In chapter 9 I shall be discussing the topic of the good in the Republic. One useful starting-point for that discussion will be the passage at Republicvi, 504a–505a, which associates the future philosopher-rulers' study of the good, the ‘greatest object of study/learning’ (to megiston mathēma: 504d2–3, etc.) with their study of the soul and of the excellences – the latter, themselves, also being among ‘the greatest things’ (504d6–e3), though the good is ranked higher. Socrates refers back to iv, 435b–d, where he put the crucial question whether the soul too contains the three eidē, kinds, that the city had been found – at any rate by the rough and ready sort of method chosen – to contain. Socrates agreed, back there in Book iv, that he and his partners in the conversation should answer the new question by using the same rough methods as before, while insisting that an accurate answer would depend on their following ‘another, longer and more considerable (makrotera kai pleiōn) road’ (435d3). Now in Book vi he suggests that such a make-do approach would be unsuitable for any ‘guard of city and laws’: he or she will need to understand things ‘in the finest possible way’. And Socrates reminds Adimantus, his interlocutor at this point, that the accounts of the four excellences agreed to in Book iv were built on that evidently less than accurate answer to the question about the soul (vi, 504a4–6).