymachus, after you became gentle with me and ceased to be difficult. Yet I have not had a good banquet. But that is my fault, not yours. I seem to have behaved like those [b] gluttons who snatch at every dish that passes and taste it before having properly savored the preceding one. Before finding the first thing we inquired about—namely, what justice is—I let that go, and turned to investigate whether it is a kind of vice and ignorance or a kind of wisdom and virtue. Then an argument came up about injustice being more profitable than justice, and I could not refrain from abandoning the previous one and following up on it. Hence the result of the discussion, so far as I am concerned, is that I know nothing. For when I do not know what justice is, I will hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue [c] or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy.

SOCRATES’ NARRATION CONTINUES: When I had said this, I thought I had done with the discussion. But it all turned out to be only a prelude, [357a] as it were. You see, Glaucon, who is always very courageous in everything, refused on this occasion, too, to accept Thrasymachus’ capitulation. Instead, he said:

Do you want to seem to have persuaded us, Socrates, that it is better in every way to be just rather than unjust, or do you want to really persuade us of this? [b]

GLAUCON: Well, then, you certainly are not doing what you want. Tell me, do you think there is a sort of good we welcome, not because we desire its consequences, but because we welcome it for its own sake—enjoying, for example, and all the harmless pleasures from which nothing results afterward beyond enjoying having them?

GLAUCON: And is there a sort of good we love for its own sake, and also for the sake of its consequences—[c] Knowing, for example, and seeing, and being healthy? For we welcome such things, I imagine, on both counts.

GLAUCON: And do you also recognize a third kind of good, such as physical training, medical treatment when sick, medicine itself, or ways of making money generally? We would say that these are burdensome but beneficial to us, and we would not choose them for their own sake, but for the sake of their rewards [d] and other consequences.

SOCRATES: I myself put it in the finest one—the [358a] one that anyone who is going to be blessed with happiness must love both because of itself and because of its consequences.

GLAUCON: That is not what the masses think. On the contrary, they think it is of the burdensome kind: the one that must be practiced for the sake of the rewards and the popularity that are the consequences of a good reputation, but that is to be avoided as intrinsically burdensome.

SOCRATES: I know that is the general view. Thrasymachus has been faulting justice and praising injustice on these grounds for some time. But it seems that I am a slow learner.

GLAUCON: Come on, then, listen to what I have to say as well, and see whether you still have that problem. [b] You see, I think Thrasymachus gave up before he had to, as if he were a snake you had charmed. Yet, to my way of thinking, there was still no demonstration on either side. For I want to hear what justice and injustice are, and what power each has when it is just by itself in the soul. I want to leave out of account the rewards and the consequences of each of them.

So, if you agree, I will renew the argument of Thrasymachus. First, I will state what sort of thing people consider justice to be, and what its origins [c] are. Second, I will argue that all who practice it do so unwillingly, as something necessary, not as something good. Third, I will argue that they have good reason to act as they do. For the life of the unjust person is, they say, much better than that of the just one.

It isn’t, Socrates, that I believe any of that myself. I am perplexed, indeed, and my ears are deafened listening to Thrasymachus and countless others. But I have yet to hear anyone defend justice in the way I want, as being better than injustice. I want to hear [d] it praised on its own, and I think that I am most likely to learn this from you. That is why I am going to speak at length in praise of the unjust life: by doing so, I will be showing you the way I want to hear you praising justice and denouncing injustice. But see whether you want me to do what I am saying or not.

SOCRATES: I want it most of all. Indeed, what subject could a person with any sense enjoy talking and hearing about more often?

GLAUCON: Excellent sentiments. Now, listen to what I said I was going to discuss first—what justice [e] is like and what its origins are. People say, you see, that to do injustice is naturally good and to suffer injustice bad. But the badness of suffering it far exceeds the goodness of doing it. Hence, those who have done and suffered injustice and who have tasted both—the ones who lack the power to do it and avoid suffering it—decide that it is profitable to come to an agreement with each other neither to do injustice [359a] nor to suffer it. As a result, they begin to make laws and covenants; and what the law commands, they call lawful and just. That, they say, is the origin and very being of justice. It is in between the best and the worst. The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is in the middle between these two extremes. People love it, not because it is a good thing, but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity. Someone who has the power [b] to do it, however—someone who is a real man—would not make an agreement with anyone, neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. For him, that would be insanity. That is the nature of justice, according to the argument, Socrates, and those are its natural origins.

We can see most clearly that those who practice it do so unwillingly, because they lack the power to do injustice, if we imagine the following thought-experiment. Suppose we grant to the just and the unjust person the freedom to do whatever they like. [c] We can then follow both of them and see where their appetites would lead. And we will catch the just person red-handed, traveling the same road as the unjust one. The reason for this is the desire to do better than others. This is what every natural being naturally pursues as good. But by law and force, it is made to deviate from this path and honor equality.

They would especially have the freedom I am talking about if they had the power that the ancestor of Gyges of Lydia is said to have possessed. The story goes that he was a shepherd in the service of the ruler [d] of Lydia. There was a violent thunderstorm, and an earthquake broke open the ground and created a chasm at the place where he was tending his sheep. Seeing this, he was filled with amazement and went down into it. And there, in addition to many other amazing things of which we are told stories, he saw a hollow, bronze horse. There were windowlike openings in it and, peeping in, he saw a corpse, which seemed to be of more than human size, wearing nothing but a gold ring on its finger. He took off the [e] ring and came out of the chasm. He wore the ring at the usual monthly meeting of shepherds that reported to the king on the state of the flocks. And as he was sitting among the others, he happened to turn the setting of the ring toward himself, toward the inside of his hand. When he did this, he became invisible to those sitting near him, and they went on [360a] talking as if he had gone. He was amazed at this and, fingering the ring, he turned the setting outward again and became visible. So, he experimented with the ring to test whether it indeed had this power—and it did. If he turned the setting inward, he became invisible; if he turned it outward, he became visible again. As soon as he realized this, he arranged to become one of the messengers sent to report to the king. On arriving there, he seduced the king’s wife, attacked the king with her help, killed him, and in [b] this way took over the kingdom.

Let’s suppose, then, that there were two such rings, one worn by the just person, the other by the unjust. Now no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice, or bring himself to keep away from other people’s possessions and not touch them, when he could take whatever he wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into people’s houses and have sex with anyone he wished, kill or release from prison anyone he wished, and do all the [c] other things that would make him like a god among humans. And in so behaving, he would do no differently than the unjust person, but both would pursue the same course.

This, some would say, is strong evidence that no one is just willingly, but only when compelled. No one believes justice to be a good thing when it is kept private, since whenever either person thinks he can do injustice with impunity, he does it. Indeed, all men believe that injustice is far more profitable to themselves than is justice. And what they believe is [d] true, so the exponent of this argument will say. For someone who did not want to do injustice, given this sort of opportunity, and who did not touch other people’s property, would be thought most wretched and most foolish by everyone aware of the situation. Though, of course, they would praise him in public, deceiving each other for fear of suffering injustice. So much for my second topic.

As for decision itself about the life of the two we are discussing, if we contrast the extremes of justice [e] and injustice, we shall be able to make the decision correctly; but if we don’t, we won’t. What, then, is the contrast I have in mind? It is this: we will subtract nothing from the injustice of the unjust person, and nothing from the justice of the just one. On the contrary, we will take each to be perfect in his own pursuit. First, then, let the unjust person act like a clever craftsman. An eminent ship’s captain or doctor, for example, knows the difference between what his craft can and cannot do. He attempts the first but lets the second go by. And if he happens to slip, he [361a] can put things right. In the same way, if he is to be completely unjust, let the unjust person correctly attempt unjust acts and remain undetected. The one who is caught should be thought inept. For the extreme of injustice is to be believed to be just without actually being so. And our completely unjust person must be given complete injustice—nothing must be subtracted from it. We must allow that, while doing the greatest injustice, he has nonetheless provided himself with the greatest reputation for justice. If he does happen to slip up, he must be able to put it [b] right, either through his ability to speak persuasively if any of his unjust activities are discovered, or to use force if force is needed, because he is courageous and strong and has provided himself with wealth and friends.

Having hypothesized such a person, let’s now put the just man next to him in our argument—someone who is simple and noble and who, as Aeschylus says, does not want to be believed to be good, but to be so.¹ We must take away his reputation. For a reputation for justice would bring him honor and rewards, so that [c] it would not be clear whether he is being just for the sake of justice, or for the sake of those honors and rewards. We must strip him of everything except justice, and make his situation the opposite of the unjust person’s. Though he does no injustice, he must have the greatest reputation for it, so that he may be tested with regard to justice by seeing whether or not he can withstand a bad reputation and its consequences. Let him stay like that, unchanged, until he is dead—just, but all his life believed to be unjust. In this way, [d] both will reach the extremes, the one of justice and the other of injustice, and we will be able to judge which of them is happier.

SOCRATES: Whew ! My dear Glaucon, how vigorously you have scoured each of the men in our competition, just as you would a pair of statues for an art competition.

GLAUCON: I am doing the best I can. Since the two are as I have described, in any case, it should not be difficult to complete the account of the sort of life that awaits each of them, but it must be done. And if what I say sounds crude, Socrates, remember [e] that it is not I who speak, but those who praise injustice at the expense of justice. They will say that the just person in such circumstances will be whipped, stretched on a rack, chained, blinded with a red-hot iron, and, at the end, when he has suffered every sort of bad thing, he will be impaled, and will realize [362a] then that one should not want to be just, but to be believed to be just. Indeed, Aeschylus’ words are far more correctly applied to the unjust man. For people will say that it is really the unjust person who does not want to be believed to be unjust, but actually to be so, because he bases his practice on the truth about things and does not allow reputation to regulate his life. He is the one who “harvests a deep furrow in his mind, where wise counsels propagate.” First, he [b] rules his city because of his reputation for justice. Next, he marries into any family he wishes, gives his children in marriage to anyone he wishes, has contracts and partnerships with anyone he wants, and, besides benefiting himself in all these ways, he profits because he has no scruples about doing injustice. In any contest, public or private, he is the winner and does better than his enemies. And by doing better than them, he becomes wealthy, benefits his friends, and harms his enemies. He makes adequate sacrifices [c] to the gods and sets up magnificent offerings to them, and takes much better care of the gods—and, indeed, of the human beings he favors—than the just person. So he may reasonably expect that the gods, in turn, will love him more than the just person. That is why they say, Socrates, that gods and humans provide a better life for the unjust person than for the just one.

When Glaucon had said this, I had it in mind to respond, but his brother Adeimantus intervened: [d]

SOCRATES: Well, then, as the saying goes, a man’s brother must stand by him.² So if Glaucon has omitted something, you must help him. Though, for my part at any rate, what he has already said is quite enough to throw me to the canvas and make me incapable of coming to the aid of justice.

ADEIMANTUS: Nonsense. But listen to what more I have to say, as well. You see, in order to clarify what [e] Glaucon has in mind, we should also fully explore the arguments that are opposed to the ones he gave—those that praise justice and disparage injustice.

As you know, when fathers speak to their sons to give them advice, they say that one must be just, as do all those who have others in their charge. But they do not praise justice itself, only the good reputation [363a] it brings: the inducement they offer is that if we are reputed to be just, then, as a result of our reputation, we will get political offices, good marriages, and all the things that Glaucon recently said that the just man would get as a result of having a good reputation.

But these people have even more to say about the consequences of reputation. For by throwing in being well thought of by the gods, they have plenty of good things to talk about—all the ones the gods are said to give to those who are pious. For example, the noble Hesiod and Homer say such things. For Hesiod says that the gods make the oak trees “bear acorns at the [b] top, bees in the middle, and fleecy sheep heavy laden with wool” for those who are just, and tells of many other good things akin to these.³ And Homer says pretty much the same:

Musaeus and his son claim that the gods give just people even more exciting goods than these. In their account, they lead the just to Hades, seat them on couches, provide them with a symposium of pious people, crown them with wreaths, and make them spend all their time drinking—as if they thought eternal drunkenness was the finest wage of virtue. Others [d] stretch even further the wages that virtue receives from the gods. For they say that someone who is pious and keeps his promises leaves his children’s children and a whole race behind him.

In these and other similar ways, they praise justice. But the impious and unjust they bury in mud in Hades, and they force them to carry water in a sieve. They bring them into bad repute while they are still alive. And all those penalties that Glaucon gave to just people who are thought to be unjust, they give [e] to the unjust ones. But they have nothing else to say.

That, then, is the praise and blame given to each. But in addition, Socrates, there is another kind of argument about justice and injustice for you to consider—one that is used both by private individuals and by poets. With one voice they all chant the hymn [364a] that justice and temperance are fine things, but difficult and onerous, while intemperance and injustice are sweet and easy to acquire and are only shameful by repute and convention. They also say that unjust deeds are, for the most part, more profitable than just ones; and whereas they are perfectly willing to bestow public and private honors on bad people—provided they have wealth and other types of power—and to declare them to be happy, they dishonor and disregard those who happen to be in any way weak or poor, even though they admit that they are better than the others. [b]

But most amazing of all are the accounts they give of the gods and virtue, and how it is that the gods, too, assign misfortune and a bad life to many good people, and the opposite fate to their opposites. Begging priests and prophets go to the doors of rich people and persuade them that, through sacrifices and incantations, they have acquired a god-given power: if the rich person or any of his ancestors has committed [c] an injustice, they can fix it with pleasant rituals. And if he wishes to injure an enemy, he will be able to harm a just one or an unjust one alike at little cost, since by means of spells and enchantments they can persuade the gods to do their bidding.

