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“So let these two forms be marked off in the soul,” I said. “But is the part that has
to do with spiritedness, and by which we’re spirited, a third thing, or would it be of the
same nature as one of these two?”
“Maybe the same as one of them,” he said, “the desiring part.”
“But I once heard something that I believe,” I said, “about how Leontius, Aglaion’s
son, was going up from Piraeus along the outside of the north wall, and noticed dead bod-
ies lying beside the executioner. He desired to see them, but at the same time felt disgust
and turned himself away; for a while he struggled and covered his eyes, but then he was
overcome by his desire, and running toward the bodies holding his eyes wide open, he
said, ‘See for yourselves, since you’re possessed! Take your fill of the lovely sight.’”
“I’ve heard that myself,” he said.
“This story certainly indicates,” I said, “that anger sometimes makes war against
the desires as though it were one thing acting against another.”
“It does indicate that,” he said.
“And don’t we often observe it in many other ways as well,” I said, “when desires
overpower someone contrary to his reasoning part, that he scolds himself and is aroused
against the part in him that’s overpowering him, and just as if there were a pair of war-
ring factions, the spiritedness of such a person becomes allied with his reason? But as
for its making a partnership with the desires to act in defiance when reason has decided
what ought not to be done, I don’t suppose you’d claim you’d ever noticed such a thing
happening in yourself, or, I imagine, in anyone else.”
“No, by Zeus!” he said.
“Then what about when someone thinks he’s being unjust?” I said. “The more
noble he is, won’t he be that much less capable of getting angry at being hungry or cold
or suffering anything else at all of the sort from the person he thinks is doing those
things to him justly, and won’t he be unwilling, as I’m saying, for his spirit to be
aroused against that person?”
“That’s true,” he said.
“But what about when he regards himself as being treated unjustly? Doesn’t the
spirit in him seethe and harden and ally itself with what seems just, and submitting to
suffering through hunger and cold and all such things, it prevails and doesn’t stint its
noble struggles until it gains its end or meets its death, or else, called back, like a dog by
a herdsman, by the reason that stands by it, it becomes calm?”
“It is very much like what you describe,” he said. “And certainly in our city we set
up the auxiliaries like dogs obedient to the rulers, who were like shepherds of the city.”
“You conceive what I want to say beautifully,” I said, “especially if you’ve taken
it to heart in this respect in addition to that one.”
“In what sort of respect?”
“That it’s looking the opposite of the way it did to us just now with the spirited
part, because then we imagined it was something having to do with desire, but now
we’re claiming that far from that, it’s much more inclined in the faction within the soul
to take arms on the side of the reasoning part.”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“Then is it different from that too, or some form of the reasoning part, so that
there aren’t three but two forms in the soul, a reasoning one and a desiring one? Or just
as, in the city, there were three classes that held it together, moneymaking, auxiliary,
and deliberative, so too in the soul is there this third, spirited part, which is by nature an
auxiliary to the reasoning part, unless it’s corrupted by a bad upbringing?”
“It’s necessarily a third part,” he said.
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