Plato: ethics and politicsA.W.PriceIPlato followed his teacher Socrates into ethics by way of a question thatremained central in Greek thought: what is the relation between the virtues orexcellences(aretai)of character, and happiness(eudaimonia)?1Both conceptswere vague but inescapable, and inescapably linked: happiness is the final end ofaction, and constitutes success in life (cf.Symposium205a2–3); so virtue, forwhich we commend agents and actions, needed to be recommended by referenceto happiness. The happiness that gives reason for action is primarily the agent’s;all Greek moralists hoped to grant the egocentricity without licensing egoism. Atleast examples of moral virtues were generally agreed: justice, piety, courage,temperance and the like. Happiness was more elusive, and its paradigms moredebatable. Herodotus has Croesus and Solon disagree about whether the greatesthappiness consists in enjoying the greatest riches, or in living simply and dyingwell (I.30–2). The demands of the virtues needed to be defined, and their status asvirtues justified by a conception of what it is for a human being to be happy.Otherwise, there could be no telling whether it was pious of Euthyphro toprosecute his own father for murder (Euthyphro3e4–4e3), nor whetherThrasymachus might be correct to claim injustice as a virtue (Republic1.348b8–64). Plato’s central treatment of these matters is in theRepublic,the masterpieceof his so-called ‘middle’ period. I shall also pay attention to four works thatconsensus places as follows: theSymposium,before theRepublic,thePhaedrus,after theRepublic,thePoliticus(orStatesman), after thePhaedrus;and finally(but perfunctorily) theLaws,the long labour of his old age. An initial questionwas properly abstract: what is the appropriate kind of way in which to define avirtue? He poses this question in theRepublicthrough presenting variants on anapproach that is not his own.Perhaps moral virtue relates to action as follows: a virtue is a practice ofacting, or a disposition to act, in a determinate way definable by a rule.2Thus, inthe case of justice, Socrates—who, in tribute to the historical Socrates, appearsas protagonist in most of the dialogues I shall be considering, but as a quasihistoricalfigure whose relations to the real Socrates, and to Plato himself, areintentionally undefined— asks Cephalus whether justiceistelling the truth andreturning what one has borrowed (331c1–3); justice as a quality of personswould then be a disposition to act so.Why, next, is justice, so understood, avirtue? This is initially contested by Thrasymachus. He offers no definition ofjustice, and it is uncertain whether he has a coherent conception of it. If we takehim to be implicitly distinguishing legal from natural justice, the legally just iswhat accords with the laws and thus, in fact, serves the interests of the lawgivers(338e1–4). The naturally just extends more widely: it is what serves another’sgood—and so, within the perspective of the subjectquasubject, broadlycoincides with legal justice (343c3–4). Thrasymachus interprets interests asmaterial, taking it for granted that it is in one’s interest to pay less tax and take morein return (d6–e1). Now material goods are limited and transferable, so that theirallocation is often a field of competition. Assessing justice and injusticeinstrumentally, as qualities of practices and dispositions that determine thedistribution of losses and gains, he takes justice to be a tendency towards lossand injustice to be a tendency towards gain. If one’s virtue must serve one’shappiness, it follows that justice is not a virtue. Plato supplies in response apastiche of Socratic ethics that at once puts Thrasymachus in his place, andmarks his own point of departure.Another member of the company, Glaucon, is not satisfied, and puts forward adifferent position, not as his own but as deserving a fairer run, to which Socrates’full reply will be no less than the remainder of theRepublic. This is animaginative variation upon Thrasymachus in which a class of rulers is replacedby a pair of agents, of which previously one was just and one unjust, whosepower is ascribed on the model of the myth of Gyges to a magic ring bestowinginvisibility. (We might introduce science fiction to the same effect.) Socrates hadconfronted Thrasymachus with contingencies: rulers can make mistakes, andcommand what is not in their interest (339c1–e8); even criminals need to cooperate,and must treat their accomplices justly (351c7–352d1). Gyges’ ring nowtransports its possessors beyond human fallibility and individual impotence: bothof them, just and unjust alike, will be unable now to refrain from breaking therules of justice against adultery, murder and the like (II.360b3–c5). Ringless, wehave reason to be just, but only as a second-best: able to do wrong but liable tobe wronged, we make a social contract that both denies us the advantages andspares us the disadvantages of injustice (358e5–359a7).What is the denotation of ‘justice’ within this aetiology? It is the class orcharacteristic of actions that are permitted by the law (358a3–4); its opposite isthe legal category of forbidden wrongdoing or ‘malurn prohibitum’. However,there is a difficulty. We are told that it is naturally good to do wrong or actunjustly, and bad to be wronged or treated unjustly; the agreement is that thatone should neither do nor suffer injustice (358e3–359a2). Thus it appears thatjustice is an artificial virtue (as Hume was to conceive it), while injustice is anatural and pre-contractual concept. This is coherent, if injustice was alreadyrecognized as a quality of actions, and the contract introduced justice as apractice. But how in a state of nature was justice to be understood, and itsextension grasped as a unity? Perhaps Glaucon offers an implicit gloss thatdefines justice outside the law: to remain just is to abstain from what belongs toothers (360b5–6). Socrates will not disagree: justice is neither having whatbelongs to others, nor being deprived of one’s own (IV.433e6–11). Yet suchremarks rather move within a moral circle than reduce the moral to the natural: itis equally apposite to say that what is my own is that of which it would be unjustto deprive me. We should rather suppose that it is retrospectively that the contractis motivated by fear of injusticeas such: what existed before the contract wasnot resentment of injustice, but fear of a multitude of unwelcome actions some ofwhich became unjust, or were deemed to be unjust, by being penalized—aselection presumably sensitive to practicalities. So the contract may be describedafter the event (as it is by Glaucon) as an escape from injustice, but it has to beexplained as an escape from something else, or many other things; these willhave included such cases of losing one’s life or being deceived by one’s partneras it was thought good to penalize, after the invention of law and morality, asmurder or adultery.This view is a positive transformation of Thrasymachus that takes laws not tobe imposed by rulers on subjects, but to be adopted by free contractors. Thestructure of attack or apology remains the same: it is indirect and instrumental.Glaucon is recommending justice as the practice of acting in accordance withlaws that human agents need to respect in order to reduce the risk of their beingtreated in ways to which they are by nature averse. For all its pretensions,morality is revealed as an under-servant of felicity.Plato has two grounds for rejecting this approach. First, it does not work: thecontent of a virtue cannot be explicated by concrete rules of conduct. This is firstintimated within theRepublicwhen Socrates objects to Cephalus that it is wrongto identify being just with telling the truth and returning what one has borrowed,for these acts are not always just (as when a borrower is asked to return someweapons by a lender who has gone mad, I.331c1–d3). A more resilientparticipant than Cephalus might suppose that one has only to try again, but theobjection falls within a pattern to which Socrates later alludes when he describeshow the young can be corrupted by counter-examples to attempts to define the justor the fine by appeal to general laws or maxims (VII.538c6–e4). This pattern ofobjection was already familiar from early Platonic dialogues (cf. [11.5], 43–6):on the same ground, temperance cannot be identified with a quiet or gentlemanner (CharmidesI59b1–160d3), nor with shame (160e3–161b2), nor couragewith endurance (Laches192b9–d9)). Unlike quietness, shame and endurance, avirtue is always good (Charmides161a6–b2). We need to add that the enduranceis wise, but how is wisdom to be defined (Laches192d10–193a2)? One way outis by a special kind of vagueness: perhaps justice is giving all men their due(RepublicI.331e1–4), and temperance is doing one’s own (Charmides161b3–6).But such paraphrases either invite the same objection, or move around the moralcircle mentioned above: if giving all men their due does not reduce to returningwhat one has borrowed and the like, it may more vaguely be equated with givingthem what is appropriate to them (RepublicI.331e8–332c3), that is, giving themwhat they justly deserve. Glaucon’s account fares better, but not well. That thejust is that which the law prescribes or permits (II.359a3–4) is only plausible ifthe law uses terms (like ‘murder’ and ‘adultery’) whose descriptive connotationsare debatable. Legislators properly find it difficult to define such terms preciselyin advance, and are wiser to be content with the vagueness that invites casuisticaldebate about their application.Secondly, Glaucon’s framework provides virtue with the wrong kind ofjustification. To make clear what he would prefer, he offers Socrates anexhaustive trichotomy of goods: (1) goods that we welcome for their own sakeand not for their consequences, such as enjoyment, and harmless pleasures thatonly bring enjoyment; (2) goods that we welcome both for their own sake andfor their consequences, such as understanding, sight and health; (3) goods thatwe welcome only for their consequences, such as exercise, being healed, anddoctoring or other money-making (357b4–d2). Socrates replies that he wouldplace justice in class (2), which is the ‘finest’ category (358a1–3). We shouldview this not as a moralist’s salesmanship, but in relation to a perennialconception: ‘It is a requirement on moral action…that the action should not bemerely instrumentally related to the intention: the end should be realized notmerely through the action but in the action’ ([11.21], 43).Glaucon initially speaks of justice as a practice (358a5–6), but then as a stateof soul (cf. n. 2): he wishes to hear what justice and injustice are, and whatpower(dunamis)each possesses in and of itself when it is present in the soul (b4–6, cf. 366e5–6). It becomes explicit that he is shifting his focus from its externalto its internal operations when he asks how it acts upon its possessor (367b4, e3).The shift is motivated by his