Plato gorgias robin waterfield pdf

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PLATO

Republic

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PLATO

Republic

Translated from the New Standard Greek Text, with Introduction, by

C. D. C. R

EEVE

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Indianapolis/Cambridge

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Copyright © 2004 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

08 07 06 05 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

For further information, please address: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937

www.hackettpublishing.com

Cover design by Abigail Coyle Interior design by Jennifer Plumley Composition by William Hartman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Plato. [Republic. English] Republic / translated from the new standard Greek text, with

introduction, by C.D.C. Reeve. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-87220-737-4 (hardcover) — ISBN 0-87220-736-6 (pbk.) 1. Political science—Early works to 1800. 2 Utopias. I. Reeve, C.D.C.,

1948– II. Title. JC71.P513 2004 321'.07—dc22

2004013418

ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-737-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-736-3 (paper) eISBN: 978-1-60384-013-2 (ebook)

v

For Daddy on his 88th birthday, with much love.

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Contents

Preface

viii

Introduction

ix

Select Bibliography

xxviii

Synopsis

xxx

Note to the Reader

xxxiv

THE REPUBLIC

Book 1 1

Book 2 36

Book 3 66

Book 4 103

Book 5 136

Book 6 176

Book 7 208

Book 8 238

Book 9 270

Book 10 297

Glossary of Terms

327

Glossary and Index of Names

330

General Index

338

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viii

Preface

I have been a student of the

Republic

since I first encountered it as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1988 I published a book about it (

Philosopher-Kings

). Four years later, I published a revision of G. M. A. Grube’s excellent translation. Perhaps I should have rested content with that, but my desire to have a

Republic

translation of my own proved too strong. The fruit of five years’ work, it is now in print. Naturally, I hope it improves on existing translations. If so, I have their producers largely to thank. Certainly, I have ransacked them for assistance. Tom Griffith has helped greatly, Robin Waterfield too, and also (in the case of Books 5 and 10) Stephen Halliwell. Over the years, my respect has grown for earlier translations—for that of George Grube, from which I learned a huge amount, but also for those of Allan Bloom and Paul Shorey.

Every translation, even the most self-consciously and flat-footedly slavish, is somewhat interpretative. There is no avoiding that. But I have tried to make this one as uninterpretative and close to the original as possible. One con- scious deviation from strict accuracy, however, will be obvious at a glance. The

Republic

is largely in reported speech. Socrates is relating a conversation he had in the past. But I have cast his report as an explicit dialogue in direct speech, with identified speakers. In the

Theaetetus,

Plato has Eucleides adopt a similar stratagem. “This is the book,” he says to Terpsion; “You see, I have written it out like this: I have not made Socrates relate the conversation as he related it to me, but I represent him as speaking directly to the persons with whom he said he had this conversation.” Decades of teaching the

Republic

have persuaded me that the minimal loss in literalness involved in adopting Eucleides’ stratagem is more than made up for in readability and intelligibility.

I renew my gratitude to John Cooper for his always judicious advice, and to Paul Woodruff for his. I am also grateful to the publisher’s readers, Chris- topher Rowe and the team of Patrick Miller and Christopher Childers. The latter—in particular—saved me from numerous errors and omissions. My debt to their care and scholarship is unrepayable. I am grateful to Hackett Publishing Company itself for trusting me with what is, in many ways, its flagship text; to my editor, Deborah Wilkes, for her encouragement and support; to Jenevieve Maerker for her help with the Introduction and, with Abigail Coyle, for the cover design. Many warm thanks, finally, to Janet Zweig for suggesting the wonderfully appropriate cover photograph.

Chapel Hill, June 2004

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ix

Introduction

No one doubts that the

Republic

is one of the very greatest works of West- ern philosophy. Like nothing before it and very little since, it combines philosophical and literary resourcefulness of the highest order in an attempt to answer the most important question of all—how should we live if we want to live well and be happy? Justly or unjustly? Morally or immorally? Moreover, the answer it develops is based on an unusually rich account of our nature and the nature of reality. Ethics, politics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphysics are all woven together in it, and their later developments have been decisively shaped by its contribution to them. Contemporary philoso- phers read the

Republic,

as their predecessors did, not out of piety, but because it continues to challenge, disquiet, and inspire. Western philosophy is not, to be sure, simply a series of footnotes to this amazing text, but many of its best stories begin here.