And the poets are brought forward as witnesses to all these accounts. Some harp on the ease of vice, on the grounds that

and a road that is long, rough, and steep.⁵ Others quote Homer to bear witness that the gods can be influenced by humans, since he too said:

And they present a noisy throng of books by Musaeus and Orpheus—who are the offspring, they claim, of Selene and the Muses—on which they base their rituals. And they persuade not only private individuals, but whole cities, that there are in fact absolutions and purifications for unjust deeds. For the living, these consist of ritual sacrifices and pleasant games. But there are also special rites for the dead. These [365a] initiations, as they call them, free people from evils hereafter, while terrible things await those who have not performed the rituals.

With so many things of this sort, my dear Socrates, being said about virtue and vice, and about how human beings and gods honor them, what effect do we suppose they have on the souls of young people? I mean those who are naturally gifted and able to flit, so to speak, from one of these sayings to another and gather from them an impression of what sort of people they should be, and of how best to travel the road of life. He would surely ask himself Pindar’s question: [b] “Is it by justice or by crooked tricks that I will scale the higher wall,” and so live out my life surrounded by secure defenses? And he will answer: “As for what people say, they say that there is no advantage in my being just if I am not also thought just, whereas the troubles and penalties of being just are apparent; but the unjust person, who has secured for himself a reputation for justice, lives the life of a god. Since, then, ‘opinion forcibly overcomes truth,’ and ‘controls happiness,’ as the wise men say, I must surely turn [c] entirely to it.⁷ I should create an illusionist painting of virtue around me to deceive those who come near, but keep behind it the wise Archilochus’ greedy and cunning fox.”

“But surely,” someone will object, “it is not easy for evil to remain always hidden.” We will reply that nothing great is easy. And, in any case, if we are to be happy, we must go where the tracks of the arguments [d] lead. To remain undiscovered we will form secret societies and political clubs. And there are teachers of persuasion to make us clever in dealing with assemblies and law courts. Therefore, partly by persuasion, partly by force, we will contrive to do better than other people, without paying the penalty.

“But surely we cannot hide from the gods or overpower them by force!” Well, if the gods do not exist, or do not concern themselves with human affairs, why should we worry at all about hiding from them? On the other hand, if they do exist, and do care about us, we know nothing about them except what we [e] have learned from the laws and from the poets who give their genealogies. But these are the very people who tell us that the gods can be persuaded and influenced by sacrifices, gentle prayers, and offerings. Hence, we should believe them on both matters, or on neither. If we believe them, we should be unjust and offer sacrifices from the fruits of our injustice. For if we are just, our only gain is not to be punished [366a] by the gods, but we will lose the profits of our injustice. But if we are unjust, we will get those profits, and afterward we will entreat the gods and, persuading them, escape with our crimes and transgressions unpunished.

“But in Hades, won’t we pay the penalty for crimes committed here, either ourselves or through our children’s children?” “My friend,” the young man will say as he does his rational calculation, “mystery rites and the gods of absolution have great power. The greatest cities tell us this, as do those children of the gods who have become the gods’ poets and prophets [b] and reveal it to be so.”

On the basis of what further argument, then, should we choose justice over the greatest injustice? For if we possess such injustice with a false façade, we will do as we have a mind to among gods and humans, both while we are living and when we are dead, as both the masses and the eminent claim. So given all that has been said, Socrates, what device could get someone with any power—whether of mind, wealth, [c] body, or family—to be willing to honor justice, and not laugh aloud when he hears it praised?

Indeed, if anyone can show that what we have said is false, and has adequate knowledge that justice is best, what he feels for unjust people won’t be anger, but a large measure of forgiveness. After all, he knows that apart from someone of godlike character who is disgusted by doing injustice, or someone who has gained knowledge and avoids injustice for that reason, no one is just willingly. Through cowardice or old [d] age or some other weakness, people do indeed object to injustice. But it is obvious that they do so only because they lack the power to do injustice. For the first of them to gain that power is the first to do as much injustice as he can.

And all this has no other cause than the one that led to the whole of Glaucon’s and my argument with you, Socrates. “Socrates, you amazing man,” we said, “of all of you who claim to praise justice, beginning from the earliest heroes of old whose accounts survive [e] up to the men of the present day, not one has ever blamed injustice or praised justice except by mentioning the reputations, honors, and rewards that are their consequences. No one has ever adequately described what each does itself, through its own power, by its presence in the soul of the person who possesses it, even if it remains hidden from gods and humans. No one, whether in poetry or in private discussions, has adequately argued that injustice is the greatest evil a soul can have in it, and justice the greatest good. If all of you had spoken in this way and had tried to persuade us from our earliest youth, we would not now be guarding against one another’s injustice, but [367a] each would be his own best guardian, afraid that by doing injustice he would be living on intimate terms with the worst thing possible.”

That, Socrates, and probably other things in addition, are what Thrasymachus (or possibly someone else) might say in discussing justice and injustice—crudely inverting their power, in my view. But I—for I have no reason to hide anything from you—want to hear the opposite from you, and that is why I am speaking with all the force I can muster. So do not [b] merely demonstrate to us by argument that justice is stronger than injustice, but tell us what each one itself does, because of itself, to someone who possesses it, that makes the one bad and the other good. Follow Glaucon’s advice and do not take reputations into account.⁸ For if you do not deprive justice and injustice of their true reputations and attach false ones to them, we will say that it is not justice you are praising, but its reputation; nor injustice you are condemning, but its reputation; and that you are encouraging us [c] to be unjust but keep it secret. In that case, we will say that you agree with Thrasymachus that justice is the good of another, the advantage of the stronger, while injustice is one’s own advantage and profit, though not the advantage of the weaker.

You agree that justice is one of the greatest goods, the ones that are worth having for the sake of their consequences, but much more so for their own sake—such as seeing, hearing, knowing, being healthy, of course, and all the others that are genuine goods by [d] nature and not simply by repute. This is what I want you to praise about justice. How does it—because of its very self—benefit its possessor, and how does injustice harm him? Leave wages and reputations for others to praise.

I can put up with other people praising justice and blaming injustice in that way—extolling the reputations and wages of the one and denigrating those of the other. But I won’t put up with that from you (unless you insist on it). For you have spent your whole life investigating this and nothing else. So do not merely demonstrate to us by argument that justice [e] is stronger than injustice, but show what effect each one itself has, because of itself, on the person who has it—the one for good, the other for bad—whether it remains hidden from gods and human beings or not.

Now, I had always admired the natural characters of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but I was especially pleased when I heard what they had to say on this occasion, and I replied:

Sons of that man, Glaucon’s lover was not wrong to [368a] begin the elegy he wrote, when you distinguished yourselves at the battle of Megara, by addressing you as “Sons of Ariston, godlike family of a famous man.” That, my dear friends, was well said, in my view. For something altogether godlike must have affected you if you are not convinced that injustice is better than justice and yet can speak like that on its behalf. And I do believe that you really are unconvinced by your own words. I infer this from your general character, [b] since if I had only your arguments to go on, I would not trust you. The more I trust you, however, the more I am at a loss as to what to do. I do not see how I can be of help. Indeed, I believe I am incapable of it. And here is my evidence: I thought that what I said to Thrasymachus showed that justice is better than injustice, but you won’t accept that from me as a proof. On the other hand, I do not see how I can refuse my help. For I fear that it may even be impious to have breath in one’s body and the ability to speak, and yet stand idly by and not defend justice when it is being prosecuted. The best thing, then, is to give [c] justice any assistance I can.

Glaucon and the others begged me not to abandon the argument but to help in every way to track down what justice and injustice each is, and the truth about their respective benefits. So I told them what I had in mind:

The investigation we are undertaking is not an easy one, in my view, but requires keen eyesight. So, since we are not clever people, I think we should adopt [d] the method of investigation that we would use if, lacking keen eyesight, we were told to identify small letters from a distance, and then noticed that the same letters existed elsewhere in a larger size and on a larger surface. We would consider it a godsend, I think, to be allowed to identify the larger ones first, and then to examine the smaller ones to see whether they are really the same.

ADEIMANTUS: Of course we would. But how is this case similar to our investigation of justice in your view? [e]

SOCRATES: I will tell you. We say, don’t we, that there is a justice that belongs to a single man, and also one that belongs to a whole city?

SOCRATES: Perhaps, then, there will be more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to discern. So, if you are willing, let’s first find out what sort of thing justice is in cities, and afterward look for it in [369a] the individual, to see if the larger entity is similar in form to the smaller one.

SOCRATES: If, in our discussion, we could look at a city coming to be, wouldn’t we also see its justice coming to be, and its injustice as well?

SOCRATES: And once that process is completed, could we expect to find what we are looking for more easily?

SOCRATES: Do you think we should try to carry it out then? It is no small task, in my view. So, think it over.

SOCRATES: Well, then, a city comes to exist, I believe, because none of us is individually self-sufficient, but each has many needs he cannot satisfy. Or do you think that a city is founded on some other principle?

SOCRATES: Then because we have many needs, and because one of us calls on another out of one [c] need, and on a third out of a different need, we gather many into a single settlement as partners and helpers. And we call such a shared settlement a city. Isn’t that so?

SOCRATES: And if they share things with one another—if they give something to one another, or take something from one another—don’t they do so because each believes that this is better for himself?

SOCRATES: Come on, then, let’s, in our discussion, create a city from the beginning. But its real creator, it seems, will be our need.

SOCRATES: Now, the first and greatest of our needs is to provide food in order to sustain existence [d] and life.

SOCRATES: The second is for shelter, and the third is for clothes and things of that sort.

SOCRATES: Tell me, then, how will a city be able to provide all this? Won’t one person have to be a farmer, another a builder, and another a weaver? And shouldn’t we add a shoemaker to them, or someone else to take care of our bodily needs?

SOCRATES: A city with the barest necessities, then, would consist of four or five men?

SOCRATES: Well, then, should each of them contribute his own work for the common use of all? I mean, should a farmer, although he is only one person, provide food for four people, and spend quadruple the time and labor to provide food to be shared by them all? Or should he not be concerned about everyone else? Should he produce one quarter the food in one quarter the time for himself alone? Should he spend the other three quarters providing a house, [370a] a cloak, and shoes? Should he save himself the bother of sharing with other people and mind his own business on his own?

SOCRATES: There is nothing strange in that, by Zeus. You see, it occurred to me while you were speaking that, in the first place, we are not all born alike. On the contrary, each of us differs somewhat in nature from the others, one being suited to one job, another to another. Or don’t you [b] think so?

SOCRATES: Well, then, would one person do better work if he practiced many crafts or if he practiced one?

SOCRATES: And it is also clear, I take it, that if one misses the opportune moment in any job, the work is spoiled.

SOCRATES: That, I take it, is because the thing that has to be done won’t wait until the doer has the leisure to do it. No, instead the doer must, of necessity, pay close attention to what has to be done and not leave it for his idle moments. [c]

SOCRATES: The result, then, is that more plentiful and better-quality goods are more easily produced, if each person does one thing for which he is naturally suited and does it at the opportune moment, because his time is freed from all the others.

SOCRATES: Then, Adeimantus, we are going to need more than four citizens to provide the things we have mentioned. For a farmer won’t make his own plow, it seems, if it is going to be a good one, nor his hoe, nor any of his other farm implements. [d] Nor will a carpenter—and he, too, needs lots of tools. And the same is true of a weaver and a shoemaker, isn’t it?

SOCRATES: So carpenters, metalworkers, and many other craftsmen of that sort will share our little city and make it bigger.

SOCRATES: Yet it still would not be a very large settlement, even if we added cowherds, shepherds, and other herdsmen, so that the farmers would have cows to do their plowing, the builders oxen to share [e] with the farmers in hauling their materials, and the weavers and shoemakers hides and fleeces to use.

SOCRATES: Moreover, it is almost impossible, at any rate, to establish the city itself in the sort of place where it will need no imports.

SOCRATES: Then we will need still other people who will import whatever is needed from another city.

SOCRATES: And if our servant goes empty-handed to another city, without any of the things needed by those from whom he is trying to get what his own people need, he will come away empty-handed, [371a] won’t he?

SOCRATES: Our citizens, then, must produce not only enough for themselves at home, but also goods of the right quality and quantity to satisfy the needs of others.

SOCRATES: And also other servants, I imagine, who are to take care of imports and exports. These are merchants, aren’t they?

SOCRATES: And if the trade is carried on by sea, we will need a great many others who have expert knowledge of the business of the sea. [b]

SOCRATES: Again, within the city itself, how will people share with one another the things they each produce? It was in order to share, after all, that we associated with one another and founded a city.

SOCRATES: So if a farmer or any other craftsman brings some of his products to the marketplace, and [c] he does not arrive at the same time as those who want to exchange things with him, is he to sit idly in the marketplace, neglecting his own craft?