concern whether being just is a good thing to be. Itsuits Plato more particularly, both anticipating what is to come, and recalling themost pregnant passage of Book I: injustice occurring within an individual doesnot lose its power (the same worddunamis), but here too produces faction andenmity (I.351e6–352a3). Irrespective of whether the focus be internal orexternal, this talk of how a state acts upon a thing ‘in and of itself can seem acontradiction in terms, asking about consequences even as it excludesconsequences, and has provoked much discussion.3One suggestion has been that Glaucon wants to set aside not natural butartificial consequences, excluding rewards and penalties that are attached to theappearance (cf. II.367d4) but not psychological effects that attach to the reality;but this fails to fit, for strength and health are natural effects of taking exerciseand receiving treatment, which are placed within category (3). We must rathersuppose that injustice and enmity, justice and friendship, stand in an internal andnecessary relation that helps to constitute what justice and injustice reallyare(ina manner in which strength does not define what it is to wrestle, nor health whatit is to diet). Virtues and vices have real natures and not just verbal definitions; aproper understanding will reveal what it is for them to take effect within a soul.It may seem inconsistent of Glaucon to ask Socrates to praise justice in and ofitself (358d1–2), to offer to praise injustice in the manner in which he wishes tohear the dispraise of injustice and the praise of justice (d3–6), and then to speakat length (within the fantasy of Gyges’ ring) about the consequences of injustice,e.g. winning the opposite reputation, presumably through deception or otherploys that pile injustice on injustice (361a7–b3). However, he must mean notthat it is appropriate to praise justice and injustice in the same way, but that hewishes them both to be praised appropriately: he will play at recommendinginjustice instrumentally as emancipation from a negative constraint, whileSocrates must succeed in recommending justice intrinsically as a positive ideal.The unjust refuse to let justice stand between themselves and what they want; thejust want to be just.Glaucon intensifies the contrast: to exclude any ulterior motives, he proposesthat they compare the intrinsic value of justice with the maximal instrumentalbenefits of injustice, imagining that the unjust agent receives all the rewardsmerited by justice, and the just agent all the penalties merited by injustice(360e1–362c8). In supposing that it is better to be just but impaled than unjustand respected, he implicitly makes a further requirement of the motivations ofjust agents: they must not only value justice for its own sake, but take its value toeclipse (or ‘trump’) all non-moral values. Otherwise the demands of justicewould be bound to be outweighed on occasion, however rarely, by non-moralconsiderations. The attitude is Socratic (cf. [11.20], 209–11), but looks moreheroic than rational unless injustice is its own worst punishment. In theCrito,anearly and Socratic dialogue, Socrates compared a soul spoiled by acting unjustlyto a body spoiled by living unhealthily (47d7–e7), but without any means tomake out that injustice is more than analogous to ill health. When he equatedliving well with living ‘finely and justly’ (48b8–10), it was not clear whetherthat rested on good reasons, or on a refusal to make distinctions. Perhaps onboth: if, as Socrates supposed, all desires are rational (though some may beerroneous), they can only aim at the right and good; there are no desires that, arisingnon-rationally, would be in fact be satisfied by what is bad and wrong; henceimmorality is wholly a failure to achieve what one really wants (cf.Gorgias467a8–468e5). TheRepublicwill set out a different picture of the soul, whichholds that reason is only one source of desire. This allows the soul a complexitylike that of the body. When theGorgias,a dialogue of transition which pioneersan anatomy of the soul, actually calls injustice a ‘sickness’ of the soul (480b1),the term is taking on an extended sense that is more than metaphorical. Platomust now provide more complex and less Socratic answers to the followingquestions: in what way are justice and injustice fundamentally inner states withdecisive implications for the happiness of the individual? What is their relation toother virtues and vices that narrows our options to two: being virtuous and happy,or vicious and unhappy? And how do they connect with the moral action that wedemand of one another?IIPlato’s line of answer proposes a paradox exactly tailored to the measure of theproblem. On Glaucon’s construction, justice is a social virtue that benefitssociety; this fits the view, later ascribed by Socrates not just to Thrasymachusbut to unnamed poets and prose-writers, that it is the other person’s good andone’s own loss (RepublicIII.392a13–b4). Plato will reconceive it as social andpersonal at the same time: in its fundamental form, its field and profit are indeedwithin a society, but that society is oneself. Politics and psychology are mirrors ofeach other, so that the commonplace that justice is good for a society can betranslated into a claim that it is good for the agent.‘My name is Legion: for we are many’ (Mark 5:9); Plato would have foundthese the words not of a madman, but of the best philosopher. Each of uscontains a plurality of parts that are indeed not people, but may be pictured asinterrelating rather as people do. What distinguishes the parts is the potentiality ofconflict: this is revealed when we find someone not merely (as H.W.B.Josephput it) ‘similarly affected towards different objects’, but ‘contrarily affectedtowards the same’ ([11.7], 53). Just as one man cannot simultaneously push andpull the same thing with a single part of his body (IV.439b8–11), so he cannotsimultaneously accept and reject the same thing with a single part of his soul.Someone who thirsts for a drink, and yet refuses to drink, displays that his soul ismultiple, containing contrasting sources of desire. If we specify that the thirstarises (like hunger) from physical depletion, but the refusal from rationalcalculation, we can distinguish his appetite from his reason (c2–e3). Further, wemust separate his spirit from both: a man may be angry with his appetites, or hisreason may condemn his anger (439e3–441c2). And this may only be abeginning, to be complicated by further investigation (435c9–d8, 443d7, cf. VI.504bl–c4). Such soul-parts are not distinct souls: they share a singleconsciousness, and lack their own sense perceptions. And yet they are not merefaculties either; indeed, they share certain faculties, such as those of believingand desiring. Rather, as clusters of beliefs and desires arising from differentsources, and acting together or apart on bodily organs, they are agencies, andhave some of the freedom that we ordinarily ascribe only to persons. Hence totalk of them in interpersonal terms can be apt, and only slightly metaphorical.When Socrates likens each soul to a trio of animals, a Cerberus, a lion and a man(IX.588c7–e1), he is graphically conveying how alien to one another are therepertories of the different parts. When he remarks that these can give commands(IV.439c6–7) or be obedient (441e6), and raise faction (442d1, 444b1) or bemeddlesome (443d2, 444b2), he is using public imagery to capture privatereality. Among the qualities of persons that are also literal qualities of parts, inPlato’s view, are virtues and vices of character.The easiest illustration of this is also its central application. Socrates feels andPlato plots a way to a definition of justice through a series of commonplaces. Aprinciple of the specialization of labour is recommended as a sensible policy (II.370a7–b6, 374a3–62, III.397d10–e9) before it returns as the essence of justice(IV.433a1–434d1). It is plausible to suppose that it must be more efficient if allagents concentrate on that single skill for which their nature and experience bestsuit them. It is truistic to say that it is unjust to take what belongs to others orlose what belongs to oneself (433e6–11).4Taken together, the two propositionssuggest a less elementary thought about justice: if one agent does the job withinthe city that another agent could do better, the one is taking what is another’s andthe other is losing what is his own. The reasoning is doubly equivocal. It shiftsfrom whatismine (my job or property) to whatought to bemine (the job orproperty of which I can make most). And it trades on the ambiguity of the notionof what I can do best between what I can do better thananythingelse, and what Ican do better thananyoneelse. Unless talents are providentially distributed, thesewill not always coincide, so that what is best for me (which is doing the former),and what is best for my city (which is generally doing the latter), may comeapart (cf. [11.5], 333 n. 34, 343 n. 28). The conclusion is a typically boldpersuasive définition: playing an improper role within a city is theft. Plato’spolitical application is well-known: there are to be three classes of citizen,guardians who theorize and govern, auxiliaries who police and defend, andartisans who marry and produce.However, all this is provisional until we have seen whether the samecharacterization applies not only to each individual within the city, but withineach individual (434d1–5). Of course, it is then claimed that it does (441d5–442b4), but the claim is not made carelessly. If there is no natural guarantee thatreason will be better at resisting thirst than thirst at impelling drinking (cf. 439b3–5), what shows that it is proper for thirst to obey reason, and not for reason tocapitulate to thirst? The answer lies in a fuller description of their aims andaptitudes. The social analogy, in which an agent’s proper job is best both for thecity and for himself, suggests that the proper function of a soul-part will at oncebenefit soul and part. Happily, these indeed go together: it is reason’s task togovern the entire soul by knowledge of what is beneficial both to each part of thesoul and to the community of its parts (441e4–442c8). It alone is capable ofreflection and calculation (439d5), and so can take a wide and long view of theinterests of the soul as a whole. An unruly appetite defeats its own ends also. Whatstimulates it is the prospect not merely of eating or drinking, but of doing sopleasurably (436an); it identifies success not with indulgence itself, but with feltsatisfaction. Hence it is not the case that the better it activates action, the betteroff it will be. A thirst that succumbs uncontrollably to any drink is not a thirstthat makes the best of its opportunities: it will accept not only the water withwhich the dying Sidney scrupled to dispel his own discomfort, but also the gin thatproduces dehydration. The apprehension and application of practical truth canalone offer deliverance