MARK MOESAt 403d8– 9 Socrates got Glaucon to strongly agree to a related idea:
that if we devote suffi cient care to the mind (eij th;n diavnoian iJkanw~ qerapeuvsante~ paradoimen) we can entrust it to take care of the details
of bodily regimen, while we indicate only the general patterns to be fol-
lowed (403d7– e2). In the conversation with Adeimantus, Socrates reaf-
fi rms his teaching that misguided legislation, operating outside of its
proper sphere, fails to serve some of the most important educative pur-
poses of legislation. It legislates not with the aim of educating for virtue
but with the aim of treating symptoms of diseases whose real roots lie
in vice and in the seedbed of vice—bad family life, bad upbringing, bad
education, and bad personal choices. Far from preventing these things,
misguided legislation can in some instances even encourage and sus-
tain them. We might understand Socrates as offering an object lesson
to this effect when he provokes his fellow imaginary lawmakers in book
5 to legislate for the abolition of the family and for eugenic programs
among the guardians.^33 At 405a1– 4, Socrates elicits Glaucon’s enthusi-
astic, but not truly insightful, assent to the following thesis:^34
And as licentiousness and disease breed in the city, aren’t many
law courts and hospitals opened, and don’t medicine and law exalt
themselves [semnuvnontai] when even large numbers of free men
are extremely [or violently, sfovdra] zealous about them?Perhaps this passage is best read as an ominous foreshadowing of the
radical proposals of book 5.
Having discussed the meaning of “mixing gumnastikhv with
iatrikhv/” in its political application, let us turn back briefl y to its physical
and psychological applications. On the level of the care of one’s body,
confusing the two results in an all-absorbing regimen of treatments for
the amelioration of the symptoms of one’s unhealthy living. It also re-
sults in an equally all-absorbing regimen of behavior aimed at avoiding
the often more painful (in the short run) treatments required for a real
return to health, and at hiding from the real causes of physical prob-
lems. In consequence, as Socrates points out in 406a– e, one squanders
one’s resources, time, and energy on expensive palliative treatments,
so that one is prevented from exercising those abilities that the povli~
needs and that are made possible by a healthy physical constitution.
Such misguided practice prolongs one’s life but disables one from “do-
ing his own work” (the slogan of the oligarchs, and a phrase familiar
from the Charmides). Not only does it prevent slaves and craftsmen from
doing their physical and manual work, but it also prevents those who
do not need to do manual work from becoming truly virtuous, whether