1 Murdoch, Iris, The Good Apprentice (New York: Viking, 1986), 243.Google Scholar

2 Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies (4th ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1962), I, 119.Google Scholar

3 Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 62Google Scholar. See also Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Bloom, Allan, “Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, trans. by Bloom, A. (New York: Basic Books, 1968).Google Scholar

4 Private conversation.

5 Ibid., 61.

6 Weil, Simone, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 77.Google Scholar

7 That the dialogue takes place at all is largely due to him. In the initial scene it is he rather than Socrates who decides that those like Polemarchus who refuse to listen to reasoned argument cannot be persuaded at all; and that the two of them will have to yield to the playful threat of force (327C, 328B). When the early conversation starts to flounder, Glaucon comes up with the money to keep it going (337D) and it is for him specifically and all the rest generally that Socrates urges Thrasymachus not to refuse out of spite to teach them his doctrine concerning justice (338A).

8 The great difficulty in translating Plato comes from his style of repeating the same or virtually the same verbal formulas but transforming their meaning through the intervening discussion. For example in the current passage, the terms good and bad (agathos and poneros) have primary connotations of social rank and political office. Later they will become spiritual and internal.

9 The references in the text are the Stephanus numbers for the passages quoted or referred to. I have followed Paul Shorey's text of the Republic in the Loeb edition. See Plato, V, trans. by Shorey, P. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930, 1978)Google Scholar. I have also been guided by his translations. My interpretation owes much to Simone Weil's essay “God in Plato,” in On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, ed. and trans. by Rees, Richard (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 89–137.Google Scholar

10 On the subject of the corpse's nakedness see Adam's, James edition of the Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902, 1963), I, 127–28.Google Scholar

11 The idea of this symbol is most insightfully expressed by Simone Weil: “The image of nakedness linked with that of death… This double image is pure mysticism. There is no man so wise, so perceptive, and so just that he is not influenced by the physical aspect and even more by the social position of other people…The effect of imagination. No one is unaffected by clothes…All this obscures the truth. The truth is secret. (Thy father which is in secret…). Truth is only manifested in nakedness and nakedness is death; it is the breaking of all the attachments which constitute every man's reason for living: the people he loves, self-esteem, possessions both material and moral, everything. Plato does not say but he implies that in order to become just, which requires self-knowledge, one must become, already in this life, naked and dead. The examination of conscience demands this rupture of all the attachments which combine our reasons for living… If justice requires us to be naked and dead in this life, it is clear that justice is impossible for human nature, is something supernatural. What prevents the soul from assimilating itself to God through justice is primarily the flesh, of which Plato said, following the Orphics and the Pythagoreans: ‘The body is the tomb of the soul’” (Weil, “God in Plato,” 96–97, italics in original).

12 This is of course the passage which many subsequent writers have seen as prefiguring Christ's crucifixion. The word strictly means “impaled” but the word itself, anaskinduleuthesetai, is obscure and one of its synonyms was used in the New Testament to describe Christ's fate.

13 This reservation, in my view, is frequently overlooked and I shall argue that doing so could possibly lead a reader to misunderstand the whole nature of the argument.

14 Strauss, The City and Man, 93.

15 Compare Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, chap. 13: “Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires.”

16 Socrates describes him at the beginning of Book 11 as always showing a manly courage (andreitatos) in all things.

17 Stewart, J. A., The Myths of Plato (London: Macmillan, 1905).Google Scholar

18 In this I disagree sharply with writers like Bloom who suggest that “only the philosopher has no need of the myth [of Er].” See Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 436.

19 Popper, Open Society, 140–44.

20 Voegelin, Eric, Plato (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 104–11.Google Scholar

21 In the Phoenician tale he tells, he in part confirms the charges brought against him in his trial that he investigates “the things beneath the earth and in the heavens” (ta te hupo ges kai ourania) (19B) since he suggests that citizens are to imagine that they “were down within the earth (upo ges) being molded and fostered themselves” (414D).

22 It is here that we are told, though just in passing, that wives and children will also be held in common (424A).

23 Remember in the picture Glaucon paints of the perfectly just man in Book II one of the miseries he suffered is having his eyes put out. Fortunately he does not need them to see true justice.

24 Plato is believed to have had female students in the Academy.

25 Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 380–81.

26 Aristotle, Politics, 1260 b 27-1264 b 25.

27 Socrates makes the same point in the Phaedo: “I cannot persuade Crito, my friends, that the Socrates who is now conversing and arranging the details of his argument is really I; he thinks I am the one he will presently see as a corpse, and he asks how to bury me” (Plato, I, trans. by Lamb, W. R. M. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914, 1977], 115CD).Google Scholar

28 See Weil, Intimations of Christianity, 87–88.

29 Simone Weil translates this passage as follows: “For there is not, there never has been, and there never will be, any other moral teaching except that of public opinion. At least, no other human teaching; the divine as the proverb says, is an exception to all rules. It is necessary to know that anything which is saved and becomes what it ought to be, in the present state of society, must correctly speaking be said to have been saved by a divine predestination (theou moiran)” (492E-493A).

30 Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 401.

31 The 11 were city magistrates and in the context it is clear that they were releasing him from his fetters. However I do not think that the ambiguity was unintentional.

32 Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 406.

33 The word ananke or a variant occurs eight times in the cave myth. The other important recurring word is phos which appears five times.

34 If there is a place for the teacher, it could be here.

35 See Shorey's edition of the Republic, II, 124, note a.

36 It is one of the great differences between Christianity and Platonism that in the former the good man helps others, whereas in the latter he minds his own business.

37 Compare the final words of the Apology: “It is now already time to depart; I go to death and you will keep on living. Which of us journeys to the better state is unknown to all except God” (42A).

38 It might be possible playfully to describe this state as a plutocracy since those who rule will be the rich, though not in gold (on khrusiou) but in the goodness and wisdom that makes man happy. This completes the process of transforming gold from a commodity to a symbol to a spiritual fact.

39 I do not think that Plato is counselling self-mortification. Although the body may be the tomb of the soul, it is also that by means of which one perceives and hence can be drawn to beauty. Plato proposes to keep its demands within reasonable limits.

40 For the tyrant these will be the brave, the high-minded (megalophron). the prudent (phronimos) and the rich (567BC).

41 That is, taken out of his social context.

42 Or their opposites, for that matter. Nietzsche was convinced that there was no transcendence. How did he know?

43 “Epistle VII,” in Plato, VII, trans. by Bury, R. G. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929).Google Scholar

44 Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 436.

45 Strauss, The City and Man, 138.

46 One of this JOURNAL'S anonymous referees takes this position.

47 Weil, “God in Plato,” 128–29.

48 Is it fair here to draw attention to the controversial conditions of Weil's tragic death in 1943?

49 See Weil, Intimations of Christianity, 134.