ADEIMANTUS: Not at all. On the contrary, there will be people who notice this situation and provide the requisite service—in well-organized cities, they are generally those whose bodies are weakest and who are not fit to do any other sort of work. Their job is to wait there in the marketplace and exchange money [d] for the goods of those who have something to sell, and then to exchange goods for the money of those who want to buy them.

SOCRATES: This need, then, causes retailers to be present in our city. Those who wait in the marketplace, and provide this service of buying and selling, are called retailers, aren’t they, whereas those who travel between cities are merchants?

SOCRATES: There are also other servants, I think, whose minds would not altogether qualify them for membership in our community, but whose bodies [e] are strong enough for hard labor. So they sell the use of their strength for a price called a wage, and that is why they are called wage-earners. Isn’t that so?

SOCRATES: Then where are justice and injustice to be found in it? With which of the people we considered did they come in?

ADEIMANTUS: I have no idea, Socrates, unless it is somewhere in some need that these people have [372a] of one another.

SOCRATES: Perhaps what you say is right. We must look into it and not back off. First, then, let’s see what sort of life people will lead who have been provided for in this way. They will make food, wine, clothes, and shoes, won’t they? And they will build themselves houses. In the summer, they will mostly work naked and barefoot, but in the winter they will wear adequate clothing and shoes. For nourishment, [b] they will provide themselves with barley meal and wheat flour, which they will knead and bake into noble cakes and loaves and serve up on a reed or on clean leaves. They will recline on couches strewn with yew and myrtles and feast with their children, drink their wine, and, crowned with wreaths, hymn the gods. They will enjoy having sex with one another, but they will produce no more children than their resources allow, lest they fall into either poverty or war. [c]

SOCRATES: True enough, I was forgetting that they will also have relishes—salt, of course, and olives and cheese, and they will boil roots and vegetables the way they boil them in the country. We will give them desserts too, I imagine, consisting of figs, chickpeas, and beans. And they will roast myrtles and acorns before the fire and drink in moderation. And so they will live in peace and good health, it seems, [d] and when they die at a ripe old age, they will pass on a similar sort of life to their children.

GLAUCON: If you were founding a city of pigs, Socrates, isn’t that just what you would provide to fatten them?

GLAUCON: Just what is conventional. If they are not to suffer hardship, they should recline on proper couches, I suppose, dine at tables, and have the relishes and desserts that people have nowadays. [e]

SOCRATES: All right, I understand. It isn’t merely the origins of a city that we are considering, it seems, but those of a city that is luxurious, too. And that may not be a bad idea. For by examining such a city, we might perhaps see how justice and injustice grow up in cities. Yet the true city, in my view, is the one we have described: the healthy one, as it were. But if you also want to look at a feverish city, so be it. There is nothing to stop us. You see, the things I mentioned [373a] earlier, and the way of life I described, won’t satisfy some people, it seems; but couches, tables, and other furniture will have to be added to it, and relishes, of course, and incense, perfumes, prostitutes, pastries—and the multifariousness of each of them. In particular, we cannot just provide them with the necessities we mentioned at first, such as houses, clothes, and shoes; no, instead we will have to get painting and embroidery going, and procure gold and ivory and all sorts of everything of that sort. Isn’t that so?

SOCRATES: Then we will have to enlarge our city again: the healthy one is no longer adequate. On the contrary, we must now increase it in size and population and fill it with a multitude of things that go beyond what is necessary for a city—hunters, for example, and all those imitators. Many of the latter work with shapes and colors; many with music—poets and their assistants, rhapsodes, actors, choral dancers, theatrical producers. And there will have to be craftsmen of multifarious devices, including, among other things, those needed for the adornment of women. In particular, then, we will need more servants—don’t you think—such as tutors, wet nurses, [c] nannies, beauticians, barbers, and relish cooks and meat cooks, too? Moreover, we will also need people to farm pigs. This animal did not exist in our earlier city, since there was no need for it, but we will need it in this one. And we will also need large numbers of other meat-producing animals, won’t we, if someone is going to eat them?

SOCRATES: And if we live like that, won’t we have a far greater need for doctors than we did before? [d]

SOCRATES: And the land, I take it, that used to be adequate to feed the population we had then will now be small and inadequate. Or don’t you agree?

SOCRATES: Won’t we have to seize some of our neighbors’ land, then, if we are to have enough for pasture and plowing? And won’t our neighbors want to seize part of ours in turn, if they too have abandoned themselves to the endless acquisition of money and overstepped the limit of their necessary desires?

SOCRATES: Now, let’s not say yet whether the effects of war are good or bad, but only that we have now found the origin of war: it comes from those same factors, the occurrence of which is the source of the greatest evils for cities and the individuals in them.

SOCRATES: The city must be further enlarged, then, my dear Glaucon, and not just a little, but by the size of a whole army. It will do battle with the invaders in defense of the city’s wealth, and of all the [374a] other things we just described.

SOCRATES: No, not, at any rate, if the agreement that you and the rest of us made when we were founding the city was a good one. I think we agreed, if you remember, that it is impossible for a single person to practice many crafts well.

SOCRATES: So, should we be more concerned about the craft of shoe making than the craft of warfare?

SOCRATES: Well, now, we prevented a shoemaker from trying to be a farmer, weaver, or builder at the same time, instead of just a shoemaker, in order to ensure that the shoemaker’s job was done well. Similarly, we also assigned just the one job for which he had a natural aptitude to each of the other people, and said that he was to work at it his whole life, free from having to do any of the other jobs, so as not to miss the opportune moments for performing it well. [c] But isn’t it of the greatest importance that warfare be carried out well? Or is fighting a war so easy that a farmer, a shoemaker, or any other artisan can be a soldier at the same time, even though no one can become so much as a good checkers player or dice player if he considers it only as a sideline and does not practice it from childhood? Can someone just pick up a shield, or any other weapon or instrument of war and immediately become a competent fighter [d] in an infantry battle or whatever other sort of battle it may be, even though no other tool makes someone who picks it up a craftsman or an athlete, or is even of any service to him unless he has acquired knowledge of it and has had sufficient practice?

SOCRATES: Then to the degree that the guardians’ job is most important, it requires the most freedom [e] from other things, as well as the greatest craft and practice.

SOCRATES: And doesn’t it also require a person whose nature is suited to that very practice?

SOCRATES: Then our task, it seems, is to select, if we can, which natures, which sorts of natures, suit people to guard the city.

SOCRATES: By Zeus, it is no trivial task that we have taken on, then. All the same, we must not shrink from it, but do the best we can.

SOCRATES: Do you think that there is any difference, when it comes to the job of guarding, between the nature of a noble hound and that of a well-bred youth?

SOCRATES: I mean that both of them have to be sharp-eyed, quick to catch what they see, and strong, too, in case they have to fight what they capture.

SOCRATES: And they must be courageous, surely, if indeed they are to fight well.

SOCRATES: Now, will a horse, a dog, or any other animal be courageous if it is not spirited? Or haven’t you noticed just how invincible and unbeatable spirit is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless [b] and unconquerable in any situation?

SOCRATES: And as far as their souls are concerned, they must, at any rate, be spirited.

SOCRATES: But with natures like that, Glaucon, how will they avoid behaving like savages to one another and to the other citizens?

SOCRATES: But surely they must be gentle to their own people and harsh to their enemies. Otherwise, [c] they will not wait around for others to destroy them, but will do it themselves first.

SOCRATES: What are we to do, then? Where are we to find a character that is both gentle and high-spirited at the same time? For, of course, a gentle nature is the opposite of the spirited kind.

SOCRATES: But surely if someone lacks either of these qualities, he cannot be a good guardian. Yet the combination of them seems to be impossible. And so it follows, then, that a good guardian is impossible. [d]

I could not see a way out, and on reexamining what had gone before, I said:

We deserve to be stuck, my dear Glaucon. For we have lost track of the analogy we put forward.

SOCRATES: We have overlooked the fact that there are natures of the sort we thought impossible, ones that include these opposite qualities.

SOCRATES: You can see the combination in other animals, too, but especially in the one to which we compared the guardian. For you know, of course, that noble hounds naturally have a character of that [e] sort. They are as gentle as can be to those they are familiar with and know, but the opposite to those they do not know.

SOCRATES: So the combination we want is possible, after all, and what we are seeking in a good guardian is not contrary to nature.

SOCRATES: Now, don’t you think that our future guardian, besides being spirited, must also be, by nature, philosophical?

SOCRATES: It too is something you see in dogs, and it should make us wonder at the merit of the beast.

SOCRATES: In that when a dog sees someone it does not know, it gets angry even before anything bad happens to it. But when it knows someone, it welcomes him, even if it has never received anything good from him. Have you never wondered at that?

GLAUCON: I have never paid it any mind until now. But it is clear that a dog does do that sort of thing.

SOCRATES: Well, that seems to be a naturally refined quality, and one that is truly philosophical. [b]

SOCRATES: In that it judges anything it sees to be either a friend or an enemy on no other basis than that it knows the one and does not know the other. And how could it be anything besides a lover of learning if it defines what is its own and what is alien to it in terms of knowledge and ignorance?

SOCRATES: But surely the love of learning and philosophy are the same, aren’t they?

SOCRATES: Then can’t we confidently assume that the same holds for a human being too—that if he is going to be gentle to his own and those he knows, he must be, by nature, a lover of learning and [c] a philosopher?

SOCRATES: Philosophy, then, and spirit, speed, and strength as well, must all be combined in the nature of anyone who is going to be a really fine and good guardian of our city.

SOCRATES: Then that is what he would have to be like at the outset. But how are we to bring these people up and educate them? Will inquiring into that topic bring us any closer to the goal of our inquiry, which is to discover the origins of justice and injustice in a city? We want our account to be adequate, but [d] we do not want it to be any longer than necessary.

SOCRATES: By Zeus, in that case, my dear Adeimantus, we must not abandon it, even if it turns out to be a somewhat lengthy affair.

SOCRATES: Come on, then, and like people in a fable telling stories at their leisure, let’s in our discussion educate these men.

SOCRATES: What, then, will the education be? Or is it difficult to find a better one than the one that has been discovered over a long period of time—physical training for bodies and musical training for the soul?

SOCRATES: But aren’t there two kinds of stories, one true and the other false?

SOCRATES: And education must make use of both, but first of the false ones? [377a]

SOCRATES: Don’t you understand that we first begin by telling stories to children? And surely they are false on the whole, though they have some truth in them. And we use stories on children before physical training.

SOCRATES: That, then, is what I meant by saying that musical training should be taken up before physical training.

SOCRATES: Now, you know, don’t you, that the beginning of any job is the most important part, especially when we are dealing with anything young and tender? For that is when it is especially malleable [b] and best takes on whatever pattern one wishes to impress on it.

SOCRATES: Shall we carelessly allow our children to hear any old stories made up by just anyone, then, and to take beliefs into their souls that are, for the most part, the opposite of the ones we think they should hold when they are grown up?

SOCRATES: So our first task, it seems, is to supervise the storytellers: if they make up a good story, we must accept it; if not, we must reject it. We will [c] persuade nurses and mothers to tell the acceptable ones to their children, and to spend far more time shaping their souls with these stories than they do shaping their bodies by handling them. Many of the stories they tell now, however, must be thrown out.

SOCRATES: In the more significant stories, we will see the less significant ones as well. For surely the more significant ones and the less significant ones both follow the same pattern and have the same effects. Don’t you think so? [d]

ADEIMANTUS: Indeed, I do. But I do not understand at all what more significant ones you mean.

SOCRATES: The ones Homer, Hesiod, and other poets tell us. After all, they surely composed false stories, which they told and are still telling to people.

SOCRATES: The first and most important fault that one ought to find, especially if the falsehood has no good features.

SOCRATES: Using a story to create a bad image of what the gods and heroes are like, just as a painter [e] might paint a picture that is not at all like the things he is trying to paint.

ADEIMANTUS: Yes, you are right to find fault with that. But what cases in particular, what sorts of cases, do you mean?

SOCRATES: First, the biggest falsehood about the most important things has no good features—I mean Hesiod telling us about how Uranus behaved, how Cronus punished him for it, and how he was in turn punished by his own son.⁹ But even if these stories [378a] were true, they should be passed over in silence, I would think, and not told so casually to the foolish and the young. And if, for some reason, they must be told, only a very few people should hear them—people who are pledged to secrecy and have had to sacrifice not just a pig, but something so large and scarce that the number of people who hear them is kept as small as possible.

SOCRATES: And they should not be told in our city, Adeimantus. No young person should hear it [b] said that if he were to commit the worst crimes, he would be doing nothing amazing, or that if he were to inflict every sort of punishment on an unjust father, he would only be doing the same as the first and greatest of the gods.

ADEIMANTUS: No, by Zeus, I do not think myself that these stories are fit to be told.

