REPUBLIC(BOOKIII) 79
“Now I’m not understanding again,” he said.
“I guess I’m speaking like a tragedy,” I said. “By those who are robbed, I mean
people who are persuaded to change their minds and people who forget, because from
the latter, time, and from the former, speech takes opinions away without their noticing
it. Now presumably you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And by those who are overpowered I mean people that some grief or pain causes
to change their opinions.”
“I understand that too,” he said, “and you’re speaking rightly.”
“And I imagine that you too would claim that people are bewitched who change
their opinions when they’re either entranced by pleasure or in dread of something
frightening.”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s likely that everything that fools people is bewitching.”
“Then as I was just saying, one needs to find out which of them are the best
guardians of the way of thinking they have at their sides, that the thing they always need
to do is to do what seems to them to be best for the city. So they need to be observed
right from childhood by people who set tasks for them in which someone would be
most likely to forget such a thing or be fooled out of it; anyone who remembers it and is
hard to fool is to be chosen and anyone who doesn’t is to be rejected. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“And laborious jobs, painful sufferings, and competitions also need to be set up
for them in which these same things are to be observed.”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Thus a contest needs to be made,” I said, “for the third form as well, that of
bewitchment, and it needs to be watched. The same way people check out whether
colts are frightened when they lead them into noisy commotions, the guardians, when
young, need to be taken into some terrifying situations and then quickly shifted into
pleasant ones, so as to test them much more than gold is tested in a fire. If someone
shows himself hard to bewitch and composed in everything, a good guardian of him-
self and of the musical style that he learned, keeping himself to a rhythm and harmony
well-suited to all these situations, then he’s just the sort of person who’d be most valu-
able both to himself and to a city. And that one among the children and the youths and
the men who is tested and always comes through unscathed is to be appointed as ruler
of the city as well as guardian, and honors are to be given to him while he’s living and
upon his death, when he’s allotted the most prized of tombs and other memorials.
Anyone not of that sort is to be rejected. It seems to me, Glaucon,” I said, “that the
selection and appointment of rulers and guardians is something like that, described in
outline, not with precision.”
“It looks to me too like it would be done some such way,” he said.
“Isn’t it most correct, then, to call these the guardians in the true sense, complete
guardians for outside enemies and also for friends inside, so that the latter won’t want to
do any harm and the former won’t have the power to? The young ones that we’ve been
calling guardians up to now, isn’t it most correct to call auxiliaries and reinforcements
for the decrees of the rulers?”
“It seems that way to me,” he said.
“Then could we come up with some contrivance,” I said, “from among the lies that
come along in case of need, the ones we were talking about just now, some one noble lie
told to persuade at best even the rulers themselves, but if not, the rest of the city?”
“What sort of thing?” he said.
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