P

LATO

Plato was born in Athens in 429 BCE and died there in 348/7. His father, Ariston, traced his descent to Codrus, who was supposedly king of Athens in the eleventh century BCE; his mother, Perictione, was related to Solon, architect of the Athenian constitution (594/3). While Plato was still a boy, his father died and his mother married Pyrilampes, a friend of the great Athenian statesman Pericles. Hence Plato was familiar with Athenian poli- tics from childhood and was expected to enter it himself. Horrified by actual political events, however, including the execution of his mentor and teacher Socrates in 399 BCE, he turned instead to philosophy, thinking that only it could bring true justice to human beings and put an end to civil war and political upheaval (see

Seventh Letter

324b–326b). In the

Republic,

written around 380 BCE, he lays out the grounds for this at once pessimis- tic and optimistic assessment.

Plato’s works, which are predominantly dialogues, all seem to have sur- vived. They are customarily divided into four chronological groups, though the precise ordering (especially within groups) is controversial:

Early:

Alcibiades, Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Hip- pias Major, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Theages

Transitional:

Euthydemus, Gorgias, Meno, Protagoras

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x

Middle:

Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Parmenides, The- aetetus

Late:

Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Laws

Besides writing his dialogues, Plato contributed to philosophy by founding the Academy, arguably the first university. This was a center of research and teaching, both in theoretical subjects and also in more practical ones. Eudoxus, who gave a geometrical explanation of the revolutions of the sun, moon, and planets, brought his own students with him to join Plato and studied and taught in the Academy; Theaetetus developed solid geometry there. But cities also invited members of the Academy to help them in the practical task of developing new political constitutions.

The Academy lasted for some centuries after Plato died, ending around 80 BCE. Its early leaders, including his own nephew, Speusippus, who suc- ceeded him, all modified his teachings in various ways. Later, influenced by the early Socratic dialogues, which end in puzzlement (

aporia

), the Acad- emy, under Arcesilaus, Carneades, and other philosophers, defended skepti- cism; later still, influenced by Plato’s other writings, Platonists were more dogmatic, less unsure. Platonism of one sort or another—Middle or Neo- or something else—remained the dominant philosophy in the pagan world of late antiquity, influencing St. Augustine among others, until the emperor Justinian closed the pagan schools at Athens in 529 CE. Much of what passed for Plato’s thought until the nineteenth century, when German scholars pioneered a return to Plato’s writings themselves, was a mixture of these different “Platonisms.”

Given the vast span and diversity of Plato’s writings and the fact that they are dialogues, not treatises, it is little wonder that they were read in many different ways, even by Plato’s ancient followers. In this respect nothing has changed: different schools of philosophy and textual interpretation con- tinue to find profoundly different messages and methods in Plato. Doctrinal continuities, discontinuities, and outright contradictions of one sort or another are discovered, disputed, rediscovered, and redisputed. Neglected dialogues are taken up afresh, old favorites newly interpreted. New ques- tions are raised, old ones resurrected and reformulated: is Plato’s Socrates really the great ironist of philosophy or a largely non-ironic figure? Is Plato a systematic philosopher with answers to give or a questioner only? Is he primarily a theorist about universals, or a moralist, or a mystic with an oth- erworldly view about the nature of reality and the place of the human psyche in it? Is the

Republic

a totalitarian work, a hymn to freedom properly conceived, or a reductio ad absurdum of the very argument it seems to be advancing? Does the dramatic structure of the dialogues undermine their apparent philosophical arguments? Should Plato’s negative remarks about the efficacy of written philosophy (

Phaedrus

274b–278b) lead us to look

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xi

behind his dialogues for what Plato’s student Aristotle refers to as the “so- called unwritten doctrines” (

Physics

209

b

14–5)? Besides this continued engagement with Plato’s writings, there is, of

course, the not entirely separate engagement with the problems Plato brought to philosophy, the methods he invented to solve them, and the solutions he suggested and explored. So many and various are these, how- ever, that they constitute not just Plato’s philosophy, but a large part of phi- losophy itself. Part of his heritage, they are also what we inevitably bring to our reading of his works.

