BERNARD FREYDBERGto be fed poet ic pabulum, and in t he course of t his feeding to have v irtu-
ally every human emotion with any taint of darkness purged from their
souls.^14 Finally, the good, for these guardians, is equated with the opin-
ion of the rulers of what is good for the city. On the way to securing this
opinion in their souls, they would have to be told many lies—including
the ultimate whopper known as the “noble lie,” from which they are sup-
posed to believe that this rigorous education was like a dream, when in
reality they were being fashioned under the earth.
However one interprets the Platonic city in speech, it is incontro-
vertible that the education of the guardians has little in common with
the education of the philosopher as the latter is imaged in the Republic.
So too will poetry play a vastly different role. Most convincingly, while
the guardians are educated to regard goodness as the opinion of what is
best for the city, for the philosopher the Good is far beyond the reach
of opinion, even (Socrates says) “beyond being.” In an equally incon-
trovertible manner, the fi rst poetic line that occurs to the one who has
been liberated from the realm of the shadows of the cave and into the
light (516d5– 7) is the ver y same fi rst line banned fi rst of all from the edu-
cation of the guardians—the famous Achilles in Hades passage, where
the dead hero says:
I would rather be on the soil, a serf to another,
To a man without lot whose means of life are not great
Than to rule over all the dead who have perished. (Odyssey 11.489 – 91)In book 7 of the Republic, Socrates confi dently claims that the liberated
one would rather “ ‘be on the soil, a serf to another man, to a portionless
man’ than to opine those things and live that way” (516d5– 6).
The “underlying sense” of the Achilles in Hades passage may seem
like a preference for a meager life and a picturing of death as the most
undesirable fate for a human being. However, its uJpovnoia could not be
more different. It is a song of praise for a life oriented toward truth
and being (the light), since such a life is superior to one given over to
shadows, superior to lives like the ones of the men in the cave to whom
the discerning of shadows (opinions) constitutes the limits of their
questioning.
There are many other instances where Socrates splits the poetic in
two, as evidenced by the same passage cited approvingly in one context
and disapprovingly in another. A pattern will clearly emerge, according
to which the non-hyponoetic (that is, literal) meaning of the passage
will be denounced in a non-philosophical context while the underlying