MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCRATES’ PROPOSALS
TO GLAUCON ABOUT Gumnastikhv IN REPUBLIC 403C–412Bpossible, by practicing the “true politics” that Socrates mentions in the
Gorgias (or the yucagwgiva that Socrates mentions in the Phaedrus) so
as to transform individual lives. He shows them trying to do this by
attempting to restore to health^77 (or by offering means of preserving
or improving the health of)^78 the souls of persons of infl uence on the
body politic—poets, rhetoricians, sophists and other teachers, citizen-
politicians , aspiring citizen-politicians like Glaucon, military men, and
so on. Readers know in retrospect that many of the interlocutors of the
dialogues were more or less directly implicated in the decline of Athens
at the end of the fi fth century.^79 According to this model, Plato carries
on something very like Thucydides’ project in his own very different and
inimitable way.
Furthermore, many of the depicted conversations are in impor-
tant ways like interactions between physicians and their clients. On the
level of Plato’s relation to his readers, therefore, they constitute quasi-
medical or quasi-psychiatric case histories that set forth records of di-
agnoses of typical deformities of soul that contributed to Athens’ de-
cline, and of attempted cures of those maladies. Or at least they suggest
therapeutic regimens for such maladies. They urge readers to recog-
nize similar maladies in themselves and others, and to learn methods
and to assimilate conceptual resources useful for curing them. The his-
torical and personal failures of many of the interlocutors, some known
to readers and some dramatized and made thematic in the dialogues
themselves, serve to motivate readers to strive to avoid a similar fate.
On healthier readers the dialogues at least urge the necessity of the
kind of gymnastic training, as it were, that might help them avoid fall-
ing into disease. Because of their intricacy and the philosophic cun-
ning with which they are composed, studying the dialogues can be
itself a health-conducive and health-sustaining regimen.^80 Depending
upon the maturity, talent, and interests of the reader, Plato’s relationship
to this reader might be conceived either as a physician-client relation-
ship or as a medical professor–medical student relationship. Further-
more, the non-systematic character and lack of closure to the corpus
of dialogues as a whole might be explained with the aid of the medical
model. An adequate set of case studies needs only to be a fairly repre-
sentative and pedagogically useful set of examples of common types of
disease, or of the types of cases a person is apt to confront.
In closing, we return to Plato’s depiction of Socrates’ interaction
with Glaucon in the Republic. Taking Plato to have written dialogues in
the role of a therapist helps us to understand that depiction. As I main-
tained in the previous section of this paper, Socrates seems in many
stretches of his conversation with Plato’s brother Glaucon^81 to be at-