MARK MOESposium 174c. Presumably Plato enjoyed the phrase’s punning between cowardice
and sexual impotence.
- There may be a nod again here to Thrasymachus, and Socrates may be
trying to show Glaucon that he will end up like Thrasymachus if he is not care-
ful in the future to balance his pursuits. - To me it seems plausible that in the censorship discussions, Plato is
indeed depicting Glaucon’s eagerness to hide from the grim realities depicted
in Homer and Hesiod and the tragedians, but to dress up his denial as an exer-
cise in righteousness. Modern students of Greek culture see pervasive psycho-
analytic themes in Greek theogonies and mythologies. See, for example, Rich-
ard Caldwell, “The Psychology of the Succession Myth,” an interpretive essay
in Hesiod’s Theogony (Newburyport: Focus Classical Library, 1987), 87– 103; and
Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1968). See also Bennett Simon, Mind and Madness in
Ancient Greece: The Classical Roots of Modern Psychiatry (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1978), 215– 16; Anthony Kenny, “Mental Health in Plato’s Republic,” in The
Anatomy of the Soul: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1973); and Pedro Lain Entralgo, The Therapy of the Word in Classi-
cal Antiquity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), especially chaps. 1– 2. - See Craig, The War Lover, 74.
- See Mary P. Nichols, “Spiritedness and Philosophy in Plato’s Repub-
lic,” in Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to
Nietzsche, ed. Catherine Zuckert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 58.
See also her remarks about Glaucon’s character in “Glaucon’s Adaptation of
the Story of Gyges and Its Implications for Plato’s Political Teaching,” Polity 17,
no. 1 (Fall 1984): 34– 36. - See notes 2 and 6. The dialectical discussion of poetry in book 10 be-
gins with the case against poetry’s value to the povli~, but then in the Myth of Er
shows that the study of the right kind of poetry is necessary in a healthy povli~.
The Republic itself, while violating all the strictures against poetry in the sick
povli~, is an instance of poetry “not only pleasant but benefi cial to regimes and
human life” (607d). See my “Mimetic Irony and Plato’s Defense of Poetry in the
Republic,” Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 5, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 43– 74. For a discus-
sion of a number of very different approaches to reading the Republic over the
centuries, see Gerald Press, “Continuities and Discontinuities in the History
of Republic Interpretation,” International Studies in Philosophy 28, no. 4 (1996):
61– 78. - For further remarks about Glaucon’s character, see Allan Bloom, “In-
terpretive Essay,” in Plato, The Republic of Plato (New York and London: Basic
Books, 1968), 337– 40, 342, 345– 46, 401, 412, 415, 423. - It might be argued that one of Socrates’ reasons for articulating the
image of the Divided Line at the end of book 6 is a desire to emphasize the
harmonious relationships among various rational powers in a healthy soul. On
this reading, the line shows that a human comes to understand and exemplify
goodness only when his rational powers function together harmoniously, as the
segments of the line corresponding to the powers are interrelated according