S

OCRATES

Socrates is the central figure in the

Republic,

as in most of Plato’s works. In some dialogues he is thought to be—and probably is—based to some extent on the historical Socrates. These are often called “Socratic” dialogues for this reason. In the transitional, middle, and late dialogues, however, he is thought to be increasingly a mouthpiece for ideas that go well beyond Plato’s Socratic heritage.

In the Socratic dialogues, philosophy consists almost exclusively in ques- tioning people about the conventionally recognized moral virtues. What is piety (

Euthyphro

)? Or courage (

Laches

)? Or temperance (

Charmides

)? These are his characteristic questions. He seems to take for granted, moreover, that there are correct answers to them—that temperance, piety, courage, and the rest are each some definite characteristic or form (

eidos, idea

). He does not discuss the nature of these forms, however, nor develop any explicit theory of them or our knowledge of them. He does not, for that matter, explain his interest in definitions, nor justify his claim that if we do not know what, for example, justice is, we cannot know whether it is vir- tue, whether it makes its possessor happy, or anything else of any signifi- cance about it (

Republic

354b–c). Socrates’ style of questioning is called (by us, not him) an

elenchus—

from the Greek verb

elengchein,

meaning to examine or refute. He asks what jus- tice is. His interlocutor puts forward a definition he sincerely believes to be correct. Socrates refutes this definition by showing that it conflicts with other beliefs the interlocutor sincerely holds and is unwilling to abandon. In the ideal situation, which is never actually portrayed in the Socratic dia- logues, this process continues until a satisfactory definition emerges, one that is not inconsistent with other sincerely held beliefs, and so can with- stand elenctic scrutiny.

The definitions Socrates encounters in his examinations of others prove unsatisfactory. But through these examinations—which are always at the same time self-examinations (

Charmides

166c–d,

Hippias Major

298b–c,

Protagoras

348c–d)—he comes to accept some positive theses that

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xii

have resisted refutation. Among these are the following three famous Socratic “paradoxes”:

The conventionally distinguished virtues—justice, piety, courage, and the rest—are all identical to wisdom or knowledge, conceived of as a type of craft (

technê

)

1

or expertise (

Charmides

174b–c,

Euthydemus

281d–e,

Protagoras

329b–334c, 349a–361d). This is often referred to as

the unity of the virtues

doctrine. Possession of this knowledge is necessary and sufficient for happiness (

Crito

48b,

Gorgias

470e). No one ever acts contrary to what he knows or believes to be best, so that weakness of will is impossible (

Protagoras

352a–359a).

Together these three doctrines constitute a kind of

ethical intellectualism:

they imply that what we need in order to be virtuous and happy is expert craft knowledge.

The goal of an elenchus is not just to reach adequate definitions of the virtues or seemingly paradoxical doctrines about weakness of will and vir- tue, however. Its primary aim is

moral reform

. For Socrates believes that, by curing people of the hubris of thinking they know when they do not, lead- ing the elenctically examined life makes them happier and more virtuous than anything else. Philosophizing is so important for human welfare, indeed, that Socrates is willing to accept execution rather than give it up (

Apology

29b–d, 30a, 36c–e, 38a, 41b–c). In the transitional dialogues, as well as in some earlier ones, Socrates, as

the embodiment of true philosophy, is contrasted with the sophists.

2

They

are, for the most part, unscrupulous, fee-taking moral relativists who think that moral values are based on convention;

he

is an honest, fee-eschewing moral realist, who thinks that the true virtues are the same for everyone everywhere. The problem latent in this contrast is that if people in different cultures have different beliefs about the virtues, it is not clear how the elen- chus, which seems to rely wholly on such beliefs, can reach knowledge of objective or non-culture–relative moral truth.

T

HE

R

EPUBLIC

The

Republic

is specifically about the virtue of justice and about whether it pays better dividends in terms of happiness than does injustice. It begins, therefore, with a characteristically Socratic search for justice’s definition (331b–c). Polemarchus provides the first candidate: justice is giving to each what he is owed (331e). Socrates proceeds to examine this definition by

1

See Glossary of Terms s.v. craft.

2

See Glossary of Terms s.v. sophists.

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xiii

testing its consistency with other beliefs Polemarchus holds and is unwilling to abandon. When it proves to be inconsistent with them, it is taken to have been refuted (335e). Socrates must be presupposing, therefore, that some of Polemarchus’ sincerely held ethical beliefs are true, since inconsistency with false beliefs is no guarantee of falsehood. The problem is that there seems to be little reason to accept this presupposition.