SOCRATES: Indeed, we must not allow any stories about gods warring, fighting, or plotting against one another if we want the guardians of our city to think that it is shameful to be easily provoked into mutual hatred. After all, those stories are not true either. Still [c] less should battles between gods and giants, or the many other multifarious hostilities of gods and heroes toward their families and friends, occur in the stories the guardians hear or in the embroidered pictures they see. On the contrary, if we are somehow going to persuade our people that no citizen has ever hated another, and that it is impious to do so, then those are the things their male and female elders should tell them from childhood on. And the poets they [d] listen to as they grow older should be compelled to tell them the same sort of thing. Stories about Hera being chained by her son, on the other hand, or about Hephaestus being hurled from the heavens by his father when he tried to save his mother from a beating, or about the battle of the gods in Homer, should not be admitted into our city, either as allegories or non-allegories. For the young cannot distinguish what is allegorical from what is not. And the beliefs they absorb at that age are difficult to erase and tend to become unalterable. For these reasons, then, we [e] should probably take the utmost care to ensure that the first stories they hear about virtue are the best ones for them to hear.

ADEIMANTUS: Yes, that makes sense. But if, at this point too,¹⁰ someone were once again to ask us what stories these are, how should we reply?

SOCRATES: You and I are not poets at present, Adeimantus, but we are founding a city. And it is [379a] appropriate for the founders to know the patterns on which the poets must base their stories, and from which they must not deviate. But they should not themselves make up any poems.

ADEIMANTUS: That’s right. But what precisely are the patterns that stories about the gods must follow?

SOCRATES: Something like this: whether in epic, lyric, or tragedy, a god must always be represented as he is.

SOCRATES: Now, gods, of course, are really good, aren’t they, and must be described as such? [b]

SOCRATES: But what does nothing bad could not be the cause of anything bad, could it?

SOCRATES: What is good is not the cause of all things, then. Instead, it is the cause of things that are good, while of bad ones it is not the cause.

SOCRATES: So, since gods are good, they are not—as the masses claim—the cause of everything. Instead, they are a cause of only a few things that happen to human beings, while of most they are not the cause. For good things are fewer than bad ones in our lives. Of the good things, they alone are the cause, but we must find some other cause for the bad ones, not the gods.

SOCRATES: Then we won’t accept from Homer—or from anyone else—the foolish mistake he makes about the gods when he says: “There are two urns at [d] the threshold of Zeus, one filled with good fates, the other with bad ones,” and the person to whom Zeus gives a mixture of these “sometimes meets with a bad fate, sometimes with a good one.” But the one who receives his fate entirely from the second urn, “evil famine drives over the divine earth.” Nor will we tolerate the saying that “Zeus is the dispenser of both [e] good and bad to mortals.” As for the breaking of the oaths and the truce by Pandarus, if anyone tells us that it was brought about by Athena and Zeus, or that Themis and Zeus were responsible for strife and contention among the gods, we won’t praise him. Nor will we allow the young to hear the words of Aeschylus: “A god makes mortals guilty, when he [380a] wants to destroy a house utterly.”¹¹ And if anyone composes a poem, such as the one those lines are from, about the sufferings of Niobe, or about the house of Pelops, or the tale of Troy, or anything else of that sort, he should be required to say that these things are not the works of a god. Or, if they are the works of a god, then the poet must look for roughly the sort of account of them we are now seeking: he must say that the actions of the gods are good and just, and that the people they punish are benefited [b] by them. We won’t allow him to say that those who are punished are made wretched, and that it was a god who made them so; but we will allow him to say that bad people are wretched because they are in need of punishment, and that in paying the penalty they are benefited by that god. But as for saying that a god, who is himself good, is the cause of evils, we will fight that in every way. We won’t allow anyone to say it in his own city, if it is to be well governed, or anyone to hear it either—whether young or old, whether with meter or without meter. For these stories [c] are impious, disadvantageous to us, and not in concord with one another.

SOCRATES: This, then, will be one of the laws or patterns relating to gods that speakers and poets will have to follow: that gods are not the cause of all things, but only of good ones.

SOCRATES: Now, what about this second law? Do you think that gods are sorcerers who deliberately [d] take different forms at different times, sometimes by changing on their own and altering their own form into a large number of shapes, sometimes by deceiving us into thinking they have done so? Or are they simple beings, and least of all likely to abandon their own form?

SOCRATES: Well, if something abandons its own form, mustn’t it either cause the change itself or be changed by something else? [e]

SOCRATES: Now, the best things are least liable to alteration or change, aren’t they? For example, a body is altered by food, drink, and labors, and all plants by sun, winds, and other similar affections—but the healthiest and strongest is least altered, isn’t that so?

SOCRATES: And wouldn’t a soul that is most courageous and most knowledgeable be least disturbed or altered by any outside influence?

SOCRATES: And the same account surely also applies even to manufactured items, such as implements, houses, and clothes: those that are good and well made are least altered by time or any other influences.

SOCRATES: So whatever is in good condition—whether due to nature or craft or both—is least subject [b] to change by something else.

SOCRATES: But gods, of course, as well as the things belonging to them, are best in every way.

SOCRATES: Do they change themselves into something better and more beautiful, or into something worse and uglier, than themselves?

ADEIMANTUS: It would have to be into something worse, if indeed they are altered at all. For surely we [c] won’t say that gods are deficient in either beauty or virtue.

SOCRATES: You are absolutely right. And do you think, Adeimantus, that anyone, whether god or human, would deliberately make himself worse in any way?

SOCRATES: It is also impossible, then, for a god to want to alter himself. On the contrary, since each god is, it seems, as beautiful and as good as possible, he must always unqualifiedly retain his own form.

SOCRATES: None of our poets, then, my very good man, is to say that “The gods, like strangers [d] from foreign lands, assume many disguises when they visit our cities.”¹² Nor must they tell lies about Proteus and Thetis, or present Hera, in their tragedies or other poems, disguised as a priestess collecting alms for “the life-giving sons of the Argive river Inachus,”¹³ or tell us any of the many other such lies. Nor should mothers, influenced by these [e] stories, which terrify children, tell bad tales about gods who go wandering around at night in the guises of many strange and multifarious beings, lest they blaspheme the gods and, at the same time, make their children too cowardly.

SOCRATES: But, though the gods themselves are the sorts of things that cannot change, do they make us think that they appear in multifarious guises, deceiving us and using sorcery on us?

SOCRATES: What ? Would a god be willing to lie by presenting in word or deed what is only [382a] an illusion?

SOCRATES: Don’t you know that all gods and humans hate a true lie, if one may call it that?

SOCRATES: I mean that no one intentionally wants to lie about the most important things to what is most important in himself. On the contrary, he fears to hold a lie there more than anything.

SOCRATES: That is because you think I am saying something deep. I simply mean that to lie and to [b] have lied to the soul about the things that are, and to be ignorant, and to have and hold a lie there, is what everyone would least of all accept; indeed, they especially hate it there.

SOCRATES: But surely, as I was saying just now, it would be most correct to say that it is truly speaking a lie—the ignorance in the soul of the one to whom the lie was told. For a lie in words is a sort of imitation of this affection in the soul, an image of it that comes into being after it, and not an altogether pure lie. Isn’t that so? [c]

SOCRATES: A real lie, then, is hated not only by the gods, but also by human beings.

SOCRATES: What about a lie in words? Aren’t there times when it is useful, and so does not merit hatred? What about when we are dealing with enemies, or with so-called friends who, because of insanity or ignorance, are attempting to do something bad? Isn’t it a useful drug for preventing them? And consider the case of those stories we were talking about just now—those we tell because we do not know the truth about those ancient [d] events: by making the lies that they contain as much like the truth as possible, don’t we make them useful?

SOCRATES: In which of these ways, then, could a lie be useful to a god? Would he lie by making likenesses of the truth about ancient events because of his ignorance of them?

SOCRATES: Because of the foolishness or insanity of his family or friends, then?

SOCRATES: So both what is daimonic and what is divine are entirely free of lies.

SOCRATES: A god, then, is altogether simple, true in both word and deed. He does not change himself or deceive others by means of images, by words, or by sending signs, whether they are awake or dreaming.

ADEIMANTUS: That is my view—at any rate, now that I have heard what you have to say. [383a]

SOCRATES: You agree, then, that this is the second pattern people must follow when speaking or composing poems about the gods: the gods are not sorcerers who change themselves, nor do they mislead us by telling lies in word or deed.

SOCRATES: Even though we praise many things in Homer, then, we won’t approve of Zeus’ sending the dream to Agamemnon, nor of Aeschylus when he makes Thetis say that Apollo sang, in prophecy at her wedding: [b]

Whenever anyone says such things about a god, we will be angry with him, refuse him a chorus, and not [c] allow teachers to use what he says for the education of the young—not if our guardians are going to be as god-fearing and godlike as human beings can be.

ADEIMANTUS: I agree completely about these patterns, and I would use them as laws.

SOCRATES: Where the gods are concerned, then, [386a] it seems that those are the sorts of stories the future guardians should and should not hear from childhood on, if they are to honor the gods and their parents, and not treat lightly their friendship with one another.

SOCRATES: What about if they are to be courageous? Shouldn’t they be told stories that will make them least likely to fear death? Or do you think that anyone ever becomes courageous if he has that fear in his heart? [b]

SOCRATES: What about if someone believes that Hades exists and is full of terrible things? Can anyone with that fear be unafraid of death and prefer it to defeat in battle and slavery?

SOCRATES: Then we must also supervise those who try to tell such stories, it seems, and ask them not to disparage the life in Hades in this undiscriminating way, but to speak well of it, since what they now tell us is neither true nor beneficial to future warriors. [c]

SOCRATES: We will start with the following lines, then, and expunge everything like them: “I would rather labor on earth in another man’s service, a man who is landless, with little to live on, than be king over all the dead”;¹ and this: “He feared that his home should be revealed to mortals and immortals as dreadful, [d] dank, and hated even by the gods”;² and: “Alas, there survives in the Halls of Hades a soul, a mere phantasm, with its wits completely gone”;³ and this: “He alone can think others to be flitting shadows”;⁴ and: “The soul, leaving his limbs, made its way to Hades, lamenting its fate, leaving manhood and youth behind”;⁵ and this: “His soul went below the earth like [387a] smoke, screeching as it went”;⁶ and:

We will beg Homer and the rest of the poets not to [b] be angry if we delete these and all similar passages—not because they are not poetic and pleasing to the masses when they hear them, but because the more poetic they are, the more they should be kept away from the ears of children and men who are to be free and to fear slavery more than death.

SOCRATES: Then, in addition, we must also get rid of the terrible and frightening names that occur in such passages: Cocytus, Styx,⁸ “those below,” “the [c] sapless ones,” and all the other names of the same pattern that supposedly make everyone who hears them shudder. Perhaps they are useful for other purposes, but our fear is that all that shuddering will make our guardians more emotional and soft than they ought to be.

SOCRATES: Shall we also remove the lamentations and pitiful speeches of famous men? [d]

SOCRATES: Consider, though, whether we will be right to remove them or not. What we claim is that a good man won’t think that death is a terrible thing for another good one to suffer—even if the latter happens to be his friend.

SOCRATES: But we also claim this: a good person is most self-sufficient when it comes to living well, and is distinguished from other people by having the least need of anyone or anything else. [e]

SOCRATES: So it is less terrible for him than for anyone else to be deprived of a son, brother, possessions, or the like.

SOCRATES: So, he will lament it the least and bear it the most calmly when some such misfortune overtakes him.

SOCRATES: We would be right, then, to remove the lamentations of famous men. We would leave them to women (provided they are not excellent women) and cowardly men, so that those we say we [388a] are training to guard our land will be ashamed to do such things.

SOCRATES: In addition, then, we will have to ask Homer and the other poets not to represent Achilles, who was the son of a goddess, as:

or to make him pick up ashes with both hands and pour them over his head, weeping and lamenting to [b] the extent and in the manner Homer describes;¹⁰ or to represent Priam, a close descendant of the gods, as “begging and rolling around in dung, as he calls upon each of his men by name.”¹¹ And yet more insistently than that, we will ask them at least not to make the gods lament and say: “Woe is me, unfortunate that I am, wretched mother of a great son.”¹² [c] But, if they do make the gods do such things, at least they must not dare to represent the greatest of the gods in so unlikely a fashion as to make him say: “Alas, with my own eyes I see a man who is most dear to me being chased around the city, and my heart laments”;¹³ or “Woe is me, that Sarpedon, who is most dear to me, should be fated to be killed by Patroclus, the son of Menoetius.”¹⁴ You see, my dear [d] Adeimantus, if our young people listen seriously to these stories without ridiculing them as not worth hearing, none of them is going to consider such things to be unworthy of a mere human being like himself, or rebuke himself if it occurred to him to do or say any of them. On the contrary, without shame or perseverance, he would chant many dirges and laments at the slightest sufferings.

SOCRATES: But that must not happen, as our argument has shown—and we must remain persuaded by it until someone shows us a better one.

SOCRATES: Moreover, they must not be lovers of laughter either. For whenever anyone gives in to violent laughter, a violent reaction pretty much always follows.

SOCRATES: So, if someone represents worthwhile people as overcome by laughter, we must not accept it, and we will accept it even less if they represent the gods in that way. [389a]

SOCRATES: Then we must not accept the following sorts of sayings about the gods from Homer: “And unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw Hephaestus limping through the hall.”¹⁵ According to your argument, they must be rejected.

ADEIMANTUS: Yes, if you want to attribute it to me, but they must be rejected in any case. [b]

SOCRATES: Moreover, we have to be concerned about truth as well. For if what we said just now is correct and a lie is really useless to the gods, but useful to human beings as a form of drug, it is clear that it must be assigned to doctors, whereas private individuals must have nothing to do with it.