from ‘fulfilment’s desolate attic’ (Larkin, ‘Deceptions’).Given that reason is a wise altruist, and appetite a foolish egoist, it is true forbothof them that it is just and best that reason rule and appetite obey. Thus, asdemanded, justice admits the same account within city and soul.What of the other virtues? TheRepublicoriginates the once famous doctrineof the four cardinal virtues in distinguishing three others that are also realizedwithin both city and citizen. Within the soul, wisdom is primarily the quality of areason that has firmly grasped theoretical and practical truth, courage of a spiritthat holds fast to reason’s guidance in the face of fear, and temperance of all theparts united in friendship and harmony (442b9–d1). A just soul must have thesethree virtues if it has the tripartite structure that Socrates describes. Even aquartet of virtues raises an old question. In earlier dialogues of Plato, such as theProtagoras,Socrates taught the unity of the virtues: to have one virtue is to haveall virtues. That doctrine simplifies the defence of virtue, which can then besingle; but can it survive the partition of the soul? TheRepublicis inexplicit, andinterpreters disagree (cf. [11.5], 329–30, n. 26, [n.6], ch. 14). One ground forsupposing that it cannot is the new possibility ofakrasia. TheProtagorasarguedthat to be wise is to be temperate, so that one cannot know that one ought to beresisting a pleasure to which one succumbs (352a8–357e8); but now appetite ispermitted to defy reason, may one not have the wisdom to know that one shouldnot drink even though one lacks the temperance or self-control to abstain? Suchcould have been true of the necrophilic Leontius when he rebuked his eyes forfeasting on corpses even as he rushed forward for a closer gaze (RepublicIV.439e7–440a3). This view may be right, but it is not required. If we maydistinguish a wise reason from a wise person, we may say that a person as awhole only possesses wisdom—or, equivalently, wisdom only possesses a personas a whole—if his reason exercises effective rule (cf. 442c5–8;LawsIII.689a1–c1). Thus we may suppose that a wise person must also be brave and temperate.Among the questions that this leaves open is whether the brave and temperatemust also be wise. If they must, then the virtues may indeed entail each other,but with the implication that only fully trained guardians can have any of them.Yet it cannot be Plato’s intention that his Utopia should leave the great majorityof its inhabitants in a vicious and therefore unhappy state. He needs to givewisdom a reach beyond the reason of the wise. He achieves this by anticipating adistinction that Aristotle was to make between two modes of ‘possessing’reason, one displayed in reasoning, the other in listening to reasoning(Nicomachean EthicsI.7.1098a3–5). It is best to possess one’s ownunderstanding, and one can then safely enjoy freedom; otherwise, if one has theluck to live within Plato’s Utopia, one may find the same governance through thesubordination of one’s reason, either for a time or for a lifetime, to theunderstanding of another (RepublicIX.590c8–591a3). How is this governance tobe effective when spirit or appetite is dominant? It is the art of the guardians togive the auxiliaries such a role that they can indulge their spiritedness, and theartisans such a role that they can indulge their appetitiveness, without actingunwisely or unreasonably. Auxiliaries are only contingently brave, and artisansonly contingently temperate, in that they need guardians to contrive for themrecurrent situations in which they can simultaneously serve spirit or appetite andobserve reason. Within their souls, reason is not corrupt, for it would notcommand whatever spirit or appetite demanded. Yet it is weak, both in that it isdirected by another’s, and in that it can lead spirit or appetite only in a directionin which this is willing to go. Their courage or temperance is thus doublyparasitic: it depends upon a judgement which echoes another’s wisdom, andwhich only prevails because that wisdom makes sure that it meets no resistance.Expulsion from Plato’s paradise would be the fall of these men: in the terms ofthe rake’s progress that he sketches in Books VIII and IX, auxiliaries wouldbecome timarchic men corrupted by honour, and artisans oligarchic, democraticor tyrannical men corrupted by pleasure. It is by moral luck that they attain tovirtue of a kind. They are not fully brave or temperate but wholly unwise; rather,they are brave or temperate in a way through a wisdom that they can accept butnot achieve. The unity of the virtues proper is reflected in a unity of popularvirtue.Thus the virtue of individuals is a unitary condition of their psychic parts. Howis it needed to make them happy? The readiest answer to this question focusesupon temperance, which is defined within the soul as follows: ‘We call a persontemperate by reason of the friendship and harmony of these parts, that is, whenthe ruler and its two subjects agree that reason ought to rule, and do not raiseraise faction against it’ (IV.442c10–d1). Caring for all the parts alike, reasonmakes them ‘friends’ (IX.589b4–5); parts, like people, will be ‘alike and friends’if they share the same governance (590d5–6). Socrates remarks again that vice isa sickness of the soul (IV.444e1), and can now explain. Eryximachus was givingfanciful expression to a Greek commonplace when he defined it as the task ofmedicine to produce ‘love and concord’ between the opposites (hot and cold, wetand dry, and so forth) that are the elements of the body (Symposium186d6–e3).Mental health is the peace of mind that comes of parts of the soul that are friendsand not factions. Without temperance, a man is prey to conflicting desires,perhaps subdued but not persuaded, which make him ‘a kind of doubleindividual’ (RepublicVIII.554d9–e1). There is a good and bad slavery: whilereason is a benevolent master who educates desire, the appetites are a tyrannicalone who frustrates it (IX.577d1–12). Reason can hope to rule with consent becauseof its altruism and intelligence. It was the soul’s original nature (X.611d7–e3),and the origin of the mortal soul (Timaeus42e7–8); so its attitude is paternalist,like that of a farmer tending his crops (RepublicIX.589b2–3). In indulgingnecessary appetites (those we cannot divert, or whose satisfaction benefits us,VIII.558d9–e2), it keeps appetite content. Being a master of language, it can‘tame bylogos’, persuading and not compelling (554d2). As reason can graspappetite’s concept of the pleasant, while appetite cannot make out reason’sconcept of the good, reason can take appetite by the hand, whereas a recalcitrantappetite could only turn its back on reason.So translated from the outer to the inner world, from society to soul, justicebecomes not a demand but an overriding need. The story of Gyges’ ring was afable of external accidents; in its internal essence, there is no such thing asinjustice with impunity. As Socrates will calculate with half-comical precision,the tyrant is 729 times unhappier than the philosopher-king (IX.587d12–e4).IIISocrates elaborates his defence of justice with some felicity. And yet it raisestwo related questions:(1) Is it coherent? Socrates is using two models to relate justice in society andsoul (cf. [11.5], 331 n. 29). The first is of group-member dependency. Anyquality of a city derives from the citizens who possess it (RepublicIV.435e1–6)and from their displaying it within the city; thus guardians make it wise inexercising their wisdom on behalf of the city as a whole (428c11–d6), whileauxiliaries make it brave in exercising their courage on its behalf (429b1–3). Theother model is of macrocosm-microcosm: justice is identical in city and in citizen(II.368e2–369a3, IV.434d3–5). According to the first model the justice of acitizen is external, but according to the second it is internal: it is said explicitlythat the justice of an individual consists in his doing his own business notexternally, but within his soul and in respect of its parts (443c9–c2). So a justcity is one whose citizens are just in exercising justicewithin it;yet just citizensare those who are just in exercising justicewithin themselves. Which seems notto cohere.(2) Is it to the point (cf. [11.16])? When Thrasymachus and Glauconquestioned the value of justice, their starting-points were concrete and external:justice is not committing murder, or adultery. They were asking a generalquestion about conduct of certain kinds. Socrates had already indicated a doubtas to whether justice can be defined in such terms, but he needs to connect hisdefinition to their initial conceptions. Otherwise, he risks having quietly changedthe subject from justice commonly conceived as respect for others to justiceidiosyncratically reconceived as mental health. The analogy between soul andcity may have confirmed that it is good for a city to be just, just as it is good for asoul to be at peace. But the question was not that, but whether it benefits eachcitizen to be justtowards others.Both difficulties will be resolved if internal and external justice are related soclosely that operating well within oneself is an exercise of the same dispositionas acting justly towards others. Then internal justice will be an aspect of thesame disposition or practice as external justice; to attempt to evaluate themseparately would be false and artificial. This Socrates tries to make out. Heconfirms his own definition by applying a ‘vulgar’ test: the internally just manwill be the last person to commit externally unjust acts such as theft and adultery(442d10–443b3). The connection also runs the other way: he evidently assumesthat it will not alter the extension of the terms ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ if one calls thataction just which ‘preserves and helps to produce’ internal justice, and that actionunjust which tends to dissolve it (443e5–444a1). (The same reciprocity shouldapply within popular virtue, once this has been distinguished: the outer willmanifest and maintain the inner, always within the contingency of an externalgovernance that makes the popular virtues sufficient in context for good acts.) Itsuits Socrates to focus on unjust actions that overindulge appetite, and so ‘feast’and ‘strengthen’ it (IX.588e5–6); and it extends the range of these actions thatappetite takes on a love of money, initially as a means to its more basicsatisfactions (580e5–581a1). Plato always views it with anxiety: in an earlier andmemorable simile, unrestrained appetites are as insatiable as a leaking jar(Gorgias493b1–3). Indulging appetite risks one’s health, and it is only safe tosatisfy necessary appetites. Every unjust action, strengthening tendencies thattend to take one over, is unsafe, and a proper object of concern to the agent whotakes thought about the condition of his soul. If the action isveryunjust, theconcern can only be acute.5Plato is seeking reasons for being just that are rooted