LITMIR.BIZ

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refusal to elucidate the origins of the city’s first inhabitants serves the convenient purpose of avoiding all the thorny problems associated with settling actual cities. The location of the city and the origins of the first inhabitants become from the very beginning a major obstacle to the legislative project of the Laws (704c ff.), but there is no comparable discussion in the Republic. The appearance of the philosopher-kings, who are ostensibly introduced to render the city possible (471c6 ff.), reorients the discussion away from the founding of a new city, and toward explaining how philosophers might emerge and come to power in existing cities. The new-found emphasis on existing cities pushes the question of the new city and its origins into the background.

      Adeimantus senses that the prolonged discussion of philosophy and its travails in existing cities has somehow shifted the terrain. He asks Socrates whether any of the current regimes is worthy of philosophy (497a9–10). Socrates replies that none are, but that the best regime would be (497b1–c3). However, Socrates no longer identifies the best regime with the one that has been elaborated in the dialogue, since he anticipates the question of “what this [best] regime is” (497c4). Somewhat confused, Adeimantus responds by asking Socrates whether the best regime and the city founded by the interlocutors in the dialogue are indeed the same (497c5–6). Socrates seems to answer in the affirmative, but with a major qualification: the philosophers could rule in any city possessing the same logos that was embodied in Adeimantus’s lawgiving (497c7–d2). Socrates also substitutes the second person singular “you” for Adeimantus’s “we” (cf. 497c6, 497d2), as if to suggest that he has again ceased to take part in this lawgiving. Furthermore, the use of the imperfect tense of the verb tithēmi to signify Adeimantus’s lawgiving seems to relegate it to the past. Whatever one might make of this surprising exchange,²⁵ this much is clear: in the ensuing discussion the city that dominated the first half of the dialogue plays a diminished role. Socrates drops the phrases “this city” and “our city” in explaining how an indefinite “city” can take up philosophy without being destroyed (497d8). The word “city” without an article recurs multiple times as Socrates explores the possibility of the rule of philosophers (499b2, 499c7, 501a2, 502b4). Socrates’s attention has shifted away from the city founded in the first half of dialogue toward whatever existing city might be amenable to the rule of philosophers. He now speaks of the sons of kings or other current rulers acquiring a passion for philosophy, which would indeed seem a much quicker and less risky route to philosopher-kings than establishing a new city from scratch (499b7–c1, 502a5–6). It allows Socrates to evade the unresolved question of the city’s ethnic identity. And yet this new proposal will soon meet opposition from the ethnos as well.

      In the subsequent discussion, Socrates does reintroduce “the laws and practices that we have gone through” in the first half of the dialogue (502b6–7). But the absence of the city for which these laws were initially intended means that they have been detached from their original context and integrated into a program of legislative reform for a preexisting city that has been rendered obedient to philosopher rulers (502b4–5). The old approach was based on “beholding a city coming to be in speech” (369a5–6), while the new approach is based on philosophers designing a divine model and striving to implement it in existing cities (500e1–3). It now seems that the city was never meant to be founded in deed, but rather elaborated in speech, so that it may serve as a model for the drastic reforms that philosophers will impose once they have taken over existing cities. When Socrates and Glaucon return as founders, their primary task is no longer to design legislation for a new city, but rather to compel the philosophers to concern themselves with government in general (519c8ff.).

      The philosopher kings, once they have been compelled to rule, would not be content with existing norms. They would have to purify the city and the ways of its inhabitants, like a tablet that an eraser has returned to a state of pristine blankness. Only then can they initiate the desired reforms (501a2–c2). The precise meaning of this purification appears in graphic terms at the end of Book VII, with its ludicrous proposal for the expulsion of all the inhabitants over ten years of age, once “the true philosophers, either one or many, come to power in a city” (540d3–4, italics mine). The sweeping expulsion of the parents followed by the sound education of the children along the lines elaborated in the first half of the dialogue is the only way a city in any nation (ethnos) could become truly happy (541a5–6). Socrates’s rare mention of the ethnos here is highly significant. By noting that such an expulsion would be equally necessary in any ethnos, Socrates indicates how completely the customs of every nation are likely to resist the establishment of his city. The notion that a city rooted in parricide and the destruction of ancestral customs could somehow “profit the nation in which it arises” (541a6–7) is absurd: it recalls and generalizes Socrates’s earlier assertion that the city that had just abolished the family and introduced women into the army could reconcile warring Greeks (471a6–7). The broadening of the dialogue’s concern from a city to the nation to which the city belongs serves to reiterate the practical impossibility of the city. Glaucon was induced to call the city Greek; Socrates eventually consigned it to some remote barbarian place; now it has become equally anathema to the ways of every nation on earth. Socrates eventually confirms that this city is a model existing only in heaven and in the minds of the humans who contemplate it (592a10–b4). Since no founder of an earthly city would have the luxury of flouting the ways of the nation in which the city comes to be (cf. 541a6–7), it is only as a founder of a heavenly city that Socrates can afford to abstract from merely “ethnic” considerations.²⁶

      Back to the Nation: Poetry and the Myth of Er

      The conclusion that the city of the Republic does not bear any ethnic stamp seems to have brought our discussion of ethnicity in the Republic to an end. But the dialogue does not end with an elaboration of the city. In Book X, Socrates once again discusses poetry, a subject more closely linked to Greek national character than the city that has dominated much of the dialogue.

      Socrates’s purpose is ostensibly to justify his earlier policy of restricting poetry within the city (595a3–6). Yet if the city, as Glaucon has proclaimed, does not exist anywhere on earth, how can poetry be censored in it? Socrates later implies that the real question might be the relationship between poetry and soul, or else between poetry and the regime within the soul (595a7–b1, 605b7–8, 608b1). The issue is no longer whether poetry is good for the city, but whether it is good for the individual soul. In treating this question, Socrates attempts to steer Glaucon and the other interlocutors away from their attachment to traditional Greek poetry. We recall our earlier uncertainty about whether Socrates has managed to dissuade Glaucon from his excessive attachment to Greece, and consequent desire to wage a war against barbarians. Perhaps the gentle Greek city, which eventually turns out to be a remote barbarian city and finally a city in heaven, is insufficient for attaining that goal. In addition to the city, a more direct and personal confrontation with Greek poetry and civilization is required.

      This discussion contains what appears to be the clearest statement about Greek identity in the Republic. Socrates remarks that many people call Homer “the educator of Greece” (606e2–3), and wish to lead their life according to his precepts. The implication is that Greece might be defined as a civilization that learned its way of life from Homer and his poetry (606e1–607a1). In linking national Greek identity to the poetry of Homer, Plato gestures toward a theme that will become the basis of Alfarabi’s presentation of the Umma as a civilization rooted in language, national legends, and poetry. Socrates, however, does not appear entirely convinced by this view. He admits that he himself has been fond of Homer since childhood and is therefore ashamed to criticize him (595b9–10), but manages to overcome this shame. Homer, he insists, did not educate anybody, in either medicine, generalship, governance, artisanship, or way of life (599b9–600e2). Yet as many commentators have noted, there is a certain amount of irony in this passage (Rosen, 370; Republic, trans. Bloom, 429–30). The eccentric, pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras, not to mention the sophists Protagoras and Prodicus, are adduced as genuine educators, while the criticisms cast upon Homer for his lack of political, military, and artisanal success might easily apply to Socrates himself. Furthermore, Socrates’s acknowledgment that many of the best and brightest Greeks strive to model their life after Homer’s poems (606e1–607a2) appears to contradict

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