MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCRATES’ PROPOSALS
TO GLAUCON ABOUT Gumnastikhv IN REPUBLIC 403C–412B37– 52. For attempts at classifying types of irony, see Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of
Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), especially chaps. 8 and 9. See
also D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969).
- Perhaps the contrast lies not in that the members of the healthy society
never feast or enjoy luxuries, but that they do so on special occasions and for
the enhancement of family life, whereas the guardian class of the aristocracy
pursues a decadent lifestyle of constant feasting and luxuriousness. Rankin (see
note 14) draws attention to the parallel between the Republic and Cynic-Stoic
politeivai. He says that these were modeled on comedy and mime, and that
family life was a favorite subject. He says the Cynic-Stoic works were satirical
sermons striking at the basic assumptions of contemporary society in favor of
something that they claimed was more simple and natural. We need to keep in
mind the distinction between the picture of felicitous family relations in the
paradise and the proposals for abolishing the family in book 5 of the Republic. - See also the phrase used in 407b1: nosotrofiva tektonikh`/.
- The term dikavstai refers mainly to members of a jury. Athenian juries
decided questions of guilt and of penalty, combining functions we divide be-
tween jury and judge. - The radical program outlined in book 5 calls for the abolition among
the guardians of natural family relations and parenthood, for the recruitment
of suffi ciently “spirited” women as guardians, and for the eugenic breeding of
men and women guardians. This program can be read, on one level at least, as
both a parody of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae and a parody of the u{bri~ of ideal-
istic political reformers drunk on power. See Ranasinghe, Soul of Socrates, 15 – 18.
Yet on another level, the inclusion of both men and women in the guardian
class of the povli~ might symbolize the marriage of “masculine” political ability
with “feminine” philosophy in the perfectly actualized soul. This view suggests
interesting relationships between the early parts of book 5 and Socrates’ char-
acterization of philosophy as “spiritual pregnancy” in the Diotima speech in
the Symposium and at Republic 490a– b (see also Republic 495b– 496a). See Leon
Harold Craig, “The Portrait of a Lady,” chap. 6 of The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s
Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). - In terms made familiar by John Henry Newman, Glaucon’s assent is
“notional” but not “real.” - The censorship of literature and music can play a role in avoidance
behavior and self-deception, as we shall suggest below. - Asclepius was of course a mortal who was deifi ed as a god of healing.
He brought the art to perfection and is said to have raised Hippolytus from
the dead, the only one ever to raise a mortal from death. In this passage he is
invoked as the healer showing the way toward the revivifi cation of Athens. - My remarks here on the soul-state analogy in the Republic dovetail nicely
with those of Diskin Clay, “Reading the Republic,” in Platonic Writings, Platonic
Readings, ed. Charles L. Griswold Jr. (New York and London: Routledge, 1988),
24 – 33. - The rhetoric of this whole section is, like that of the previous section,
accommodated to Glaucon’s elitist self-conception, appealing frequently to his