in human nature, that is,in human psychology. A Martian’s reasons for being moral would have to bevery different if it were capable of an unconflicted contrariness of which we, inPlato’s view, are not. The success of his ethics is here a function of hispsychology. It depends upon taking spirit and appetite to be potentially rampant,and locating all criminal tendencies within them. (A pertinent objection is thatthe psychopath, for instance, may suffer not from passion but from boredom.)6Helpful, in a way, is that the parts are protean: spirit is given not only to angerbut to pride (RepublicVIII.553d4–6); appetite can even motivate a dilettantishtaste for philosophy (561c6–d2). When Belloc’s Mitilda told ‘such dreadful lies’she may have been indulging spirit or appetite. Yet this variability is moreconvenient for saving the theory than for guiding our practice. In the absence ofany determinate definition of the inclinations of the lower parts, and hence of anyprecise demarcation between the acts that discipline and the acts that indulgethem, it becomes imperative to supplement a negative description of the costs ofimmorality by a positive account of the motivations natural to reason. It is alsopart of our nature, in Plato’s view, that we possess a reason that is not just theslave of the passions (as Hume characterized it), but a pursuer of its own projects.We need to hear more about the appeal of acting justly in familiar ways, and howit is strong enough to captivate any soul in a state of healthy receptivity.Widening our focus around justice, we must ask what the charms are of treatingothers well that are irresistible to the intelligent soul.IVPlatonism is marked by two metaphysical dualisms, of unchanging Forms andmutable participants, and of soul and body. The second dualism discourages apossible implication of the first: Platonists do not view the world of change withindifference, for it is another country within which souls operate, orientingthemselves and others in colonial lives that realize the Forms under other skies.In thePhaedo,we find Socrates teaching the way of death, urging his pupils toescape the cycle of reincarnation in order, as discarnate souls, to philosophizeuninterruptedly. In theSymposium,composed at about the same time, he takes amore positive view of incarnate life. Within a body, even the life of the mind isan exercise in transience, but after a manner that creates a kind of permanence.‘Ways, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears’ and even ‘knowings’ donot remain the same, but come and go in a cycle of loss and repair, each instancedeparting and being replaced by another, so that it appears to remain the same(207e2–208b2). This pattern within a life becomes the model for a patternbetween lives that traverses not only the passage of time but the terminus ofdeath. Poets, lawgivers and lovers so lead their mental lives as to pass on theirbest features to others. Thus, within a pédérastic relationship, the man transmitshis virtues to the boy, so that, as through physical children, but more nobly andmore efficaciously, his life is reduplicated in a way that delivers it from his owndeath (209b5–c7). If the boy becomes a lover in turn, there is the chance of achain of transmission that may achieve for the sequence of lovers a kind ofimmortality. TheSymposiumcontains no developed psychology, but this prospectgains in point from the tripartition of theRepublic. Tripartition comes withincarnation, and so, to the extent that human virtues are ways of making the bestof a tripartite state, they are creatures of incarnate life. Philosophic lovers orlawgivers (poets are now distrusted) who value beinghumanlyvirtuous havereason to work not only for their own escape from reincarnation, but also for thecontinuation within other lives of the human virtues that they hope themselves totranscend.Vicarious immortality is not explicitly adduced in theRepublic,perhaps forthe reason, as we shall see in Section VII, that there Socrates has tactical reason(despite Glaucon, but because of Thrasymachus) to play down the appeal ofruling. Yet he illustrates how it could be maximized in describing lawgivers wholay down the general plan of a Utopia where everything of importance is to beplanned (e.g. V.458d9–e1), and there is no area of personal liberty within whichtheir influence is not to intrude. It is a further goal of theirs that every life shouldconnect with every other by a maximal mutual identification: ‘In this city morethan any other, when any individual fares well or badly, they would all speak inunison the word we mentioned just now, namely thatmineis doing well, or thatmineis faring badly’ (463e3–5). Now ‘this way of thinking and speaking’(464a1) can neither achieve anything in itself, nor have any magic to work in avacuum: the language of pseudo-identity is not an Indian rope-trick. What is itssubstance?Some have supposed that Plato takes an organic view of the state (pro,[11.13],79–81;contra,[11.17]), a suggestion that may be both clarified and supported bya simile in which he compares the fully unified city to the body that feels pain asa whole when only a finger is wounded (462c10–d7). Just as it is the animal whofeels pain, and not the finger, so it might be the city as a whole that feels at onewith itself. In the face of the fact that a city is not a person, such a notion, couldonly be mystical. Plato inclines rather to translate out talk about a city in terms ofits citizens (as when he derives any quality of a city from its citizens, IV.435e1–6). In one respect, an organic view threatens to be at once opaque and sinister: itmight imply that the happiness of persons can be sacrificed to the impersonalgood of the state. Plato remains far from conceiving that even when he getsclosest to it. In reply to a complaint by Adeimantus that he is denying hisguardians thedolce vitathat a ruling class expects, Socrates reminds him that theirtarget was the happiness not of one class especially, but of the whole city; and hegives the simile of a statue whose eyes should be painted the colour that bestsuits the statue (420b5–d5). However, the point of the simile is that, just as wewant eyes that look like eyes, so we want guardians who remain guardians, thatis, who care for their fellow citizens. The contrast is between factional andgeneral happiness, and not between the good of the citizens and the good of the city.When Socrates speaks of a myth that will make the citizens ‘care more for thecity and for each other’ (III.415d3–4), the ‘and’ is exegetical and not conjunctive.His desire that the city remain ‘one’ (IV.423b9–10) expresses not a mystical ortemperamental love of unity, but a fear that rich and poor may form two citieshostile to one another (422e9–423a1). There is nothing sinister, either, in theclaim that it is guardians who make the city count as wise, although they are byfar the smallest class (428c11–e9), any more than when a company counts asinnovative in virtue of the ingenuity of its design department. Even though hemocks a democratic and undiscriminating attitude to pleasures (VIII. 561b7–c4),and argues that the truest pleasures are those of philosophy (IX.583b2–587b10),Plato never permits happiness to be the privilege of a few. Perhaps because hedoes not suppose that a choice has to be made (at least within his Utopia), herather envisages thatallcitizens will achieve the happiness natural to them.How then, if not within an organic state, is the term ‘mine’ to be used inunison? Since it is the guardians who guide the rest, it is their mentality thatmost needs moulding.7To preclude private interests that might conflict withpublic obligations, Socrates advocates the abolition, among guardians andauxiliaries, of marriage, family life and private property, and their replacementby eugenic couplings and common messes. Ignorance of one’s parents risks theerrors of an Oedipus, and it is ostensibly to prevent these that he proposes thatthose born as a result of some procreative festival will call whoever bred then‘mother’ or ‘father’ (V.461d2–5). But when he adds a similar extension of‘sister’ and ‘brother’ even though he is oddly unconcerned about coeval incest(d7–e3), it becomes clear that he sees a more positive value in the group family.Viewing each other as relations, the guardians will treat one another accordingly(463c3–d8). Thus they will live in perfect peace; and, iftheydon’t quarrel, therewill be no danger of rebellion or faction within the rest of the city (465b5–10).Plato’s hope turns out to be that, so long as the guardians are perfectly united asan extended family, even the artisans will empathize with them and with oneanother. We may suspect that, even from his viewpoint, the latter would besubject to some tension of attitude: if they are spared the communism, this isplausibly because it would undermine the appetitive motivation which theyrepresent, and which suits their productive role; and yet it is presumably becausethey possess a reason, if a débile and dependent one, that they are capable of analtruism within the city of which appetite is incapable within the soul. However,what counts as a ‘necessary’ appetite, deserving of satisfaction, must vary withnatural disposition and civic role; a rational altruism can permit artisans a livelierappetitiveness than befits others. If so, they too may achieve Plato’s personal andcivic ideal of unity in becoming one man instead of many (IV.443e1), and yetidentifying with everyone else.Such is Plato’s political ideal. His personal ideas shines forth in the defence ofinspired madness that constitutes Socrates’ second speech in thePhaedrus,though it is there enveloped in an aptly mythic glow that makes interpretationhazardous. Not only recollection of the Forms, but erotic companionship, arepresented as recoveries of an earlier and happier state. Souls in heaven arepictured as following in the trains of the Olympian gods, and so forming moreselective bonds of congeniality than are proper to civic relations. After thecatastrophe of incarnation, followers of Zeus will look for someone to love whois by nature a philosopher and a leader, while followers of Hera will look forsomeone who is naturally regal, and so on (252e1–253b4). This fits well with theRepublic’sacceptance of varied natural talents, but extends the varieties ofpersonality. It does not only value the companionship of philosophers, but allowsthat spirited lovers, though less intellectual and less chaste, may eventually, inthe ornithic imagery, regrow their plumage together and fly back to heaven(256b7–e2). (We may suppose that it is in order to relate even unphilosophicallove to recollection that Socrates here exceptionally envisages tripartition evenbefore incarnation.) Thus Plato seems willing to grant personal attachments ageneral power to facilitate and enhance whatever activities are their sphere.However, he finds them particularly apt to philosophy. One reason is theinterpersonal nature of