Plato’s Republic in Its Thucydidean Context
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This paper was presented at the 2022 meeting of the Association for Core Texts and Courses. Given the occasion, I prepared my remarks in an informal and cursory style, and without citations.
For my talk, I’ll first make some remarks on the political and historical context in which Plato situates the Republic, focusing on five events in particular, before going on to discuss how these events inform the Republic’s drama.
The first event is the battle of Salamis, which brought the Greco-Persian Wars to an end. Themistocles’ strategy was to abandon Athens, so as to fight the Persians with the other Greeks on the strait separating the Peloponnesus from mainland Greece; this strategy required, however, that the Athenians leave behind hearth and home so as to save themselves from the Persian horde. Despite the evident impiety of abandoning their ancestral and patron goddess, Athena, the Athenians were successful. Not divine providence but human ingenuity had saved them, and it had succeeded precisely when one would have expected divine punishment. Understandably, then, when the Athenians returned home victorious, their energies were directed first and foremost to surrounding Athens with the long walls. They appear to have waited a bit longer to rebuild the Parthenon. Athens may have defeated Persia, but Persia had defeated Athena.
Themistocles’ strategy had a transformative effect on Athens, an effect Thucydides relates through a remark an unnamed Athenian makes to the Spartans in the lead up to the Peloponnesian War. This Athenian attempts to delay the imminent hostilities by reminding the Spartans and their allies that, though they had indeed aided Athens during the battle of Salamis, they had done so “from cities being dwelled in,” that is, from cities in which their homes stood, still occupied, while the Athenians fought “from [a city] which is no longer and on behalf of one with little hope of being.” After Salamis, Athens could no longer be what she had been before, but what she was to be hereafter had yet to be determined. If the old Athens was gone, what was the new Athens going to be? What could she be without Athena? Could she be a better city? Could she perhaps even be the best city imaginable?
The next pair of events relevant here are Pericles’ funeral oration and the subsequent plague. The new emphasis on human ingenuity in Athens created a climate of competitiveness that Pericles understood threatened the unity of the city. His solution to this difficulty was to beautify the Athenian regime or polity, and so provide an answer to the above series of questions. Among Athens’ beautiful qualities that Pericles relates are the luxuries she enjoys from her empire and her acting as the school of the rest of Greece. Accordingly, Pericles instructed his Athenians to “contemplate the power of the city every day, in what it does, and become lovers of it.” But when a plague came to Athens, the dissoluteness of her citizens became manifest, so that she was forever exposed as having fallen far short of Pericles’ beautification. And, as Pericles himself was eventually compelled to confess, there was little lovable in the oppressive tyranny she exercised over the subject cities in her empire, a tyranny not freely chosen as beautiful but reluctantly accepted as necessary, lest those, whom they now tyrannize, later turn, in their new-found freedom, against Athens.
The final two events I’ll touch on are the Melian dialogue and the Sicilian Expedition, and I’ll have to restrict myself simply to observing that in the former the Athenians reach a nadir of shamelessness, acting upon such arguments as would have only a few years earlier made them blush even to utter publicly. The antidote to this shamelessness was the immense pride they took in their audacious and undiluted pursuit of cunning self-interest absent any considerations of ordinary morality. Needless to say, such pride betrays that this undiluted pursuit is, in fact, quite diluted. It is not surprising, then, that the Athenians were eager to glorify their empire with the Sicilian Expedition, in what amounted to a gruesome but all-too-clear return of the erotic need to beautify Athens, a need first awoken by Pericles.
Plato’s Republic takes place in post-plague Athens, and it begins as very much an Athenian affair, with an evening planned of taking delight in the novel imports that make their way through Athens’ port, the Piraeus. And so far as we can tell, such would it have remained, had Socrates not encountered one of Pericles’ most peculiar imports—the old, pious metic, Cephalus. Whereas the Athenian men of his age lament the loss of youth and the pleasures enjoyed, Cephalus finds contentment and restful slumber in fulfilling the demands the gods make of him as just. Indeed, it is a group of non-Athenians—namely, Cephalus, his son Polemarchus, and the Chalcedonian rhetorician Thrasymachus—who dominate Book 1 of the Republic, introducing and developing its principal problem regarding the goodness of justice. These non-Athenians force, willy-nilly, the Athenian brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus to turn away from the delights of imperial Athens and take up the difficult but pressing question of justice.