SOCRATES: It is appropriate for the rulers, then, if anyone, to lie because of enemies or citizens for the good of the city. But no one else may have anything to do with it. On the contrary, we will say that for a private individual to lie to such rulers is as bad a [c] mistake as for a sick person not to tell his doctor or an athlete his trainer the truth about his physical condition, or for someone not to tell the captain the things that are true about the ship and the sailors, or about how he himself or one of his fellow sailors is faring—indeed, it is a worse mistake.

SOCRATES: So, if anyone else is caught telling lies in the city—“any of the craftsmen, whether a prophet, [d] a doctor who heals the sick, or a carpenter who works in wood”¹⁶—he will be punished for introducing a practice that is as subversive and destructive of a city as of a ship.

ADEIMANTUS: Indeed it is, at any rate, if what people do is influenced by what he says.

SOCRATES: And aren’t the most important aspects of temperance for the majority of people, at any rate, to obey the rulers and to rule over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food for themselves? [e]

SOCRATES: So we will claim, I imagine, that it is fine to say the sort of thing that Diomedes says in Homer: “Sit down in silence, my friend, and be persuaded by my story”;¹⁷ and what follows it: “The Achaeans went in silently, breathing valor, afraid of their commanders”;¹⁸ and anything else of that sort.

SOCRATES: But what about things like, “You drunkard, with the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer,” and what follows it?¹⁹ Are they, then, fine things to say? And what about all the other headstrong [390a] things that private individuals say to their rulers in works of prose or poetry?

SOCRATES: That, I imagine, is because they are not suitable for inculcating temperance in the young people who hear them. But it would not be surprising if they were found pleasant in some other context. What do you think?

SOCRATES: What about making the wisest man say that the best thing of all, as it seems to him, is when “the tables are well laden with bread and meat, and the wine-bearer draws wine from the mixing bowl, brings [b] it, and pours it in the cups”?²⁰ Do you think that hearing things like that is suitable for inculcating self-mastery in young people? Or that “death by starvation is the most pitiful fate”?²¹ Or about how Zeus stayed awake alone deliberating, when all the other gods and mortals were asleep, and then easily forgot all his plans because of his sexual appetite, and was so overcome by [c] the sight of Hera that he did not even want to go to their bedroom, but to possess her there on the ground, saying that his appetite for her was even greater than it was when they first made love to one another “without their parents’ knowledge”?²² Or what about the chaining together of Ares and Aphrodite by Hephaestus²³ for similar reasons?

SOCRATES: On the other hand, if there are any words or deeds of famous men that express perseverance in the face of everything, surely they must be [d] seen and heard. For example, “He struck his chest and spoke to his heart: ‘Bear up, my heart, you have suffered more shameful things than this.’”²⁴

SOCRATES: And we must not, of course, allow our men to be bribable with gifts or to be money-lovers.

SOCRATES: Then they must not sing: “Gifts persuade gods, and gifts persuade revered kings.”²⁵ Nor must we praise Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, for being moderate, when he advises Achilles to take the gifts and defend the Achaeans, but not to lay aside his anger without gifts.²⁶ Nor should we agree that Achilles himself was such a money-lover as to accept the gifts of Agamemnon, or to release a corpse when he got paid for it, but otherwise to refuse.²⁷ [391a]

SOCRATES: It is only out of respect for Homer, indeed, that I hesitate to say that it is positively impious to accuse Achilles of such things, or to believe them when others say them. Or to believe that he said to Apollo: “You have injured me, Farshooter, most deadly of the gods; And I would punish you, if only I had the power.”²⁸ Or that he disobeyed the river—a god—and was ready to fight it.²⁹ Or that he [b] consecrated hair to the dead Patroclus, which he had already consecrated to the other river, Sphercheius: “To the hero, Patroclus, I give my hair to take with him.”³⁰ We must not believe that he did that. Nor is it true that he dragged the dead Hector around the tomb of Patroclus³¹ or massacred the captives on his pyre.³² So we will deny these things. Nor will we allow our people to believe that Achilles—the son of [c] a goddess and of Peleus (who was himself the most temperate of men and the grandson of Zeus), and the pupil of the most wise Cheiron—was so full of inner disorder as to have two opposite diseases within him: illiberality accompanied by the love of money on the one hand, and arrogance toward gods and humans on the other.

SOCRATES: Moreover, we will neither believe nor allow it to be said that Theseus, the son of Poseidon, and Peirithous, the son of Zeus, ever attempted those terrible rapes,³³ nor that any other child of a god and [d] hero dared to do any of the terrible and impious deeds that are now falsely attributed to them. We will compel the poets either to deny that they did such things, or else to deny that they were children of the gods. But they must not say both or attempt to persuade our young people that the gods produce evils, nor that heroes are no better than humans. After all, as we were saying earlier, these things are neither [e] pious nor true. For we demonstrated, I take it, that it is impossible for the gods to produce evils.

SOCRATES: And they are also positively harmful to those who hear them. You see, everyone will be ready to excuse himself when he is bad, if he has been persuaded that similar things are done and were done by “close descendants of the gods, near kin of Zeus, whose ancestral altar is in the ether on Ida’s peak,” and “in whom the blood of daimons has not weakened.”³⁴ That is why we must put a stop to such stories; if we do not, they will produce in our young people a very casual attitude to evil. [392a]

SOCRATES: What kind of stories are still left, then, about which we must determine whether or not they may be told? I mean, we have discussed how gods, heroes, daimons, and things in Hades should be portrayed.

SOCRATES: Because what we are going to say, I imagine, is that poets and prose writers get the most important things about human beings wrong. They say that many unjust people are happy and many just [b] ones wretched, that doing injustice is profitable if it escapes detection, and that justice is another’s good but one’s own loss. We will forbid them to say such things, I imagine, and order them to sing and tell the opposite. Don’t you think so?

SOCRATES: Well, then, if you agree that what I said is correct, won’t I say to you that you have conceded the point we were investigating all along?

SOCRATES: Then we won’t come to an agreement about what stories should be told about human beings until we have discovered what sort of thing justice is, and how, given its nature, it profits the one who has it, whether he is believed to be just or not.

SOCRATES: Our discussion of the content of stories is complete, then. Our next task, I take it, is to investigate their style. And then we will have completely investigated both what they should say and how they should say it.

SOCRATES: Well, we must see that you do. Maybe this will help you to grasp it better: isn’t everything said [d] by poets and storytellers a narration of past, present, or future events?

SOCRATES: And don’t they proceed by narration alone, narration through imitation, or both?

SOCRATES: What a ridiculously unclear teacher I seem to be! So, I will do what incompetent speakers do: I won’t try to deal with the subject as a whole. Instead, I will take up a particular example and use that to explain what I mean. Tell me, do you know [e] the beginning of the Iliad where the poet tells us that Chryses begged Agamemnon to release his daughter, that Agamemnon got angry, and that Chryses, having failed to get what he wanted, prayed to his god³⁵ to punish the Achaeans? [393a]

SOCRATES: You know, then, that up to the lines, “He begged all the Achaeans, but especially the commanders of the army, the two sons of Atreus,”³⁶ the poet himself is speaking and is not trying to make us think that the speaker is anyone but himself. After that, however, he speaks as if he himself were Chryses, and tries as hard as he can to make us think that the speaker is not Homer, but the priest himself, who is [b] an old man. And all the rest of his narration of the events in Ilium and Ithaca, and all of the Odyssey, are written in pretty much the same way.

SOCRATES: Now, each of the speeches, as well as the material between them, is narration, isn’t it?

SOCRATES: But when he makes a speech as if he were someone else, won’t we say that he makes his [c] own style as much like that of the person he tells us is about to speak?

SOCRATES: Now, to make oneself like someone else in voice or appearance is to imitate the person one makes oneself like, isn’t it?

SOCRATES: Then in a passage of that sort, it seems, he, and the rest of poets as well, produce their narration through imitation.

SOCRATES: But if the poet never disguised himself, his entire poem would be narration without imitation. To prevent you from saying that you still do [d] not understand, I will tell you what that would be like. If Homer said that Chryses came with a ransom for his daughter to supplicate the Achaeans, especially the kings, and if after that Homer had gone on speaking, not as if he had become Chryses, but still as Homer, you know that it would not be imitation but narration pure and simple. It would have gone something like this—I will speak without meter since I am not a poet: the priest came and prayed that the gods would grant it to the Achaeans to capture Troy [e] and have a safe return home, and he entreated them to accept the ransom and free his daughter, out of reverence for the god.³⁷ When he had said this, the others approved of it and consented. But Agamemnon was angry and ordered him to leave and never return, or else his priestly wand and the wreaths of the god would not protect him. He said that the priest’s daughter would grow old in Argos by his side sooner than be freed. He ordered Chryses to leave and not make him angry if he wanted to get home safely. When the old man heard this, he was frightened and went [394a] off in silence. And once he had left the camp, he prayed at length to Apollo, invoking the cult names of the god, reminding him of his past gifts, and asking to be repaid for any that had found favor with him, whether they were temples he had built or victims he had sacrificed. He prayed that, in return for these things, the arrows of the god would make the Achaeans pay for his tears. That, comrade, is how we get pure narration without any imitation. [b]

SOCRATES: Also understand, then, that the opposite occurs when one omits the words between the speeches and leaves the speeches on their own.

ADEIMANTUS: I understand that, too; it is what happens in tragedies, for example.

SOCRATES: You have got it absolutely right. And now I think I can make clear to you what I could not before. One sort of poetry and storytelling employs only imitation—tragedy, as you said, and comedy. [c] Another sort, which you find primarily in dithyrambs, employs only narration by the poet himself. A third sort, which uses both, is what we find in epic poetry and many other places. Do you follow me?

SOCRATES: And before that, as you remember, we said that we had already dealt with content, but that we had yet to investigate style.

SOCRATES: What I meant, then, was just this: we need to come to an agreement about whether to allow [d] our poets to narrate as imitators, or as imitators of some things, but not others—and what sorts of things these are; or not to allow them to imitate at all.

ADEIMANTUS: I imagine that you are considering whether we will admit tragedy and comedy into our city or not.

SOCRATES: Perhaps so, but it may be an even wider question than that. I really do not know yet. But wherever the wind of argument blows us, so to speak, that is where we must go.

SOCRATES: What I want you to consider, then, Adeimantus, is whether our guardians should be imitators or not. Or does the answer follow from what [e] we have said already—namely, that whereas each individual can practice one pursuit well, he cannot practice many well, and if he tried to do this and dabbled in many things, he would surely fail to achieve distinction in all of them?

SOCRATES: Then doesn’t the same principle also apply to imitation—namely, that a single individual cannot imitate many things as well as he can imitate one?

SOCRATES: Then he will hardly be able to practice any pursuit worth talking about while at the same [395a] time imitating lots of things and being an imitator. For, as you know, even when two sorts of imitation are thought to be closely akin, the same people are not able to practice both of them well simultaneously. The writing of tragedy and comedy is an example. Didn’t you just call both of these imitations?

SOCRATES: Indeed, the same men cannot be used as both tragic and comic actors. And all these are imitations, aren’t they? [b]

SOCRATES: And human nature, Adeimantus, seems to me to be minted in even smaller coins than this, so that an individual can neither imitate many things well nor perform well the actions themselves of which those imitations are likenesses.

SOCRATES: So, if we are to preserve our first argument, that our guardians must be kept away from all other crafts so as to be the most exact craftsmen of the city’s freedom, and practice nothing at all except what [c] contributes to this, then they must neither do nor imitate anything else. But if they imitate anything, they must imitate right from childhood what is appropriate for them—that is to say, people who are courageous, temperate, pious, free, and everything of that sort. On the other hand, they must not be clever at doing or imitating illiberal or shameful actions, so that they won’t acquire a taste for the real thing from imitating it. Or haven’t you noticed that imitations, if they are [d] practiced much past youth, get established in the habits and nature of body, tones of voice, and mind?

SOCRATES: Since those we claim to care about are men, then, and men who must become good, we won’t allow them to imitate a woman, young or old, as she abuses her husband, quarrels with the gods, brags because she thinks herself happy, or suffers misfortune and is possessed by sorrows and lamentations—and [e] still less a woman who is ill, passionately in love, or in labor.

SOCRATES: Nor must they imitate either male or female slaves doing servile actions.

SOCRATES: Nor cowardly, bad men, it seems, or those whose actions are the opposite of what we described just now—men who libel and ridicule each other, and use shameful language when drunk or even when sober, or who wrong themselves and others by word or deed in the other ways that are typical of such people. And they must not get into [396a] the habit, I take it, of acting or talking like madmen. They must know, of course, about mad and evil men and women, but they must not do or imitate anything they do.

SOCRATES: What about metalworkers or other craftsmen, or those who row in triremes, or their coxswains, or the like—should they imitate them? [b]

ADEIMANTUS: No, they should not, since they are not allowed even to pay any mind to those pursuits.

SOCRATES: And what about neighing horses, bellowing bulls, roaring rivers, the crashing sea, thunder, or the like—will they imitate them?

