See Symposium 189a– b, when Eryximachus says to Aristophanes: “Al-
though you are supposed to be giving a speech, you make jokes and force me
to be on guard against your speech in case you say something funny, when you
should come out and speak in peace.” Saxonhouse has highlighted the comic
atmosphere of book 5 of the Republic. See Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “Comedy in
Callipolis: Animal Imagery in the Republic,” American Political Science Review 72,
no. 3 (1978): 888–901. Hyland contends that the second and third waves intro-
duced in book 5 are fundamentally comic; Rowe agrees, though for very differ-
ent reasons. See Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence, 59– 86. See also Christo-
pher Rowe, “The Good, the Reasonable and the Laughable in Plato’s Republic,”
in Laughter Down the Centuries, ed. Siegfried Jäkel and Asko Timonen (Turko:
Turun Yliopisto, 1997).
A similar distancing strategy is at work in Aspasia’s speech in the Menex-
enus. See Christopher P. Long, “Dancing Naked with Socrates: Pericles, Aspasia
and Socrates at Play with Politics, Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Ancient Philosophy
23 (2003): 49–69.
See Sallis, Being and Logos, 356.
For a discussion of just how radical these purges are, see Bernard Freyd-
berg, The Play of the Platonic Dialogues, Literature and the Sciences of Man 12
(New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 86ff.
Glaucon is characterized as erotic at 474d, as musical at 398e. The link
between music and eros is established at 403c. For a good discussion of the
importance of Glaucon’s erotic nature, see Sallis, Being and Logos, 400– 401. See
also Jacob Howland, The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (New York: Twayne,
1993), 102.
Brann writes: “The philosopher’s city is coming into being while
Socrates and Glaucon converse—the primary political act is the ‘conversion’ to a
philosophical education of one youth by one man.” See Eva Brann, “The Music of the
Republic,” Agon 1 (1967): 24. Sallis seems to draw on Brann’s interpretation in
his own reading of the Republic. See Sallis, Being and Logos, 312– 455.