Socrates’ next interlocutor, Thrasymachus, explains why. He argues that those who are stronger in any society—the rulers—control education and socialization through legislation and enforcement. But he thinks that the rulers, like everyone else, are self-interested. Hence they make laws and adopt conventions—including linguistic conventions—that are in their own best interests, not those of their weaker subjects. It is these conven- tions that largely determine a subject’s conception of justice and the other virtues. By being trained to follow or obey them, therefore, a subject is unwittingly adopting an ideology—a code of values and behavior—that serves his ruler’s, rather than his own, interests. Consequently, Thrasyma- chus defines justice not as what socialized subjects like Socrates and Polemarchus think it is (something genuinely noble and valuable that pro- motes their own happiness), but as what it really is in all cities:

the interest of the stronger.

As in the case of Polemarchus, Socrates again uses the elenchus to try to refute Thrasymachus. But his attempts are not found wholly adequate, either by Thrasymachus himself or by the other interlocutors (350d–e, 357a–b, 358b–c). And we can see why: by arguing that ethical beliefs are an ideologically contaminated social product, Thrasymachus has undercut the elenchus altogether. He may get tied up in knots by Socrates, but his theory is invulnerable to elenctic refutation (as Thrasymachus points out at 349a). For elenctic refutation appeals to ideologically contaminated ideas in order to counter his theory, but his theory maintains that these have no validity. That is why Plato has Socrates abandon the elenchus in subsequent books and attempt to answer Thrasymachus (whose views are taken over by Glau- con and Adeimantus) by developing a positive defense of justice of his own.

THE ARGUMENT OF THE REPUBLIC IN OUTLINE At the center of Socrates’ defense of justice stand the philosopher-kings— who unite political power and authority with philosophical knowledge of the transcendent, unchanging form of the good (the good-itself)—and the ideal city they come to rule, Kallipolis (“beautiful city” or “noble city” in Greek). Because this knowledge is based, as Socrates argues, in mathematics and science, it is unmediated by conventionally controlled concepts of good and bad, just and unjust. Hence it is free from the distorting influence of power or ideology, and so immune to the challenge Thrasymachus poses to the elenchus.

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xiv

What the philosopher-kings do is construct a political system—includ- ing primarily a system of socialization and education—that will distribute the benefits of their specialized knowledge of the good among the citizens at large. The system they construct relies on Plato’s theory of the soul or mind (psychê), the seat of consciousness, emotion, desire, and decision- making. According to this theory, there are three fundamentally different kinds of desires: appetitive ones for food, drink, sex, and the money with which to acquire them; spirited ones for honor, victory, and good reputa- tion; and rational ones for knowledge and truth (437b ff., 580d ff.). Each of these types of desire “rules” in the soul of a different type of person, deter- mining his values. People most value what they most desire, and so those ruled by different desires have very different conceptions of what is valuable or good, or of what would make them happy. Just which type of desire rules an individual’s soul depends on the relative strengths of his desires and on the kind of education and socialization he receives. The fundamental goal of ethical or political education isn’t to provide knowledge, therefore, but to socialize desires, so as to turn people around (to the degree possible) from the pursuit of what they falsely believe to be happiness, to the pursuit of true happiness (518b–519d).

The famous allegory of the cave illustrates the effects of such education (514a). Uneducated people, tethered by their unsocialized appetites, see only images of models of the good (shadows cast by puppets on the walls of the cave). Such people are not virtuous to any degree, since they act simply on their whims. When their appetites are shaped through physical training and that mix of reading and writing, dance and song that the Greeks call mousikê (musical training), they are released from these bonds and are ruled by their socialized appetites. They have at least that level of virtue required to act prudently and postpone gratification. Plato refers to them as money- lovers, because they pursue money as the best means of reliably satisfying their appetitive desires in the long term (580d–581a). They see models of the good (the puppets that cast the shadows), for stable satisfaction of appetitive desires is a sort of good.

Further education, this time in mathematical science, leaves people who are eligible for it ruled by their spirited desires. They are honor-lovers, who seek success in difficult endeavors and the honor and approval it brings. They have the true beliefs about virtue required for such success, and hence that greater level of virtue Plato calls “political” virtue (430c).