ADEIMANTUS: No, they have already been forbidden to be mad or to imitate madmen.

SOCRATES: So you are saying, if I understand you, that there is one kind of style and narration that a really good and fine person would use whenever he had to say something, and another kind, unlike that one, which his opposite by nature and education [c] would always favor, and in which he would narrate his story.

SOCRATES: In my view, when a moderate man comes upon the words or actions of a good man in the course of a narration, he will be willing to report them as if he were that man himself, and he won’t be ashamed of that sort of imitation. He will be most willing to imitate the good man when he is acting in a faultless and intelligent manner, but less willing [d] and more reluctant to do so when he is upset by disease, passion, drunkenness, or some other misfortune. When he comes upon a character who is beneath him, however, he will be unwilling to make himself resemble this inferior character in any serious way—except perhaps for a brief period in which he is doing something good. On the contrary, he will be ashamed to do something like that, both because he is unpracticed in the imitation of such people, and also because he cannot stand to shape and mold himself on an inferior pattern. In his mind he despises that, except when it is for the sake of amusement. [e]

SOCRATES: Won’t he use the sorts of narration, then, that we described in dealing with the Homeric epics a moment ago? And though his style of speaking will involve both imitation and the other sort of narration, won’t imitation play a small part even in a long story? Or am I talking nonsense?

ADEIMANTUS: Not at all. That must indeed be the pattern followed by that sort of speaker.

SOCRATES: As for the other sort of speaker, the more inferior he is, the more willing he will be to [397a] narrate anything and to consider nothing beneath him. Hence he will undertake to imitate, before a large audience and in a serious way, all the things we just mentioned: thunder and the sounds of winds, hail, axles, and pulleys; trumpets, flutes, pipes, and all the other instruments; and even the cries of dogs, sheep, and birds. And his style will consist entirely of imitation in voice and gesture, won’t it, with possibly a [b] small bit of plain narration thrown in?

SOCRATES: Well, then, that is what I meant when I said that there are two kinds of style.

SOCRATES: Now, one of them involves little variation.³⁸ Hence if an appropriate harmony and rhythm are provided for this style, won’t anyone who speaks in it correctly come close to speaking in a single harmony and, what is more, in a rhythm of pretty much the same sort, since the variations involved in it are slight? [c]

SOCRATES: What about the other kind of style? Won’t it need the opposite: namely, every harmony and every rhythm, if it, too, is going to be spoken in properly, since it is multifarious in the forms of its variations?

SOCRATES: Now, doesn’t every poet and speaker adopt a style that fits one or the other of these patterns, or a mixture of both?

SOCRATES: What are we to do, then? Shall we admit all of these into our city, or one of the pure [d] sorts, or the mixed one?

ADEIMANTUS: If my view prevails, we will admit only the pure imitator of the good person.

SOCRATES: And yet, Adeimantus, the mixed style is pleasing. And the one that is most pleasing to children, their tutors, and the vast majority of people is the opposite of the one you chose.

SOCRATES: But perhaps you would say that it does not harmonize with our constitution, because there is no twofold or manifold man among us, since each [e] does only one job.

SOCRATES: And isn’t that the reason that it is only in a city like ours that we will find a shoemaker who is a shoemaker, not a ship’s captain who also makes shoes; and a farmer who is a farmer, not a juror who also farms; and a soldier who is a soldier, not a moneymaker who also soldiers, and so on?

SOCRATES: Suppose, then, that a man whose wisdom enabled him to become multifarious and imitate [398a] everything were to arrive in person in our city and want to give a performance of his poems. It seems that we would bow down before him as someone holy, amazing, and pleasing. But we would tell him that there is no man like him in our city, and that it is not in accord with divine law for there to be one. Then we would anoint his head with perfumes, crown him with a woolen wreath,³⁹ and send him away to another city. But, for our own benefit, we would employ a more austere and less pleasant poet and storyteller ourselves—one who would imitate the [b] speech of a good person and make his stories fit the patterns we laid down at the beginning, when we undertook to educate our soldiers.

SOCRATES: And now, my friend, it looks to me as though we have completed our discussion of the branch of musical training that deals with speech and stories. After all, we have discussed both what is to be said and how it is to be said.

SOCRATES: Wouldn’t what is left for us to discuss next, then, be lyric odes and songs? [c]

SOCRATES: And couldn’t anyone discover by now what to say about what they must be like, if indeed it is going to be concordant with what has already been said?

I am afraid, Socrates, that “anyone” does not include me. You see, it is not sufficiently clear to me at the moment what we are to say, though I have my suspicions.

SOCRATES: Nonetheless, you are sufficiently clear about this: first, that a song consists of three elements—speech, harmony, and rhythm. [d]

SOCRATES: Now, as far as speech is concerned, at any rate, it is no different, is it, from speech that is not part of a song, in that it must still be spoken in conformity to the patterns we established just now?

SOCRATES: But we said that there is no longer a need for dirges and lamentations in words.⁴⁰

SOCRATES: What are the lamenting harmonies, then? You tell me; you are musical. [e]

SOCRATES: Shouldn’t we exclude them, then? After all, they are even useless for helping women to be as good as they should be, let alone men.

SOCRATES: Now, surely drunkenness is also entirely inappropriate for our guardians, and softness and idleness as well.

SOCRATES: What, then, are the soft harmonies, and the ones suitable for drinking parties?

GLAUCON: There are some Ionian ones that are called “relaxed,” and also some Lydian ones.

SOCRATES: Could you use any of them, my friend, on men who are warriors? [399a]

GLAUCON: No, never. So it looks as though you have got the Dorian and Phrygian left.

SOCRATES: I do not know the harmonies, so just leave me that harmony that would appropriately imitate the vocal sounds and tones⁴¹ of a courageous person engaged in battle or in other work that he is forced to do, and who—even when he fails and faces wounds or death or some other misfortune—always [b] grapples with what chances to occur, in a disciplined and resolute way. And also leave me another harmony for when he is engaged in peaceful enterprises, or in those he is not forced to do but does willingly; or for when he is trying to persuade someone of something, or entreating a god though prayer, or a human being through instruction and advice; or for when he is doing the opposite—patiently listening to someone else, who is entreating or instructing him, or trying to change his mind through persuasion. Leave me the harmony that will imitate him, when he does not behave arrogantly when these things turn out as he intends; but, on the contrary, is temperate and moderate in all these enterprises, and satisfied with their outcomes. Leave me these two harmonies, then—[c] the forced and the willing—that will best imitate the voices of temperate and courageous men in good fortune and in bad.

SOCRATES: Well, then, we will have no need for multi-stringed or polyharmonic instruments to accompany our odes and songs.

SOCRATES: Then we won’t maintain craftsmen who make triangular lutes, harps, and all other such multi-stringed and polyharmonic instruments. [d]

SOCRATES: What about flute-makers and flute players? Will you allow them into the city? Or isn’t the flute the most multi-stringed of all? And aren’t polyharmonic instruments all imitations of it?

SOCRATES: You have the lyre and the cithara left, then, as useful in our city; and in the countryside, by contrast, there would be a sort of pipe for the herdsman to play.

SOCRATES: Well we are certainly not doing anything new, my friend, in preferring Apollo and his [e] instruments to Marsyas and his.⁴²

SOCRATES: And, by the dog,⁴³ we have certainly been unwittingly re-purifying the city we described as luxurious a while ago.

SOCRATES: Then let’s complete the purification. Now, the next topic after harmonies is the discussion of rhythms. We should not chase after complexity or multifariousness in the basic elements.⁴⁴ On the contrary, we should try to discover the rhythms of a life that is ordered and courageous, and then adapt the metrical foot and the melody to the speech characteristic of it, not the speech to them. What rhythms [400a] these would be is for you to say, just as you did in the case of the harmonies.

GLAUCON: No, by Zeus, I cannot tell you that. However, I can tell you from observation that there are three kinds of metrical feet⁴⁵ out of which the others are constructed, just as there are four, in the case of voices, from which come all the harmonies. But I cannot tell you which sort imitates which sort of life.

SOCRATES: Well, then, we will also have to consult with Damon, on this point, and ask him which metrical feet suit illiberality, arrogance, madness, and [b] the other vices, and which their opposites. I think I have heard him using the unclear terms “warlike,” “complex,” “fingerlike,” and “heroic” to describe one foot, which he arranged, I do not know how, to be equal up and down in the interchange of long and short.⁴⁶ And I think he called one foot an iamb and another a trochee, and assigned long and short quantities to them. In the case of some of these, I think he [c] approved or disapproved of the tempo of the foot as much as of the rhythm itself, or of some combination of the two—I cannot tell you which. But, as I said, we will leave these things to Damon, since to decide them would take a long discussion. Or do you think we should try it?

SOCRATES: But you are able to decide this, at least, aren’t you: that grace goes along with good rhythm and lack of grace with bad rhythm?

SOCRATES: Furthermore, good rhythm goes along [d] with fine speaking and is similar to it, while bad rhythm goes along with the opposite sort, and the same goes for harmony and disharmony; since, as we said just now, rhythm and harmony must conform to speech, and not vice versa.

SOCRATES: And what about the style of speaking and what is said? Don’t they go along with the character of the speaker’s soul?

SOCRATES: Fine speech, then, as well as harmony, grace, and rhythm, go along with naiveté. I do not mean the stupidity for which naiveté is a [e] euphemism, but the quality a mind has when it is equipped with a truly good and fine character.

SOCRATES: And mustn’t our young people try to achieve these on every occasion, if they are going to do the job that is really theirs?

SOCRATES: Now, surely painting and all the crafts similar to it are full of these qualities—weaving is [401a] full of them, as are embroidery, architecture, and likewise the manufacture of implements generally; and so, furthermore, is the nature of bodies and that of the other things that grow. For in all these there is grace or the lack of it. And lack of grace, bad rhythm, and disharmony are akin to bad speech and bad character, while their opposites are akin to and imitate their opposite—a character that is temperate and good.

SOCRATES: Is it only poets we have to supervise, then, compelling them either to embody the image [b] of a good character in their poems or else not to practice their craft among us? Or mustn’t we also supervise all the other craftsmen, and forbid them to represent a character that is bad, intemperate, illiberal, and graceless, in their images of living beings, in their buildings, or in any of the other products of their craft? And mustn’t the one who finds this impossible be prevented from practicing in our city, so that our guardians will not be brought up on images of evil as in a meadow of bad grass, where they crop [c] and graze every day from all that surrounds them until, little by little, they unwittingly accumulate a large amount of evil in their souls? Instead, mustn’t we look for craftsmen who are naturally capable of pursuing what is fine and graceful in their work, so that our young people will live in a healthy place and be benefited on all sides as the influence exerted by those fine works affects their eyes and ears like a healthy breeze from wholesome regions, and imperceptibly guides them from earliest childhood into [d] being similar to, friendly toward, and concordant with the beauty of reason?

SOCRATES: Then aren’t these the reasons, Glaucon, that musical training is most important? First, because rhythm and harmony permeate the innermost element of the soul, affect it more powerfully than anything else, and bring it grace, such education makes one graceful if one is properly trained, and the opposite if one is not. Second, because anyone [e] who has been properly trained will quickly notice if something has been omitted from a thing, or if that thing has not been well crafted or well grown. And so, since he feels distaste correctly, he will praise fine things, be pleased by them, take them into his soul, and, through being nourished by them, become fine and good. What is ugly or shameful, on the other hand, he will correctly condemn and hate while he [402a] is still young, before he is able to grasp the reason. And, because he has been so trained, he will welcome the reason when it comes and recognize it easily because of its kinship with himself.

SOCRATES: It is like learning to read, then. We became adequately proficient only when the few letters that there are did not escape us in any of the different words in which they are scattered about; and when we did not disregard them, either in a small word or a big one, as if they were not worth noticing; but tried hard to distinguish them wherever they [b] occur, knowing that we would not be competent readers until we knew our letters.

SOCRATES: And isn’t it also true that if there are images of letters reflected in water or mirrors, we won’t know them until we know the letters themselves, for both abilities are parts of the same craft and discipline?

SOCRATES: Then, by the gods, aren’t I right in saying that neither we nor the guardians we claim to [c] be educating will be musically trained until we know the different forms of temperance, courage, generosity, high-mindedness, and all their kindred, and their opposites, too, which are carried around all over the place; and see them in the things in which they are, both themselves and their images; and do not disregard them, either in small things or in large, but accept that the knowledge of both belongs to the same craft and discipline?

SOCRATES: Then, if the fine habits in someone’s soul and those in his physical form agree and are in [d] concord with one another, so that both share the same pattern, wouldn’t that be the most beautiful sight for anyone capable of seeing it?

SOCRATES: A really musical person, then, would passionately love people who are most like that. But a disharmonious person, he would not passionately love.

GLAUCON: No, he would not—at least, not if the defect were in the soul. If it were only in the body, however, he would put up with it and still be willing to embrace the boy who had it. [e]

SOCRATES: I understand that you love or have loved such a boy yourself, and I agree with you. But tell me this: does excessive pleasure share anything in common with temperance?

SOCRATES: Can you think of any pleasure that is greater or keener than sexual pleasure?

SOCRATES: But isn’t the right sort of passion a naturally moderate and musically educated passion for order and beauty?

