The Thinker 125
reason is sovereign. Plato does not detest Homer, as the world has
come to think. He holds Homeric values in high esteem, but not the
highest. No society that denigrates its warriors, Plato suggests, will
ever be just and thriving. We need to be defended from our enemies,
and this has to be done by people for whom honor comes fi rst. To
slight such people, as Agamemnon slights Achilles, can unbalance
them, even drive them mad. And when mad they are dangerous: the
warrior driven off his true, honorable path becomes a brute. He falls
in love with death— his enemy’s and sometimes even his own.
(“Long live death,” the fascist warriors chanted in Spain.) The he-
roic ideal is easy to pervert, Plato knows, and that is why he takes
such care to understand it.
In Homer, a man is defi ned by the quotient of thymos he pos-
sesses. How spirited is he? What will he dare do to gain glory? In
Plato, courage matters, but reason matters more. Plato cannot
believe that the often brief, turbulent life of the hero is the best kind.
For him the best life by far is the life of calm, directed by reason.
Plato does not want to banish Homer’s heroic tradition so much as
he wants to subordinate it. He wants to replace the rule of thymos
with the rule of reason. Where warriors were, there phi los o phers
shall be.
One of Plato’s most daring strokes is to speculate that the state
and the spirit are mirror images of each other. In a soul where thymos
reigns there will be turbulence; from the Platonic point of view, the
warrior often enters a state of protracted agitation, attempting to en-
hance his reputation. He is always on the lookout for the next op-
portunity to win glory. A state that is guided by the warrior ethos
will be similarly turbulent. It will always be at war or preparing for
war; one ruler will displace another based not on probity but on
power. There will be no peace, no contentment.
Every state of the soul, according to Plato, has its corresponding
state of public life. The soul of the demo cratic man is inconsistent,