Finally, yet further education in dialectic (a sort of philosophical training that is a descendant of the Socratic elenchus) and practical city management results in people who are bound only by their rational desires. They are free from illusion and see, not mere images of the good, but the good itself. They are wisdom-lovers or philosophers, who have knowledge rather than mere true belief about virtue, and so are fully virtuous.

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xv

Not everyone, however, is able to benefit from all these types of educa- tion: there are some at each stage whose desires are too strong for education to break. That is why there are producers, guardians, and philosopher-kings in the ideal city. That is why, too, these groups can cooperate with one another in a just system, where the money-loving producers trade their products for the protection provided by the honor-loving guardians and the knowledge provided by the wisdom-loving kings, rather than competing with them for the very same goods (462e–463b). Nonetheless, everyone in this ideal system is enabled to travel as far toward the sun (the good) as edu- cation can take him, given the innate strength of his desires. Thus everyone comes as close to being fully virtuous, and so to pursuing and achieving genuine happiness, as he can. It is this that makes Plato’s city both an ethical and a prudential ideal, both maximally just and maximally happy. And because it is both, it constitutes a response to the Thrasymachean challenge raised anew by Glaucon and Adeimantus in Republic 2. For if maximal jus- tice and maximal happiness go together, then it pays, in terms of happiness, to be just rather than unjust.3

THE THEORY OF FORMS In a number of dialogues, Plato connects the relativist doctrines he attributes to the sophists with the metaphysical theory of Heraclitus, according to which the perceptible things or characteristics we see around us are in constant flux or change—always becoming, never being. In the The- aetetus, he argues that Protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things” presupposes that the world is in flux; in the Cratylus, he suggests that the theory of flux may itself be the result of projecting Protagorean rel- ativism onto the world (411b–c). Nonetheless, Plato seems to accept some version of this theory himself (see Aristotle, Metaphysics 987a32–4). In Republic 5, for example, he characterizes perceptible things and characteris- tics as lying “in between what purely is and what in every way is not” (478a–479d; see also Timaeus 52a).

The theory of flux clearly exacerbates the problem we noticed earlier with the Socratic elenchus. If perceptible things and characteristics are always in flux, how can justice and the other virtues be stable forms? How can there be stable definitions of them to serve as correct answers to Socrates’ questions? And if there are no stable definitions, how can there be such a thing as ethical knowledge? More generally, if perceptible things and characteristics are always in flux, always becoming, how can anything be some- thing definite or determinate? How can one know or say what anything is? Aristotle tells us that it was reflection on these fundamental questions that

3 First-time readers may want to skim over the remainder of the Introduction, returning to it for more careful study after they have read the Republic itself.

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led Plato to “separate” the forms from perceptible things and characteristics (Aristotle, Metaphysics 987a29–b1). The allegories of the sun and line (Repub- lic 507a–511e), which divide reality into the intelligible part and the visible (perceptible) part, seem to embody this separation.

Conceived in this way, forms seemed to Plato to offer solutions to the metaphysical and epistemological problems to which the elenchus and flux give rise. As intelligible objects set apart from the perceptible world, they are above the sway of flux, and so available as stable objects of knowl- edge; stable meanings or referents for words. As real, mind-independent entities, they provide the basis for the definitions of the virtues that Socratic ethics needs.

Like many proposed solutions to philosophical problems, however, Plato’s raises new problems of its own. If forms really are separate from the world of flux our senses reveal to us, how can we know them? How can our words connect with them? If items in the perceptible world really are sepa- rate from forms, how can they owe whatever determinate being they have to forms? In the Meno, Phaedo, and Phaedrus, Plato answers the first of these questions by appeal to the doctrine of recollection (anamnêsis). We have knowledge of forms through prenatal, direct contact with them; we forget this knowledge when our souls become embodied at birth; then we “recol- lect” it in this life when our memories are appropriately jogged. He answers the second question by saying that items in the world of flux “participate” in forms by resembling them. Thus perceptible objects possess the characteris- tic of beauty because they resemble the form of beauty, which is itself beau- tiful in a special and basic way (see Phaedo 100c, Symposium 210b–211e).

