REPUBLIC(BOOKV) 109
“There’s no way,” I said. “But from that day on which any of them becomes a
bridegroom, whatever offspring are born in the tenth month after that, or even the sev-
enth, to all of these he’ll apply the name sons to the males and daughters to the females,
and they’ll call him father, and in the same way he’ll call their offspring his grandchil-
dren, and they in turn will call people like him grandfathers and grandmothers, and
they’ll call those who were born at the same time their mothers and fathers were pro-
ducing children sisters and brothers, so that, as we were just saying, they won’t have
sexual contact with one another. But the law will grant brothers and sisters permission
to be joined together if the lottery falls out that way and the Pythia*confirms it.”
“Quite rightly,” he said.
“So, Glaucon, this or something like it is the way of sharing women and children
among the guardians of your city. The next thing after this ought to be to have it estab-
lished out of the argument that this goes along with the rest of the polity and is by far the
best way. Or how should we proceed?”
“That way, by Zeus,” he said.
“Well then, wouldn’t this be a source from which an agreement might come, that
we ask ourselves what’s the greatest good we can state in the organization of a city, at
which the lawgiver ought to aim in setting down the laws, and what’s the greatest evil,
and then consider on that basis whether the things we were just now going over fit into
the footprint of the good while they don’t fit into that of the evil?”
“That most of all would be the way,” he said.
“Then can we have any greater evil in a city than that which tears it apart and
makes it many instead of one? Or a greater good than that which binds it together and
makes it one?”
“No we can’t.”
“And doesn’t the sharing of pleasure and pain bind it together, when as much as
possible all the citizens feel joy and pain in almost the same way at the coming into
being and passing away of the same things?”
“Absolutely so,” he said.
“But the private appropriation of such things dissolves it, when some people
become overwhelmed with pain and others overcome with joy at the same experiences
of the city and of the people in the city?”
“How could it not?”
“And doesn’t that sort of thing come from this, that people in the city don’t utter such
words as mine and not mine at the same time, and the same with somebody else’s? ”
“Exactly so.”
“So isn’t that city governed best in which the most people say this mine and not
mine on the same occasion about the same things? ”
“Much the best.”
“And this is precisely whichever city is in a condition closest to that of a single
human being? For instance, whenever a finger of any of us is wounded, presumably the
whole community extending from the body to the soul in a single ordering under the ruler
within it would be aware of it, and it all would suffer pain as a whole together with the part
that’s afflicted, and is that the sense in which we mean that a human being has a pain in his
finger? And is it the same story for any other part of a human being whatever, both for a
part afflicted with pain and for one that’s eased by pleasure? ”
de462abcd*The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Presumably the rulers would know which cases involved actual
incest and avoid them, and would take her into their confidence.