philosophizing. Most explicit here is theSeventh Letter:‘Only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing doestruth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark’ (341c6–d1).Dialectic is essentially a kind of dialogue, a truth of which he keeps us in mindby the very genre of his writings. It is oral discussion, and not writtencommunication, that can alone truly achieve the mental immortality described intheSymposium: living words sown in one soul contain a seed that can propagatethem in others down an unending sequence (Phaedrus276e4–277a4). The sphereof philosophy is friendship.VPlato calls his famous demand that philosophers be rulers and rulers philosophers‘the greatest wave’ (RepublicV.473c6–7). We must not forget that he waswriting under a democracy, and one whose values, even within his parody (VIII.557a9–558c7), we too must find congenial. And yet he makes his conception ofa class of guardians selected and trained for devotion to the city still moreremarkable in its concrete elaboration.Socrates assumes that aptitude for guardianship is genetically determined. Henotoriously embodies this assumption in a ‘noble fiction’ that is to be instilledinto all citizens (III.414b9–c2): everyone contains a trace of gold, silver, or ironand copper that marks him as a natural guardian, auxiliary, or artisan (415a4–7).Children commonly resemble their parents, but exceptions are to be demoted orpromoted (a7–b3, cf. IV.423c6–d2). How and when the traces are to be detectedis largely unspecified. Artisans will presumably receive some physical andmental training, in addition to the ‘noble fiction’, to prepare them for temperance;but it is not said what, nor whether it precedes or follows their assignment to thatclass. (In recent English educational terms, one might think of them as failing theeleven-plus.) Guardians and auxiliaries only divide in middle age when theformer advance from mathematics and administration to philosophy andgovernment. Relegation may occur at any time as occasion justifies: cowards inbattle become artisans (V.468a5–7). Late promotion is more problematic, as itmay be too late to catch up on education; parallel to demotion here is notpromotion (as at III.415b2–3, IV.423d1–2), but public honour and privategratification (V.468b2–c4). Yet Plato’s human stratification is a meritocracy, andnot a caste-system.In place of marriages, Socrates proposes the institution of eugenic matings(458d9–e4) arranged ostensibly by lot but actually with an eye to personal meritand stability of population (459d8–460b5).8This had better have the effect ofcreating better guardiansandauxiliaries, and not a shortage of naturalauxiliaries; it fits that courage, as well as intelligence, is a ground of selection(460b1–5, 468c5–8). He permits some freedom of sexual activity to those pastthe proper ages for breeding (461b9–c7), presumably because even they needsome sexual satisfaction; but, likening ‘erotic necessity’ to geometric (458d5–7),he depersonalizes it. The only erotic attitudes that he allows to be discriminatingin their objects depend upon culture (cf. III.403a7–c2), and are satisfied bykissing (V.468b12–c4). It may be wondered (as in [11.n], 159) whether theirvery selectivity must not make them out of place within Plato’s all-embracingcommunity.In one respect Plato is millenia in advance of his time. He accepts that hisprinciple of specialization applies also to women, but rejects an application thatwould justify the status quo.9Different natures should indeed have differentfunctions within the city, but to infer that men and women should play differentroles would be like permitting bald men to be cobblers but not men with hair, orvice versa; for most purposes it is irrelevant that the female bears and the malebegets (453e2–454e4). Recent writers, tired of debating whether Plato avoidsfascism, debate tirelessly whether he achieves feminism. Julia Annas has twocomplaints that rest, I think, rather upon prejudice than upon perception. First,she declares that Plato ‘sees women merely as a huge untapped pool of resources’,and that his ‘only’ objection to the subjection of women is that ‘under idealconditions it constitutes an irrational waste of resources’ ([11.1], 183). Sheimplies that, although concerned about ‘production of the common good’ ([11.1], 181), Plato views half the population exclusively as providers and notreceivers, as means and not as ends. This should not easily be believed.Somewhat artificially, Socrates distinguishes the questions whether his proposalsare feasible, and whether they are desirable (456c4–10, 457a3–4). His defence oftheir feasibility, sketched above, is explicitly about what is natural (b12–c2), andimplicitly about what is just (though it uses his definition of justice and not theterm ‘just’). His defence of their desirability is simply that mental and physicaleducation will produce the best possible men and women, which is the greatestgood for a city (456e6–457a2). He says no more, doubtless because he simply hasin mind that the best city is that whose citizens are best (cf. IV.435e1–6), avaluation that is intrinsic and not instrumental. Secondly, Annas complains thatPlato retains a masculine stereotype of excellence in spending most of Book V‘claiming, irrelevantly and grotesquely, that women can engage in fighting andother “macho” pursuits nearly as well as men’ ([n.1], 185).10It is true thatSocrates pays special attention to women’s new role as soldiers and athletes (V.452a7–e3); but this is because he feels that he has to confront the objection that,since physical exercise was taken naked, that would be indecent and ridiculous(cf. 457a6–b3). Otherwise, he gives no more emphasis to physical than tointellectual training (456b8–10, 456e9–457a1), and actually makes less mentionof ‘macho’ pursuits such as athletics and soldiering (456a1–2, 457a6–7) than ofmedicine (454d2–6, 455e6), culture (e7), philosophy (456a4), and guardianship(a7–8, 457a8). Even when reflecting upon women, Plato is no philistine.There are, however, two opposite regrets to qualify our admiration of hisprescience. On the one hand, he distances himself too quickly from his ownexperience in denying women any distinctive qualities. The training andeducation of the guardians involve the reconciling of contrasted tendencieswithin the soul, the toughness of spirit and the tenderness of reason (III.410c8–e9), and facility and stability within reason itself (VI.503b7–d12). If he hadpresented this as a wedding of the masculine and the feminine (cf.LawsVII.802e8–11), he could have welcomed women more positively, not asmonopolizers, but as icons, of tenderness and stability. On the other hand, heremains too slackly within the limits of his own experience when he has Glauconremark that, broadly speaking, women are in everything ‘far outdone’ by men,and Socrates agree: ‘In all occupations the woman is weaker than the man’ (V.455d2–e2). Admittedly, the force of this is unclear, and has to be consistent withthe reservation ‘Many women are better than many men at many things’ (d3–4,where the repetition of ‘many’ increases the rhetorical emphasis even as itreduces the logical content). It might imply a scarcity of female guardians, whichwould be inconvenient. It might just mean that men possess more energy andstamina in exercising the same abilities, which is one way of making sense of thesumming-up: ‘So man and woman have the same nature as guardians of the city,except that it is stronger in men and weaker in women’ (456a10–11). But apassage that challenges prejudice should not take refuge in ambiguities. Plato hassome, but not all, of the courage and imagination needed to flesh out his pictureof a class of rulers unlike any rulers he knew.VIThough they can be allowed no monopoly on altruism, philosophers must beextraordinarily motivated to serve others if they are to merit the power that Platowould place in their hands. At the heart even of his social philosophy lies thetheory of Forms. Within both personal and civic relations he expects these to benot distracting but inspiring.In thePhaedrusSocrates makes an extraordinary linkage between Forms andfaces. Of all the Forms, Beauty offers the clearest image of itself to our sight, sothat ‘it is the most apparent and the most loved’ (2250d3–e1). We then read thatthe lover would offer a sacrifice to the boy ‘as to a statue and a god’ (251a6–7),as if a boy, unlike a god, could be both. He is clearly in a state of deepconfusion, and we should not be too quick to insist that what he really sees in theboy is the image and not Beauty itself.In(and not merelywhile) looking at him,he is ‘carried back’ to the Form (250e2–3): passionate seeing is infused byunconscious recollecting. When he turns his attention from body to soul, thesame confusion recurs. He now recollects not a Form but a god, i.e., at least amode of apprehending and realizing Forms. But gazing at the boy withoutgrasping that he is remembering a god, he naturally credits the boy with the giftsthat he in fact owes to the god and transmits to the boy; mistaking material formodel, he supposes that he is imitating the boy even as he transmutes him(252e7–253b1). The confusion is salutary, for it inspires the generosity (b7–8)that does indeed make the lover godlike: it is through finding the boy ‘equal to agod’ (255a1) that he becomes himself ‘possessed by a god’ (be). Appropriatelywithin his defence of a higher madness, Socrates is allowing that the Forms canproduce a moral revolution, replacing conventionality by authenticity (252a4–6),through metaphysical bewilderment.The same transition from inspiration by a body to displacement of interestfrom body to soul was already an emphatic feature of the ladder of love in theSymposium. The omission there of any mention of recollection, a theme thatPlato was developing about the same time in thePhaedo,can only be understoodas a sacrifice for the sake of simplicity and unity of presentation. Alternatelyextending and raising his view, the lover shifts his interest from one body to allbeautiful bodies, to one soul, to the practices and laws that mould all beautifulsouls, to the branches of knowledge, and so to the most cognizable of allbeauties, the Form of Beauty itself (210a4–e1). The Form is explicitly graspedonly at the end, but must be supposed to have been exercising a subliminalinfluence from the beginning. The lovers of sights and sounds inRepublicBookV, who not only lack but are incapable of knowledge of the Form, are fixated ona plurality of beauties (476b4–c4, 479e1–2). Though they doubtless use thegeneral term ‘beautiful’, they are effectively nominalists and not realists aboutbeauty, with no inkling that shifts of interest between individuals and evencategories are intelligible as exercises of loyalty towards a single commonproperty. They are aesthetes for whom every art-object is irreplaceable by anyother. Those who make the ascent are different from early on: their hearts rapidlyadjust