The doctrine of recollection presupposes the immortality of the soul— something Plato argues for in Republic 10 and elsewhere (Phaedo 69e ff., Phaedrus 245c ff.). It also presupposes some method of jogging our memo- ries in a reliable way. This method is dialectic, which is a descendant of the Socratic elenchus. It is introduced in the Republic as having a special bearing on first principles—a feature it continues to possess in Aristotle (Topics 101a37–b4)—particularly on those of the mathematical sciences.

The importance of these sciences in Plato’s thought is twofold. First, they provided a compelling example of a rich body of precise knowledge organized into a deductive system of axioms, definitions, and theorems—a model of what philosophy itself might be. Second, the brilliant mathemati- cal treatment of harmony (musical beauty) developed by Pythagoras of Samos and his followers (Aristotle, Metaphysics 987a29–8a17) suggested a role for mathematics within philosophy itself. It opened up the possibility of giving precise definitions in wholly mathematical terms of all character- istics, including such apparently vague and evaluative ones as beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice, good and evil, and the other things of which Socrates sought definitions (Republic 530d–533e).

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xvii

Despite the benefits these sciences promised, however, Plato found a problem with them: they treat their first principles as “absolute” starting points, to be accepted without argument (510c–d). Yet if these starting points are false, the entire system collapses. It is here that dialectic comes in. Dialectic defends these definitional starting points—it renders them “unhypothetical”—not by deriving them from something yet more primi- tive (which is impossible, since they are “starting” points), but by defend- ing them against all objections, by solving all the aporiai, or problems, to which they give rise (534b–c, 437a). With the objections solved, our intel- lectual vision is cleared and we are able then to see the forms these defini- tions define in something like the way we did before our souls became embodied (540a–b).

In the process of their dialectical defense, the definitions themselves also undergo conceptual revamping, so that their consistency with one another—and hence their immunity to dialectical (elenctic) refutation—is revealed and assured. This enables the philosopher (to whom the craft of dialectic belongs) to knit them all together into a single unified theory of everything that exhibits “their kinship with one another and with the nature of what is” (537c). It is this unified, holistic theory that provides the philosopher—and him alone—with genuine knowledge (533d–534a).

The first principle of this entire theory, Plato claims, the greatest object of knowledge (505a), is the form of the good, which seems to be an ideal of rational order or unity expressed in mathematical terms. It is the model the philosopher uses to design his ideally just and happy Kallipolis (540a–b). On a larger scale, it also provides the maker of the cosmos—the Demi- urge—with the knowledge he needs to perform his cosmic task (Timaeus 29e ff.). For even the gods are bound by the objective truths and values embodied in the forms (Euthyphro 10a ff.).

FORMS AND THE GOOD In the discussion of music and poetry in Republic 2, Socrates says: “You and I are not poets at present, Adeimantus, but we are founding a city. And it is 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” (378e–379a). Adeimantus responds by asking what these patterns for stories about the gods actually are. Socrates’ lengthy answer may be summed up without much loss as follows: no bad images of “what the gods and heroes are like” (377e); only stories that will make the guardians “least likely to fear death” (386a); no “terrible and frightening names for the underworld” (387b–c); no “lamentations of famous men” who have suffered defeat and died (387e); no representation of “worthwhile people as overcome by laughter” (388e–389a); no represen- tation of gods or heroes as failing “to rule over the pleasures of drink, sex,

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xviii

and food for themselves” (389d–e); none of the “headstrong things that pri- vate individuals say to their rulers in works of prose or poetry” (390a); no imitators except “the pure imitator of the good person” (397d); no musical harmonies except the Dorian and Phrygian (399a); no music played on flutes, triangular lutes, harps, or no “multi-stringed or polyharmonic instruments” (399c); no rhythms except those appropriate to “a life that is ordered and courageous” (399d).

The way the philosopher reaches these patterns, moreover, is clear. He looks at the effects that various kinds of poetry have on a guardian’s soul. He determines what kind of soul the guardians should have by looking to the role of guardians in the good city (500b–501c, 618b–e). And he deter- mines what that role should be by looking to the good itself, since it is only through knowing it that he knows any other kind of good at all (534b–c).

The patterns the philosopher reaches in this way are forms. But they are, as we have seen, quite unspecific: they are not detailed blueprints for actual poems. All they determine are the features that a good poem must have. The same, presumably, is true of the forms of other things. Thus the philoso- pher’s pattern of an F simply specifies the features an F must have, or must lack, if it is to be good.