Now, the question of justice takes two basic forms in Book 1. We see the first with Polemarchus, especially at the end of his conversation with Socrates. Having agreed that justice is human virtue and that the just man never harms anyone (and perhaps even benefits all, though that’s unclear), Socrates asks Polemarchus, What is justice? That is, he asks him to define what justice is, in light of his both self-aware and candid admission that he believes it to be good, that he believes the just man to be happy. I take this to be the proper starting point for inquiring into justice. We recognize its priority when we view it in light of the second and suboptimal form that the question takes, namely, with Thrasymachus, whose critique of justice is so harsh as to require defending it as perfectly good. The defects of the Thrasymachean form of this question are evident dramatically from Thrasymachus’ confused relationship to justice, from the fact that, despite advocating for injustice, he remains to a considerable extent, and unbeknownst to him, attached to justice. That confusion should suffice to demonstrate to those present that one must be more self-aware of one’s attachment and, should one wish to examine it, also candid about it. That is, inquiry into justice requires a considerable degree of looking within and examining oneself, prior to an examination of whether reality could ever fulfill the expectations one finds there.
Glaucon, however, doesn’t see any of this. He speaks of Athens’ corruption—of what everyone says and what the popular orator Thrasymachus repeats—in praising injustice before justice, but he also says he can find no argument to come to its defense. While he is aware of his attachment to justice, more so certainly than Thrasymachus, his account of that attachment is inadequate. He has accepted the accounts of himself that those like Thrasymachus offer, namely, that it is rooted in a fear of punishment; but every dramatic indication is that it is rooted rather in a sense of shame. Whereas the ring of Gyges would, as Glaucon notes, suffice to allay fear, it is not so clear that escaping the sight of others would suffice to alleviate one’s shame—one would still have to live with oneself or one’s conscience or what have you. Glaucon is not entirely self-aware, then, to say nothing of the fact that he is not altogether candid, either. To that extent, then, he also falls short of Polemarchus’ starting point, which I have called the proper one for the inquiry into justice.
What are the consequences of Glaucon’s failure to look within? He asks Socrates what life he should live, that of the tyrant or that of the just man willing to be tortured and even die for justice, that is, the life of the martyr. Should the courage that Socrates observes in him overcome his supposed “fear” of being punished for doing injustice? That is, should he be daring and bold in his pursuit of injustice? Or, alternatively, should he rather be courageous in his pursuit of justice? Should he die for its sake? Or, since he could well manage to escape death in his pursuit of justice for himself and for Athens, should he perhaps even be a revolutionary, seeking successful regime change in Athens? The consequence of Glaucon’s failure, we can then say, is that in seeking perfection from the good life, in relation to the question of justice, he has set for himself only these extreme possibilities.
It is no surprise, then, that Socrates will go on to build a city in speech, for what Glaucon really seeks is not so much an understanding of what justice is; rather, he seeks salvation from Athens and her corruption. The city in speech is Socrates’ answer to the question raised in the wake of Themistocles’ strategy at the battle of Salamis and Pericles’ policy during the Peloponnesian War. Socrates wins Glaucon over to the cause of justice first in Book 3, by beautifying it through the military and moral excellence of the guardian class, but most fully in Book 5, when he convinces him that, should the city in speech come into being, it would bring an end to the lamentable fighting among the Greeks.
Ultimately, however, Glaucon’s desire for perfection in the city in speech will collapse under its own weight, when he comes to see that it is too perfect even for himself. He learns this lesson in Book 7, where he hears of an education so beyond his capabilities and even his ambition that its mere prelude alone seems impossibly difficult. He here becomes aware of his hubris at having pushed the argument so far; that is, he becomes aware, however vaguely, of his shame. But in Book 8, when Adeimantus makes a joke to this effect, that Glaucon loves victory and in this respect falls short of his beloved philosopher-king—well, at this point, Glaucon now knows not just his hubris but knows also that everyone else knows his hubris. His silent withdrawal from the conversation at this joke speaks volumes. Though he has made great progress in self-awareness, Glaucon has nevertheless fallen short of Polemarchus in this regard. Glaucon never gives up his impossible hope that Kallipolis could one day come into being. It is for this reason, among others, that the Republic ends with a myth of reincarnation. His impossible hope is ultimately transported from this life into the next.
I’ll end with some more general reflections. In his dissatisfaction with what orators like Thrasymachus have to offer, Glaucon turned to a philosopher for help. And as we have seen, Socrates is indeed successful in his efforts to win Glaucon over to justice and political moderation. That is, he is successful in offering a new support to justice, in light of the decay of faith in the ancestral religion and the failure of the class of politicians and rhetoricians, even the best among them. Read in light of Thucydides, the Republic emerges as a cautionary tale regarding the susceptibility of men, living in the midst of great political and moral decay, to grand visions of political and personal transformation, to redemptive and salvific projects both in this life and the next. It is often remarked that the Republic is a book on the limits of politics. This is indeed the case, as Glaucon accepts time and again Socrates’ shocking solutions to the perennial problems of politics. We come to see thereby that, though political judgment admits of better and worse, though there are real goods and harms in how we handle these problems, nevertheless we must on some level learn to live with them. This requires, however, that we read the Republic with the self-aware and candid love of justice, on the one hand, and with the argumentative precision, on the other, that are together characteristic of Polemarchus. We must always remember that he sits there, in silent attention, as witness to all that Glaucon does and would put them through.
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