to generalizations about beauty as a single property that comes in kindsand degrees. For Plato, this can only mean that, like homing pigeons, they arealready potentially on target to retrieve the Form itself.How will this effect their attitudes to persons? Their promiscuity will beunlike that of the indiscriminate lovers mentioned in theRepublicwho find asnub nose ‘charming’ and a Roman nose ‘regal’, a dark complexion ‘virile’ and afair one ‘divine’ (474d7–e2). Inhabiting an erotic world of thick rather than thinconcepts, of specificities and not abstractions, these find all adolescents attractivein different ways. The lovers of theSymposiumrealize that ‘if one must pursuebeauty of appearance, it is great folly not to consider the beauty of all bodies oneand the same’ (210b2–3). So the two promiscuities contrast, for the one dependson appreciating differences, the other on appreciating identity; the one values allindividuals, while the other values nothing individual. Even at the second levelof the ascent, where the objects of love are souls and mental qualities, there is nointerest in varieties of personality. The right speeches are those ‘that improve theyoung’ (c2–3), with no suggestion of the theme in thePhaedrus,which is one ofthe links between its treatments of love and rhetoric, that different types ofspeech are appropriately directed at different temperaments (271b1–5, c10–d7).When the ascent is completed, the lover will look down at ‘the wide sea ofbeauty’ (Symposium210d4) at a height from which individuals, and even kinds ofindividual, are no longer distinct.We may then wonder whether the ladder of love is not an exit out of love inany ordinary sense. It is true that the summit of the ascent is not the end of thestory. In a sexual metaphor, the lover will beget on Beauty ‘not images of virtuebut true virtue’, and so become ‘dear to the gods and, if any man can, immortalhimself also’ (212a3–7). Yet all this contrasts with the kind of immortalityoffered before (209c2–d1); there the lover begat on the boy virtues ‘morebeautiful and immortal’ than physical children; here he begets virtue on Beautyitself so as to become, so far as is humanly possible, immortal in the manner of agod. The ‘images of virtue’ that the human lover generated in his beloved wereperhaps no more real than those that poets generate in their audience (d1–4); thephilosophical lover may generate ‘true virtue’ only in himself in the form of anintellectual state that relates him only to the gods. On this reading, a vicariousimmortality dependent on the contingencies of personal relationships istranscended and replaced by a proprietary immortality that is no longer a child ofchance. Gregory Vlastos concludes, ‘What started as a pederastie idyl ends up ina transcendental marriage’ ([10.59], 42).If this egoistic intellectualism is the correct interpretation of the Platonic ascent,Forms provide not a new motivation towards morality, but a new problem for itsjustification. As Vlastos aptly comments, ‘Were we free of mortal deficiency wewould have no reason to love anyone or anything except the Idea: seen face toface, it would absorb all our love’ ([10.59, 32–3). If so, Plato’s erotics haveproblematic implications for his politics, for the Forms that distract lovers fromloving should also distract philosopher-rulers from ruling. It is a famous problemin theRepublichow to draw philosophers away from enjoying the truth intodoing good, and this reading of theSymposiumturns the screw. If Socrates’second speech in thePhaedrusseems very different, that might confirm that ithas to be taken with caution. However, one may doubt whether it can be right toread theSymposiumso inconveniently. It is clear from thePhaedothat ‘truevirtue’ is not purely intellectual but rather consists of practical virtue ‘togetherwith wisdom’ (69b3), here in theSymposiumcoming from apprehension of theForms. Similarly procreative language to that ofSymposium(212a2–5) serves intheRepublic(VI.490b3–7) to describe the emergence of ‘a sound and justcharacter, which is accompanied by temperance’ (c5–6). In theLaws,the effectof intercourse with divine virtue is to become outstandingly virtuous oneself (X.904c6–e3). The contrast in thePhaedois with a slavish virtue that merelymeasures pleasures and pains; here in theSymposiumit is with a prephilosophicalvirtue that may be beautiful and immortal (209c6–7) but lacksunderstanding. There is no implication of any withdrawal from practical life.More uncertain is whether there remains any intimate relationship with anindividual. One might infer that there does not from a remark that ‘slavery to thebeauty of one’ is ‘base and mean-spirited’ (210d1–3); but that complaint isactually more applicable if the lover is now developing his own virtue alone. Weshould rather distinguish the contemplation of beauty, which should be wide andindividually non-discriminating, from the creation of beauty, which for most ofus has to be personal and more selective. Better indicative is the context: personallove cannot cease to be Socrates’ topic without a discontinuity of which onecould expect a clearer warning. It is more likely that the ‘true virtue’ is generatedboth in the lover and in a beloved (unlike the ‘images of virtue’ which alreadyexisted in the lover and had only to be transmitted). If so, what the Formsprovide is not a new egocentricity in the pursuit of virtue, but a new motivationfor creating it as best one can—which for lovers is within a beloved, as forlawgivers it is within a community. Vicarious immortality was presented beforethe ascent-passage as the prolongation of a human good; a proprietaryimmortality is now the additional reward of a divine height of beneficence. Sounderstood, this section of theSymposiumis indeed an overture, and not anobstacle, to the wider and deeper concerns of theRepublic.The two works display a structural similarity: in both, a human explanation ofcaring for others is supplemented by a transcendental one that follows onintroduction of the Forms. TheSymposiumfirst finds in vicarious immortality ahuman motive for creating virtue in another especially within an eroticrelationship; theRepublicfirst finds in communism among the guardians ahuman cause of identifying with others within a Utopia. But those capable ofapprehending the Forms have an extra ground for doing good that also enablesthem to do more good. Plato’s presentation in theRepublictakes on a partlymisleading emphasis from the dialectical context. In reaction to Thrasymachus’assertion that all rule is for the benefit of the rulers (I.338e1–339a4), Socratesclaims that some ‘compulsion and penalty’ must be applied to the good if theyare to be willing to rule; the greatest penalty is being ruled by someone worse(347b9–c5). Later he still accepts the principle, ‘The city in which those who areto rule are least eager to do so must needs be the best and least divisivelyadministered’ (VII.520d2–4). It is only fair that philosopher-kings should beforbidden to linger among their own contemplations, and ‘compelled’ to rule,each in turn, in return for an education that, exceptionally, they owe to their city(a6–c3). This risks disappointing Glaucon, who wanted to hear justice praisedfor its own sake (II.358d1–2), for ruling reluctantly in payment of a debt mighthave no value in itself other than that, which is being questioned and cannot bepresupposed, of justice itself; and even that value might be cancelled by thecompulsion. However, the word ‘compelled’ carries no implication of theintrinsically unchoiceworthy: philosophers are also ‘compelled’ to gain a visionof the Form of the Good (VII.519c8–d1, 540a7–9). When Socrates remarks thatphilosopher-kings will practise ruling ‘not as something fine but as somethingnecessary’ (b4–5), the thought must be that they will be obliged to rule, and notthat they will get nothing out of it. Yet the emphasis is unhelpful: we have tolook around for hints of what ruling offers rulers in itself that makes them willingthough not enthusiastic. And we cannot extract an answer from sections II–IIIabove: truant philosophizing, so long as it is pursued for the sake of truth and notfor fun or out of one-upmanship, is hardly fattening the lion of spirit or theCerberus of appetite. Philosophers, like Martians, escape the common costs ofinjustice.We need to ask (as Vlastos possibly failed to) what it is to love a Form. Tosuppose that it is simply to enjoy contemplating it would be like supposing that amother can only show her love for her child by looking at it. Loving the Forms isfurther to wish to fashion oneself after them in a just and orderly life (VI.500c2–d1). Once reason itself possesses wisdom, it desires that this possess the soul ofwhich it is part, which requires that it rule wisely within the soul (IV.442c5–8).This already offers the agent a rich enough prize: becoming just and practisingvirtue likens a man to a god so far as is humanly possible (X.613a7–b1, cf.Symposium212a5–7). Thus meeting an obligation can be a humble, if not thehighest, part of the project of apotheosis. There is yet further point in mouldingnot just oneself but one’s community: I love wisdom more if I wish it tocharacterize not only myself but my city, which demands that this be ruled by thewise; in a striking expression, it is a ‘service’ to justice to extend its domain ingoverning a city (VII.540e2–3). Moreover, to the extent that this attitude focuseson the Form itself, it will be impartial between cities as well as citizens.Identification with others previously replaced egoism by what has been called‘nostrism’ (cf. [11.9], 72); devotion to Forms, and desire that things participate inthem, now supplements egocentricity by impartiality. Here in theRepublic,as notin theSymposium,we meet a passionate impersonality, inspired by the Forms,that values the existence of justice on earth as in heaven, with no specialreference either to the agent or to his own circle or community. However highthis valuation may be, it is compatible with a reluctance to rule. If I am aphilosopher in Plato’s Utopia, I shall consent to rule, for the sake both of beingjust myself and of making others just, when it is needed and because I amobliged; but I shall not compete to rule when justice would be equally achieved allround by another’s ruling instead. I may value nothing above the rule of justice;but, to the extent that this is an end definable without even implicit reference tomyself, I can be as keen as possible that it be achieved without being more thanwilling that it be achieved through me. It is thus that we may take Plato to bereconciling the rulers’ reluctance with their devotion to the ruled.VIIForms have a further role to play, providing not only a special motivation to rulebut a special competence in ruling. Dialectic, which leads through the world ofthe Forms, is also to provide a practical knowledge that entitles philosophersalone to lead their own lives and direct those of others. But how