SOCRATES: Then nothing insane and nothing akin to dissoluteness can be involved in the right love?

SOCRATES: Then sexual pleasure must not be involved, must it, and the lover and the boy who passionately [b] love and are loved in the right way must have no share in it?

SOCRATES: It seems, then, that you will lay it down as a law in the city we are founding that a lover—if he can persuade his boyfriend to let him—may kiss him, be with him, and touch him, as a father would a son, for the sake of beautiful things. But in all other respects, his association with the one he cares about must never seem to go any further than this. Otherwise, he will be reproached as untrained in [c] music, and as lacking in appreciation for beautiful things.

SOCRATES: Do you agree, then, that our account of musical training has come to an end? At any rate, it ought to end where it has ended; for surely training in the musical crafts ought to end in a passion for beauty.

SOCRATES: Now, after musical training, our young people must be given physical training.

SOCRATES: And in this, too, they must have a careful training, which starts in childhood and continues throughout life. It would, I believe, be something like this—but you should consider what you think, too. You see, I, for my part, do not believe that a [d] healthy body, by means of its own virtue, makes the soul good. On the contrary, I believe that the opposite is true: a good soul, by means of its own virtue, makes the body as good as possible. What do you think?

SOCRATES: Then if we give adequate care to the mind, entrust it with the detailed supervision of the body, and content ourselves with indicating the general patterns to be followed rather than going on at great length, wouldn’t we be proceeding in the right way? [e]

SOCRATES: Now, we said that our prospective guardians must avoid drunkenness.⁴⁷ For surely a guardian is the last person who should get so drunk that he does not know where on earth he is.

GLAUCON: Yes, it would be ridiculous for a guardian to need a guardian himself!

SOCRATES: What about food? These men are athletes in the greatest contest, aren’t they?

SOCRATES: Then would the regimen of ordinary, trained athletes be suitable for them? [404a]

SOCRATES: But it seems to be a soporific sort of regimen and unreliable as regards health. Or haven’t you noticed that these athletes sleep their lives away, and that if they deviate even a little from their orderly regimen, they become seriously and violently ill?

SOCRATES: Then we need a more refined sort of training for our warrior-athletes, since they must be like sleepless hounds, as it were, who have the keenest possible sight and hearing, and whose health is not so precarious that it cannot sustain the frequent changes of water and diet generally, and the heat waves and winter storms typical of war. [b]

SOCRATES: Wouldn’t the best physical training, then, be akin to the simple musical training we described a moment ago?

SOCRATES: I mean a simple and good physical training, and one that is especially adapted to the conditions of war.

SOCRATES: You could learn that even from Homer. For you know that when his heroes are at war, he does not portray them banqueting on fish⁴⁸—even though they are by the sea in the Hellespont—or boiled meat, but roasted meat only, which is the [c] sort most easily available to soldiers. For it is pretty much always easier to use an open fire than to carry pots and pans around everywhere.

SOCRATES: Nor, I believe, does Homer mention rich sauces anywhere. In fact, isn’t everyone else who is in training also aware that if he is planning to stay in good physical condition, he must avoid such things altogether?

SOCRATES: If you think they are right to do that, my dear Glaucon, you apparently do not approve of Syracusan cuisine or complex Sicilian relishes. [d]

SOCRATES: Then you also object to men having a Corinthian girlfriend, if they are planning to be in good physical condition.⁴⁹

SOCRATES: And the reason for that, I take it, is that we would be right to compare this sort of diet, and this lifestyle, to the polyharmonic songs and lyric odes that make use of every sort of rhythm. [e]

SOCRATES: There complexity engendered intemperance, didn’t it, and here it engenders illness; whereas simplicity in musical training engenders temperance in the soul, and in physical training health in the body?

SOCRATES: And as intemperance and disease breed in a city, aren’t many law courts and surgeries [405a] opened? And don’t the legal and medical professions give themselves airs when even free men in large numbers take them very seriously?

SOCRATES: Could you find better evidence that a city’s education is in a bad and shameful state than when eminent doctors and lawyers are needed, not only by inferior people and handicraftsmen, but by those who claim to have been brought up in the manner of free men? Indeed, don’t you think it is shameful and strong evidence of lack of education [b] to be forced to make use of a justice imposed by others, as if they were one’s masters and judges, because one lacks such qualities oneself?

SOCRATES: Do you really think so? Isn’t it even more shameful not just to spend a good part of one’s life in court defending oneself and prosecuting someone else, but to be so vulgar that one is persuaded to take pride in this and regard oneself as amazingly clever at doing injustice, and as so accomplished at every trick and turn that one can wiggle through any [c] loophole, and avoid punishment—and to do all that for the sake of little worthless things, and because one is ignorant of how much better and finer it is to arrange one’s own life so that one won’t need to find a judge who is asleep?

SOCRATES: What about needing the craft of medicine for something besides wounds or some seasonal illnesses? What about needing it because idleness and the regimen we described has filled one full of gasses [d] and phlegm, like a stagnant swamp, so that sophisticated Asclepiad doctors are forced to come up with names like “flatulence” and “catarrh” to describe one’s diseases? Don’t you think that is shameful?

SOCRATES: And of a sort that I do not imagine even existed in the time of Asclepius himself. My evidence for this is that his sons at Troy did not [e] criticize the woman who treated the wounded Eurypylus with Pramneian wine that had lots of barley meal and grated cheese sprinkled on it, even though such treatment is now thought to cause inflammation. [406a] Moreover, they did not criticize Patroclus, who prescribed the treatment.⁵⁰

SOCRATES: Not if you recall that the sort of modern medicine that coddles the disease was not used by the Asclepiads before the time of Herodicus. Herodicus was a physical trainer who became ill and, through a combination of physical training and medicine, tormented first and foremost himself, and then [b] lots of other people as well.

SOCRATES: By making his death a lengthy process. You see, although he was always tending his illness, he was not able to cure it, since it was terminal. And so he spent his life under medical treatment, with no free time for anything else whatsoever. He suffered torments if he departed even a little from his accustomed regimen; but, thanks to his wisdom, he struggled against death and reached old age.

SOCRATES: And appropriate for someone who did not know that it was not because of ignorance or inexperience [c] of this kind of medicine that Asclepius failed to teach it to his sons, but because he knew that everyone in a well-regulated city has his own work to do, and that no one has the time to be ill and under treatment all his life. We see how ridiculous this would be in the case of craftsmen, but we do not see it in the case of those who are supposedly happy—the rich.

SOCRATES: When a carpenter is ill, he expects to get a drug from his doctor that will make him throw [d] up what is making him sick or evacuate it through his bowels; or to get rid of his disease through surgery or cautery. If anyone prescribes a lengthy regimen for him and tells him that he should rest with his head bandaged and so on, he quickly replies that he has no time to be ill, and that it is not profitable for him to live like that, always minding his illness and neglecting the work at hand. After that, he says goodbye [e] to his doctor, resumes his usual regimen, lives doing his own job, and recovers his health; alternatively, if his body cannot withstand the illness, he dies and escapes his troubles.

GLAUCON: That does seem to be the correct way for someone like that to use the craft of medicine.

SOCRATES: Isn’t that because he had a job to do, and that if he could not do it, it would not profit him [407a] to go on living?

SOCRATES: But a rich person, it is said, has no job assigned to him of the sort that would make his life not worth living if he had to keep away from it.

SOCRATES: What, have you not heard the saying of Phocylides that once one has the means of life, one must practice virtue?⁵¹

SOCRATES: Let’s not quarrel with him about that. But let’s try to find out for ourselves whether this virtue is something a rich person must practice, and if his life is not worth living if he does not practice it; or whether nursing an illness, while an obstacle [b] to putting your mind to carpentry and other crafts, is no obstacle whatever to taking Phocylides’ advice.

GLAUCON: But, by Zeus, it is: excessive care of the body that goes beyond simple physical training is pretty much the biggest obstacle of all. For it’s a nuisance in household management, in military service, and even in sedentary political office.

SOCRATES: And most important of all, surely, is that it makes any sort of learning, thought, or private [c] meditation difficult, by forever causing imaginary headaches or dizziness and accusing philosophy of causing them. Hence, wherever this sort of virtue is practiced and submitted to philosophical scrutiny, excessive care of the body hinders it. For it is constantly making you imagine that you are ill and never lets you stop agonizing about your body.

SOCRATES: Then won’t we say that Asclepius knew this, too, and that he invented the craft of medicine for people whose bodies are healthy in nature and habit, but have some specific disease in them? [d] That is the type of person and condition for which he invented it. He rid them of their disease by means of drugs or surgery, and then prescribed their normal regimen, so that affairs of politics would not be harmed. However, he did not attempt to prescribe regimens for those whose bodies were riddled with disease, so that by drawing off a little here and pouring in a little there, he could make their life a prolonged misery and enable them to produce offspring in all probability like themselves. He did not think that he should treat someone who could not live a normal life, since such a person would profit neither himself [e] nor his city.

SOCRATES: Clearly so. And it was because he was like that, don’t you see, that his sons, too, turned out to be good men in the war at Troy, and practiced [408a] the craft of medicine as I say they did. Don’t you remember that they “sucked out the blood and applied gentle drugs” to the wound Pandarus inflicted on Menelaus? But they no more prescribed what he should eat or drink after that than they did for Eurypylus?⁵² That was because they assumed that their drugs were sufficient to cure men who were healthy and living an orderly life before being wounded, even if they happened to drink wine mixed with barley and cheese right afterward. But they [b] thought that the lives of naturally sick and intemperate people were profitable neither to themselves nor to anyone else, that the craft of medicine shouldn’t be practiced on them, and that they should not be given treatment, not even if they were richer than Midas.

SOCRATES: It is the right view to hold of them. And yet it is on just this point that Pindar and the tragedians are not persuaded by us. They say that Asclepius, even though he was the son of Apollo, was bribed with gold to heal a rich man who was already dying, and that that is why he was struck by lightning. [c] But, in view of what we said before, we won’t accept both claims from them. On the contrary, we will say that if Asclepius was the son of a god, he was not a money-grubber; and that if he was a money-grubber, he was not the son of a god.

GLAUCON: That’s absolutely right. But what do you say about the following, Socrates? Won’t we need to have good doctors in our city? And the best, I take it, will be those who have treated the greatest number of healthy and diseased people. In the same way, the best judges will be those who have associated with [d] people with multifarious natures.

SOCRATES: I certainly agree that we need good ones. But do you know which ones I regard as such?

SOCRATES: Well, I will try. However, you ask about things that are not alike in the same question.

SOCRATES: Doctors, it is true, would become cleverest if, in addition to learning the craft of medicine, they associated with the greatest possible number of the most diseased bodies right from childhood, had themselves experienced every illness, and were not, by nature, very healthy. After all, they do not [e] treat a body with a body. If they did, we would not allow their bodies to be or become bad. But it is with a soul that a body is treated, and it is not possible for a soul to treat anything well if it is or has become bad itself.

SOCRATES: But a judge, my friend, does rule a soul with a soul. And it is not possible for a soul to [409a] be nurtured among bad souls from childhood, to have associated with them, and to have itself indulged in every sort of injustice, so as to be able to draw exact inferences from itself about the injustices of others, as in the case of diseases of the body. On the contrary, it itself must have no experience of, and be uncontaminated by, bad characters while it is young, if as a fine and good soul itself, it is going to make judgments about what is just in a healthy way. That is precisely the reason, indeed, that good people are thought to be naïve when they are young and easily deceived by unjust ones: they do not have models within themselves of the behavior of bad ones. [b]

SOCRATES: That is why a good judge must not be young, but old—a late learner of what sort of thing injustice is, who has become aware of it, not as something at home in his own soul, but as an alien thing present in other people’s souls. He must have trained himself over many years to discern how naturally bad it is by using his theoretical knowledge, not his own intimate experience of it. [c]

GLAUCON: At any rate, it would seem that the noblest judge would be like that.

SOCRATES: And so is the good one you asked about, since the one who has a good soul is good. The clever and suspicious person, on the other hand, who has committed many injustices himself and thinks of himself to be unscrupulous and wise, appears clever when he associates with those like himself, because he is on his guard and looks to the models within himself. But when he meets with good people who are older, he is seen to be stupid, distrustful at the wrong time, and ignorant of what a healthy character is, since he has no model of this within [d] himself. But because he meets bad people more often than good ones, he seems more wise than foolish, both to himself and to them as well.

SOCRATES: Then we must not look for a good judge among people like that, but among the sort we described earlier. For while a bad person could never come to know either vice or virtue, a naturally virtuous person, when educated, will in time acquire knowledge of both virtue and vice. And it is someone like that, and not a bad person, who becomes a wise judge in my view. [e]

SOCRATES: Then won’t you establish by law in your city both the craft of medicine we mentioned and this craft of judging along with it? And these crafts will care for such of your citizens as have naturally good bodies and souls; but those whose bodies [410a] are not like that they will allow to die, while those whose souls are naturally and incurably bad they will themselves put to death.

GLAUCON: Yes, we have seen that that is best both for those who receive such treatment and for the city.

SOCRATES: And so it is clear that your young people will be wary of coming to need a judge, since they employ that simple sort of musical training, which we said engenders temperance.