is it to do this?TheRepublichardly faces up to the question. Karl Popper has a complaint that isfor once not unfair: ‘Plato’s Idea of the Good is practically empty. It gives us noindication of what is good, in a moral sense, i.e. what we ought to do’ ([11.13],274 n. 32, cf. 145–6). The objection goes back to Aristotle (Nicomachean EthicsI.6.1096b35–1097a13), who had more to go by than the text of the dialogues.Yet in assessing it by the evidence we have, we need to remember some featuresof theRepublicas a text that we inevitably neglect when we expound its contentas a theory—as I have been doing. In a manner, theRepublicdeconstructs itself.It advances the thesis that it is dialectic alone, looking at the stars, that can guidethe ship of state (to translate into metaphor an analogy spelled out at VI.488a7–489c7). The paradox is made vivid in the image of the philosopher’s return fromthe light outside back into the Cave: one would expect him to be blinded by thedarkness (VII.516e3–6), but are assured that he alone will see aright (520c3–6).The best guide is Johnny Head-in-Air. But who is presenting the case? ASocrates who remains Socratic in denying any pretensions to dialectic himself:he compares himself to a blind man on the right road (VI.506c8–9), and can onlyoffer to speak in likenesses (e3–4). He is a pre-dialectical ‘lawgiver’ (V.458c6, VI.497d1) for a community that allows only dialecticians the right to rule.11Hisconclusions themselves imply that interpreters who take them as Platonic dogmamust be making a mistake. His task is to present a persuasive case for dialecticwithout any ability reliably to anticipate its results. Consequently, we cannotexpect more from him than gesture where we most want guidance, and need tobe cautious even where he is communicative.Socrates conceives of the goal of dialectic in two ways: it is apprehension ofthe nature of the Form of the Good (VII.532a5–b5), and of the interconnectionsbetween the branches of knowledge (531c9–d4, 537c1–7). Dialectic is thusfoundational, evaluative and synoptic. Our world depends upon the world ofForms, which derives ideologically from the Good; unlike our world, which canonly imperfectly marry the material with the ideal, the world of Forms is as it isbecause that is the best way anything can be. Apprehending the Forms wouldyield a grasp of theisand theoughtof their world and of ours, but Socrates isunable to spell out how. One particular difficulty is this: our ‘ought’ is in part amoral ‘ought’, but how can morality, which is interpersonal, connect with theimpersonal world of Forms? More technically, Plato is at least inclined to adoctrine of the self-predication of Forms; how then can there be a Form ofJustice, when it is only persons, acts, intentions, and the like, that can be just?Consistently with his persona, Socrates supplies hints that are not answers. Quitedeliberately, we may suppose, Plato has him twice take us by surprise. Justicehas been defined in partite terms: a soul or city is just if its parts do their ownthing. And yet it is by looking at the soulbeforepartition that we shall bestdistinguish justice from injustice (X.611c4–5). Justice is personal. And yet it canbe said that the Forms neither wrong nor are wronged by each other (VI.500c3–4).We should infer, I suggest, that the justice that Socrates has identified as one ofthe cardinal virtues is the human face of a vaguer reality. Specific talk of a Formof Justice is at home within a human perspective. Glimpsed outside thatperspective, the opposite of injustice is no less than rational order (kosmosaccording tologos,c4–5). We may suppose that the four virtues, and indeed allvirtues, are products of the refraction of that through the prism of mind andmatter. (This would be the metaphysical ground of the unity of the virtues.) Inpatterning themselves and their society upon the Forms, philosophers make them‘as orderly and divine as is humanly possible’ (c9–d1). Their goal is to makehuman activity a more faithful reflection of intelligible reality.This is abstract, but not empty. There is an obvious analogy between the unityof the Forms (visible to the synoptic eye) and Plato’s ideal—which we may wellnot share—of a wholly co-operative community. If we explain away hismetaphysics as a projection from his ethics, that confirms the analogy. Yet thecontent of theRepublicis generally less indefinite, and we need to reflect howthe abstract and concrete connect. In a similar passage, we read that philosophers,forming a clear pattern in their minds through scrutiny of the truest truth,‘establish here norms concerning the fine, the just, and the good if they needestablishing, and preserve those that are established’ (484d1–3). This mayexpress an ideal that contrasts both with Aristotle and with later Plato: dialecticmight allow the deduction of moral principles, and civil laws and institutions,that are fixed and absolute. But the issue is debatable.12Little can safely be readout of the fact that much of theRepublicis an imaginative exercise in lawgiving.We may view its laws less as attempts to anticipate the results of dialectic than asa mode of describing a city that does not exist. More recent Utopias (likeThomas More’s) are commonly presented in the popular genre of travel-writing;Plato apes the more serious Greek genre of lawgiving for a colony (cf. thecasualness of VII.534e1)—as he will do again, more fully and formally, in theLaws. Over some matters Socrates expresses a conservatism that is doubtlessPlato’s: innovation in music and gymnastics is especially discouraged (IV.424b5–c6). Yet the apparent fixity of Plato’s ideal may owe more to the genre than towhat Popper calls ‘the rigidity of tribalism’ ([11.13], 172). Certainly, to inferfrom Books VIII and IX (where Socrates sketches a decline from Utopia througha series of constitutions and characters terminating in the tyrannical) that Platothought that all change is for the worse would be to misread systematiccomparison as impossible history, for the primitive and pre-historical GoldenAge was not an age of Platonists and philosopher-kings.We may think of his Utopia as a thought-experiment that conveys concretelyhow a society could be informed by dialectic without consisting solely ofdialecticians. In resting so much on the analogy between soul and city, whileleaving open whether further investigation would multiply the parts of the soul,Socrates implicitly leaves open also whether there are precisely three classes ofcitizen. Indeed, his survey of the stages of advanced education in Book VIIimplies further subdivisions within guardians and auxiliaries. What then of the‘norms concerning the fine, the just and the good’ (VI.484d2)? We mustremember that Plato cannot be rigid about rules, either moral or legal, when hehas rejected any attempt to define moral virtues in concrete behavioural terms(see section I above). It is true that courage was characterized as ‘thepreservation of the opinion that has arisen under the law through educationconcerning what things, and what kinds of thing, are to be feared’ (IV.429c7–8).All but guardians need general opinions as guides for a reason raised in thePoliticus: ‘How could anyone be able to sit beside someone all his life andprescribe to him precisely what is fitting?’ (295a9–b2). But no virtue can becaptured by such rules, for the unity of the virtues applies in a manner even toacts: an act may be just without being brave, for its context may include nodanger; but, as Cephalus learnt (RepublicI.331cl–d3), an act is only just if it isbest, and that is sensitive to circumstance. Despite some of the appearances, bothmoral and legal rigidities are out of place in theRepublic.VIIII have suggested that we have to take a somewhat sceptical view of Socrates’quasi-legislation in theRepublicif we keep in mind the theory on which it rests.This is uncertain, but has the effect of easing the transition to the later dialogues,thePoliticusandLaws.ThePoliticusessentially approves the institution of philosopher-kings: theStranger confirms that the correct and real form of government is that in whichthe rulers are truly expert; whether they rule willing or unwilling subjects, withor without laws, is by the way (293c5–d2). The decisive questions are not concrete(‘Do they kill and banish?’, ‘Do they import citizens or send out colonies?’), butabstract (‘Are they applying knowledge and justice?’, ‘Are they improving thecity?’ (d4–c2)). This must be because there are no reliable generalizationslinking the concrete and the abstract; absolute laws cannot do justice to thedissimilarities of men and situations (294a10–b6). A conception of precision(t’akribes,284d1) can only be sketched imprecisely; expert statesmen, like allpractical experts (c2), must be able to measure the greater and the lesser inrelation not only to each other but to the ‘mean’, that is, ‘the moderate, the fitting,the timely, the necessary, and all else that falls into the mean between extremes’(e5–8). Aristotle was to develop this more fully, but to very different effect: Platoaspires to the precision of an art of measurement, while he appeals to theperception of particular cases (Nicomachean EthicsII.9.1109b22–3). WithinPlato, we must suspect, imprecision of description, and precision as an aspiration,are made for each other.There are still roles for rules, either fixed or flexible. Even expert rulers willenact laws to guide action in their absence (Statesman295a4–b2); but these arerevisable by rulers, and overridable by subjects (c8–d7). More significant is theright role of laws within cities whose rulers are inexpert—that is, within all citiesoutside Utopia (meaning ‘nowhere’). Here flexibility is dangerous. Where thereis no knowledge, revision is likely to come of corrupt motives, whereas longexperience, careful consideration and popular consent lie behind laws as theystand (300a1–b6). When rulers know what they are doing, consent does notmatter (293c8–d2); when they do not, it does. It is if a doctor is expert that thepatient’s consent has no bearing on the desirability of the treatment (296b5–c2).However, as in medicine, political consent is at best an indication, and never acriterion, of getting things right. At least the primarygoalof governing wellmust be to act justly oneself; but itsmarkis just action by the governed (c6–d4),which is a consequence and not a mode of procedure. Plato retains a counterfactualoptimism: if a perfect ruler appeared, he would be welcome (301d4, cf.RepublicVI.498d6–502a2); but, as it is, no such king is produced in our cities,and the best that we can do is follow in the track of the truest polity (301d8–e4).This causes Plato no enthusiasm. If a more practicable art, like medicine ornavigation, were to proceed by rigid legislation, we should all find it absurd(298b6–299e9). Such government is an imitation of the true in a manner thatmakes it less a copy than a counterfeit (293e2–3, cf. 300c5–301a4): far fromtaking the ideal as a model, it despairs of achieving more than a simulacrum ofsuccess by means that are fit less to succeed than to avoid the worst causes offailure.TheLawsdeepens and develops what is essentially the same conception, butwith much more patience for the unideal. Its protagonist is an Athenian Stranger,who lacks at once the uncertainties and the aspirations of a Socrates. Hedistinguishes a ‘first city and polity’, which realizes the greatest possible unity,from one that is single to a secondary degree (V.739b8–e4). The ideal recalls theRepublic,the means are communist (women, children, property held incommon), the end unanimity in attitude and action; even things private bynature, eyes and ears and hands, must seem to operate in common. There is a newfluidity: the communism is to extend not only through a small class of guardiansand auxiliaries, but ‘so far as possible throughout the whole city’ (c1–2). Thiscorresponds to a more fluid psychology; the golden cord of reason has to contendwith other cords that are hard and steely (I.644d7–645b1), but the field of conflictis not defined as tripartite (cf. [11.2]). However, reason was never immune tocorruption, and the removal of the barriers that constituted partition fits a newanxiety that incarnation is always infection. It is not in human nature to acquireautocratic power without becoming full of insolence and injustice (IV.713c6–8,cf. XII.947e7–8). Our mortal nature inclines us to sacrifice public interest toprivate gain, ‘creating a darkness within itself (IX.875b6–c2). Only by the graceof God could a man be born with a character that would enable him safely toapply his intelligence and dispense with laws; as it is, true freedom is hardly tobe found anywhere (c2–d3). The main obstacle to philosophical rule is nothingmore contingent than our humanity.Hence the second-best city is humanly the best. While still in fact evidentlyimpracticable (cf. [11.3], 266–8, 311–12), it conveys more concretely whatmight be adequate to human needs if circumstances were different and consentobtainable. Though knowledge itself should never be enslaved to law (c7–d1),there is no security for any city in which the law is not master of the rulers (IV.715c6–d6). By a revision of Athenian practice, with an age-limit and an electioninstead of lot, officials are to be answerable to scrutiny by a board of auditors(XII.945e4–946e4); when autocracy is out of the question, even bureaucracymust be kept under control. Laws are to be prefaced by explanations andexhortations (IV.718b2–723d4). We may wonder whether these would notencourage jurors to apply the spirit rather than the letter of each law, but theirintention seems simply to win comprehension and compliance (718c8–d7). It isillustrated profusely, almost compulsively, how minutely laws must define anddifferentiate the types of criminal offence. That some details of regulation mustbe left by the founding legislator to experiment and experience (e.g. VI.770b4–8)was also recognized in the less law-boundRepublic(IV.427a2–7); here, even theseare to become virtually immutable after ten years’ trial (LawsVI.772b5–c7).Later revision must be excused by necessity, and will be inhibited by proceduralobstacles (c7–d4). Where nature is weak, safety lies in a straitjacket.Plato’s morality is a melodrama, and theLawsdenies it a happy ending. Healways tends to dualisms, of Forms and world, soul and body, reason andunreason, unity and division, education and corruption. Social dramas aremirrored by conflicts within each soul. When he writes, ‘There is a strange, wild,lawless kind of desire that is present even in those of us who seem mostmoderate’ (RepublicIX.572b4–6), the idealist is shaking hands with the cynic:Jacques Vergès, the French lawyer who defends the undefendable, has remarked,‘There is in the heart of the most honest man a cesspool filled with hideousreptiles.’ A political Utopia that intends to make a heaven of earth has to make wayfor a second-best polity that is truer to man’s fallen nature. We read Plato nownot in order to share the consolations of hope or despair, but to be reminded ofhow it is part of our freedom to be able to enter imaginatively into a higher viewof our potentialities, and a lower view of our actualities, than we can take quiteseriously.NOTES1 The traditional and inevitable translation ofeudaimoniaby ‘happiness’ is defendedby Vlastos ([9.93], 201–3) with a qualification: he notes thateudaimoniahas twofeatures, ‘a subjective (pleasurable contentment or satisfaction) and an objective one(attainment of good, well-being)’, and concedes that the second looms larger withineudaimoniathan within happiness.2 As I shall use the terms, I am ‘disposed’ to act in a certain way in certaincircumstances if I am such as to act so in those circumstances (if and when theyarise), while I have a ‘practice’ of acting in a certain way in certain circumstancesif I do act so in those circumstances (if and when they arise). Hence disposition andpractice are logically equivalent, and both hypothetical in content. It is not an issuewhether the disposition has intrinsic value, or only instrumental value derivativefrom the value of the practice. This usage fits the easy transitions in theRepublicbetween state and activity (e.g. atRepublicII.357d3–358b7, where Glaucon,proposing that justice be assigned intrinsic as well as instrumental value, firstspeaks of it as something to be practised, and then as an internal state of the soul).3 E.g. Sachs ([11.16], 144−7 (=[10.58]II, 38–41)), Reeve ([11.15], 24−33), Irwin ([9–39], 189–91).4 This thought suffices to show that it is indeed of justice, and not, more broadly, ofrighteousness or, indeed, being moral, that Plato is offering an account; cf. Vlastos([11.18] sect. 1).5 It may still be objected that Socrates is really assigning external justice onlyderivative value as a cause and a symptom of internal justice, and so disappointingGlaucon. I take his reply to be that internal and external are aspects of the samedisposition-cum-practice, of which the internal is naturally the focus of intrinsicvalue egocentrically conceived. One might compare dressing well, a single practicethat involves both looking good to others, and looking good to oneself in themirror. A better reply might be that,pace RepublicIV.443c9–d1, psychic harmonyis equally manifested in internal acts of mind and external actions. The just mantreats others in ways that do not merely evidence and reinforce, but embody, his stateof soul. He finds equal pleasure in internal and external activity, for it is in boththat his psychic harmony becomes for him an object of experience.6 I owe this example to Mark Rowe. It would need a speculative psychopathology todissolve the objection on Plato’s behalf.7 The double process of externalization (from soul to society) and internalization(from society to soul) is illumined by Lear [11.10].8 Whether in reaction to the frequent infelicity of Popper [11.13], or out of a distastefor moral commonplaces and a penchant for thought-experiments, modern writingon theRepublictends to be neutral or even sympathetic (e.g. Price [11.14], 179–93). But ominous parallels to Plato can readily be found in Kolnai [11.9], GeorgeOrwell’s1984,andQuotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Thus Orwell nicelyconveys the charmlessness of compulsory copulation: ‘Even then he could haveborne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. Butcuriously enough it was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce achild if they could… She even used to remind him of it in the morning, assomething which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. Shehad two names for it. One was “making a baby”, and the other was “our duty to theParty”’ (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989:70).9 The status quo was certainly repressive, though the orthodoxy of Annas [10.45],181–2) needs some qualification in the light of Cohen ([11.4], ch. 6).10 The complaint goes back to Rousseau: ‘No longer knowing what to do withwomen, he found himself forced to turn them into men’ (Émile,Book 5). Itreappears, alas, in Price ([11.14], 170−1).11 The case is not as simple as that of an amateur arguing for employing an architect,for two reasons: dialectic is needed to define ends as well as means; and Socratesindulges in plenty of designing himself.12 Contrast Owen ([11.12], 89−94 (=[4.46], 77−82)), who finds theRepublicrigid,with Klosko ([11.8], 167–72), who finds it flexible. The evidence is elusive, but,with or on behalf of Klosko, I would cite the following passages as qualifying theprevalent pretence to be legislating once and for all by acknowledging the properlimits of the law, the need to supplement its letter in the light of its spirit, and thepossibility of moral development:Republic1, 425a3–e7, 426e4–427b2,BIBLIOGRAPHY11.1 Annas [10.45].11.2 ‘Bobonich, C. ‘Akrasia and agency in Plato’sLawsandRepublic’,Archiv fürGeschichte der Philosophie76 (1994): 3–36.11.3 Brunt, P.A.Studies in Greek History and Thought,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993.11.4 Cohen, D.Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in ClassicalAthens,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.11.5 Irwin[9.34].11.6 ——[9.39].11.7 Joseph, H.W.B.Essays in Ancient and Modern Philosophy,Oxford, ClarendonPress, 1935.11.8 Klosko, G.The Development of Plato’s Political Theory,New York and London,Methuen, 1986.11.9 Kolnai, A.The War Against the West,London, Victor Gollancz, 1938.11.10 Lear, J. ‘Plato’s politics of narcissism’, in T.Irwin and M.C.Nussbaum (eds)Virtue,Love and Form: Essays in Memory of Gregory Vlastos(see [9.38]), pp. 137–59.11.11 Nussbaum, M.C.The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy andPhilosophy,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.11.12 Owen, G.E.L. ‘The place of theTimaeusin Plato’s dialogues’,Classical QuarterlyNS 3 (1953): 79–95; repr. in Allen [10.64] and in Owen, ed. Nussbaum [see 4.46].11.13 Popper, K.R.The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. I: The Spell of Plato,5th edn,London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.11.14 Price, A.W.Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle,Oxford, Clarendon Press,1989.11.15 Reeve, C.D.C.Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic,Princeton,NJ, Princeton University Press, 1988.11.16 Sachs, D. ‘A fallacy in Plato’sRepublic’,Philosophical Review72 (1963): 141–58,repr. in Vlastos [10.58]: II.11.17 Taylor, C.C.W. ‘Plato’s totalitarianism’,Polis5.2 (1986): 4–29.11.18 Vlastos, G. ‘The theory of social justice in thepolisin Plato’sRepublic’, in H.North(ed.)Interpretations of Plato,Leiden, Brill, 1977:1–40; repr. in Vlastos, ed. Graham,vol. II (see [4.64]).11.19 ——‘The individual as object of love in Plato’, in Vlastos [9.87], 3–42.11.20 Vlastos [9.93].11.21 Wollheim, R. ‘The good self and the bad self’, in Wollheim,The Mind and itsDepths,Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1993:39–63.