SOCRATES: And won’t a person who is musically trained hunt for a type of physical training by following these same tracks, and catch it, if he chooses? [b] And won’t the result be that he will have no need of the craft of medicine, except when absolutely necessary?

SOCRATES: And he will undertake even the regimens and exertions of physical training with an eye less to strength than to arousing the spirited part of his nature, unlike all other athletes who use diets and exertions only to gain muscle power.

SOCRATES: Then, doesn’t it follow, Glaucon, that those who established musical training and physical training did not establish them with the aim that some people attribute to them: namely, to treat the [c] body with the former and the soul with the latter?

SOCRATES: It looks as though they established both chiefly for the sake of the soul.

SOCRATES: Have you never noticed the mind-set of those who have a lifelong association with physical training but stay away from musical training? Or, again, that of those who do the opposite?

SOCRATES: Savagery and toughness, in the one case; softness and over-cultivation, in the other. [d]

GLAUCON: I have certainly noticed that people who devote themselves exclusively to physical training turn out to be more savage than they should, while those who devote themselves to musical training turn out to be softer than is good for them.

SOCRATES: And surely the savageness derives from the spirited element of their nature, which, if rightly nurtured, becomes courageous, but, if overstrained, is likely to become hard and harsh.

SOCRATES: What about the cultivation? Wouldn’t it derive from the philosophic element of their nature, [e] which, if relaxed too much, becomes softer than it should, but, if well nurtured, is cultivated and orderly?

SOCRATES: And isn’t the soul of the person thus harmonized temperate and courageous? [411a]

SOCRATES: And that of the inharmonious person, cowardly and savage? GLAUCON: Exactly.

SOCRATES: So when someone gives himself over to musical training and lets the flute pour into his soul through his ears, as through a funnel, those sweet, soft, and plaintive harmonies we mentioned; and when he spends his whole life humming, entranced by song, the first result is that whatever spirit he had, he softens the way he would iron and makes useful, rather than useless and brittle. But when he keeps at it unrelentingly and charms his spirit, the next result [b] is that he melts it and dissolves it completely until he has cut out, so to speak, the very sinews of his soul and makes himself “a feeble warrior.”⁵⁴

SOCRATES: And if he has a spiritless nature to begin with, this happens quickly. But if he has a spirited one, his spirit becomes weak and unstable, quickly inflamed by trivial things and quickly extinguished. As a result, people like that become quick-tempered and prone to anger, instead of spirited, and [c] filled with peevishness.

SOCRATES: On the other hand, what about someone who works hard at physical training, eats very well, and never touches musical training or philosophy? At first, because his body is in good strong condition, isn’t he full of pride and spirit, and more courageous than he was before?

SOCRATES: But what happens if he does nothing but this and never enters into partnership with a Muse? Even if there was some love of learning in his soul, because it never tastes any sort of instruction or [d] investigation, and never participates in any discussion or in any of the rest of musical training, doesn’t it become weak, deaf, and blind, because it never receives any stimulation or nourishment, and its senses are never purified?

SOCRATES: Then a person like that, I take it, becomes an unmusical hater of argument⁵⁵ who no longer uses argument to persuade people, but force and savagery, behaves like a wild beast, and lives in [e] awkward ignorance without rhythm or grace.

SOCRATES: So I, for one, would claim that it is to deal with these two things, so it seems, that a god has given two crafts to human beings—musical training and physical training—to deal with the philosophical and spirited elements, and not, except as a byproduct, with the soul and the body; but with these two, so that they might be harmonized with one another by being stretched and relaxed to the appropriate [412a] degree.

SOCRATES: Then it is the person who makes the best blend of musical and physical training, and applies them in the most perfect proportion to his soul, that we would be most correct to describe as completely trained in music and as most in harmony—far more so than the one who merely attunes his strings to one another.

SOCRATES: Then won’t we also need this sort of person in our city, Glaucon, as a permanent overseer, if indeed its constitution is to be preserved?

SOCRATES: Those, then, would be the patterns of their education and upbringing. For why should we enumerate their dances, hunts, chases with hounds, athletic contests, and horse races? After all, it is pretty much clear that they should be consistent with these patterns, and so there should no longer be any difficulty in discovering them.

SOCRATES: All right. Now, what is the next question we have to settle? Isn’t it which of these same people will rule and which be ruled?

SOCRATES: Well, isn’t it clear that the older ones must rule, whereas the younger ones must be ruled?

SOCRATES: In the present case, then, since the rulers must be the best of the guardians, mustn’t they be the ones who are best at guarding the city?

SOCRATES: Then mustn’t they be knowledgeable and capable in this matter, and, in addition, mustn’t they care for the city?

SOCRATES: And he would love something most if he thought that the same things were advantageous both for it and for himself, and if he thought that when it did well, he would do well, too; and that if it didn’t, the opposite would happen.

SOCRATES: Then we must choose from among our guardians the sort of men who seem on the basis of our observation to be most inclined, throughout their entire lives, to do what they believe to be advantageous for the city, and most unwilling to do the opposite. [e]

SOCRATES: I think, then, that we will have to observe them at every stage of their lives to make sure that they are good guardians of this conviction, and that neither compulsion nor sorcery will cause them to discard or forget their belief that they must do what is best for the city.

SOCRATES: I will tell you. It seems to me that the departure of a belief from someone’s mind is either voluntary or involuntary—voluntary when he learns that the belief is false; involuntary in the case of all true beliefs. [413a]

GLAUCON: I understand the voluntary sort, but I still need instruction about the involuntary.

SOCRATES: What? Don’t you know that people are involuntarily deprived of good things, but voluntarily deprived of bad ones? And isn’t being deceived about the truth a bad thing, whereas possessing the truth is a good one? Or don’t you think that to believe things that are is to possess the truth?

GLAUCON: No, you are right. And I do think that people are involuntarily deprived of true beliefs.

SOCRATES: Then isn’t it through theft, sorcery, and compulsion that this happens? [b]

SOCRATES: I suppose I am making myself as clear as a tragic poet! By those who have their beliefs stolen from them, I mean those who are over-persuaded, or those who forget; because argument, in the one case, and time, in the other, takes away their beliefs without their noticing. You understand now, don’t you?

SOCRATES: Well then, by those who are compelled, I mean those who are made to change their beliefs by some suffering or pain.

SOCRATES: And the victims of sorcery, I think you would agree, are those who change their beliefs [c] because they are charmed by pleasure or terrified by some fear.

SOCRATES: Well then, as I was just saying, we must discover which of them are best at safeguarding within themselves the conviction that they must always do what they believe to be best for the city. We must watch them right from childhood, and set them tasks in which a person would be most likely to forget such a conviction or be deceived out of it. And we must select the ones who remember and are difficult [d] to deceive, and reject the others. Do you agree?

SOCRATES: And we must also subject them to labors, pains, and contests, and watch for the same things there.

SOCRATES: Then we must also set up a third kind of competition for sorcery. Like those who lead colts into noise and tumult to see if they are afraid, we must subject our young people to fears and then plunge them once again into pleasures, so as to test them much more thoroughly than people test gold [e] in a fire. And if any of them seems to be immune to sorcery, preserves his composure throughout, is a good guardian of himself and of the musical training he has received, and proves himself to be rhythmical and harmonious in all these trials—he is the sort of person who would be most useful, both to himself and to the city. And anyone who is tested as a child, youth, and adult, and always emerges as being without impurities, should be established as a ruler of the city [414a] as well as a guardian, and should be honored in life and receive the most prized tombs and memorials after his death. But those who do not should be rejected. That is the sort of way, Glaucon, that I think rulers and guardians should be selected and established. Though I have provided only a pattern, not the precise details.

SOCRATES: Then wouldn’t it really be most correct to call these people complete guardians—the [b] ones who guard against external enemies and internal friends, so that the former will lack the power, and the latter the desire, to do any evil; but to call the young people to whom we were referring as guardians just now, auxiliaries and supporters of the guardians’ convictions?

SOCRATES: How, then, could we devise one of those useful lies we were talking about a while ago,⁵⁶ a single noble lie that would, preferably, persuade [c] even the rulers themselves; but, failing that, the rest of the city?

SOCRATES: Nothing new, but a sort of Phoenician story⁵⁷ about something that happened in lots of places prior to this—at least, that is what the poets say and have persuaded people to believe. It has not happened in our day, and I do not know if it could happen. It would take a lot of persuasion to get people to believe it.

SOCRATES: You will realize that I have every reason to hesitate, when I do tell it.

SOCRATES: All right, I will—though I do not know where I will get the audacity or the words to tell it. [d] I will first be trying to persuade the rulers and the soldiers, and then the rest of the city, that the upbringing and the education we gave them were like dreams; that they only imagined they were undergoing all the things that were happening to them, while in fact they themselves were at that time down inside the earth being formed and nurtured, and that their weapons and the rest of their equipment were also manufactured there. When they were entirely completed, [e] the earth, their mother, sent them up, so that now, just as if the land in which they live were their mother and nurse, they must deliberate on its behalf, defend it if anyone attacks it, and regard the other citizens as their earthborn brothers.

SOCRATES: No, it was only to be expected. But all the same, you should listen to the rest of the story. “Although all of you in the city are brothers,” we will [415a] say to them in telling our story, “when the god was forming you, he mixed gold into those of you who are capable of ruling, which is why they are the most honorable; silver into the auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and other craftsmen. For the most part, you will produce children like yourselves; but, because you are all related, a silver child will occasionally be born to a golden parent, a golden [b] child to a silver parent, and so on. Therefore, the first and most important command from the god to the rulers is that there is nothing they must guard better or watch more carefully than the mixture of metals in the souls of their offspring. If an offspring of theirs is born with a mixture of iron or bronze, they must not pity him in any way, but assign him an honor appropriate to his nature and drive him out to join [c] the craftsmen or the farmers. On the other hand, if an offspring of the latter is found to have a mixture of gold or silver, they will honor him and take him up to join the guardians or the auxiliaries. For there is an oracle that the city will be ruined if it ever has an iron or a bronze guardian.” So, have you a device that will make them believe this story?

GLAUCON: No, none that would make this group believe it themselves. But I do have one for their [d] sons, for later generations, and for all other people who come after them.

SOCRATES: Well, even that would have a good effect, by making them care more for the city and for each other. For I think I understand what you mean—namely, that all this will go where tradition leads. What we can do, however, when we have armed our earthborn people, is lead them forth with their rulers at their head. They must go and look for the best place in the city for a military encampment, a site from which they can most easily control anyone in the city who is unwilling to obey the laws, or repel [e] any outside enemy who, like a wolf, attacks the fold. And when they have established their camp and sacrificed to the appropriate gods, they must make their sleeping quarters, mustn’t they?

SOCRATES: And mustn’t these provide adequate shelter against the storms of winter and the heat of summer?

GLAUCON: Yes, of course. After all, I assume you are talking about their living quarters.

SOCRATES: I will try to tell you. You see, it is surely the most terrible and most shameful thing in the world for shepherds to rear dogs as auxiliaries to help them with their flocks in such a way that those dogs themselves—because of intemperance, hunger, or some other bad condition—try to do evil to the sheep, acting not like sheepdogs but like wolves.

SOCRATES: So, mustn’t we use every safeguard to prevent our auxiliaries from treating the citizens like [b] that—because they are stronger—and becoming savage masters rather than gentle allies?

SOCRATES: And wouldn’t they have been provided with the greatest safeguard possible if they have been really well educated?

SOCRATES: That is not something that deserves to be asserted so confidently, my dear Glaucon. But what does deserve it is what we were saying just now, that they must have the right education, whatever it is, if they are going to have what will do most to make [c] them gentle to one another and to the ones they are guarding.

SOCRATES: But anyone with any sense will tell us that, besides this education, they must be provided with living quarters and other property of the sort that will neither prevent them from being the best guardians nor encourage them to do evil to the other citizens. [d]

SOCRATES: Consider, then, whether or not they should live and be housed in some such way as this, if they are going to be the sort of men we described. First, none of them should possess any private property that is not wholly necessary. Second, none should have living quarters or storerooms that are not open for all to enter at will. Such provisions as are required by temperate and courageous men, who are warrior-athletes, they should receive from the other citizens [e] as wages for their guardianship, the amount being fixed so that there is neither a shortfall nor a surplus at the end of the year. They should have common messes to go to, and should live together like soldiers in a camp. We will tell them that they have gold and silver of a divine sort in their souls as a permanent gift from the gods, and have no need of human gold in addition. And we will add that it is impious for them to defile this divine possession by possessing an admixture of mortal gold, because many impious deeds have been done for the sake of the currency of the masses, whereas their sort is pure. No, they alone among the [417a] city’s population are forbidden by divine law to handle or even touch gold and silver. They must not be under the same roof as these metals, wear them as jewelry, or drink from gold or silver goblets. And by behaving in that way, they would save both themselves and the city. But if they acquire private land, houses, and money themselves, they will be household managers and farmers instead of guardians—hostile masters of the other citizens, instead of their allies. They will spend [b] their whole lives hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, much more afraid of internal than of external enemies—already rushing, in fact, to the brink of their own destruction and that of the rest of the city as well. For all these reasons, let’s declare that that is how the guardians must be provided with housing and the rest, and establish it as a law. Or don’t you agree?