MARK MOEStempting to provide him with opportunities for recognizing the danger-
ous potentials of his naive political ambitions and of his own ignorance
about yuchv and povli~. Plato depicts Socrates as pretending to agree with
Glaucon’s opinions and attitudes about an ideal povli~ in order to lure
him into a diagnostic self-examination that he would otherwise resist.
We might compare Socrates’ interaction with Thrasymachus and
Glaucon in the Republic with Socrates’ interaction with Critias and Char-
mides in the Charmides. In the Charmides, Plato’s purpose in depicting
Socrates’ examination fi rst of Charmides (158e– 162b) and then of Cri-
tias (162c– 175d) is to depict a diagnosis (and prognosis) of the nega-
tive potentials of the infl uence that Critias exerts upon Charmides. In
the Republic, Plato’s purpose in depicting Socrates’ examination fi rst
of Thrasymachus and then of Glaucon is to depict a diagnosis of the
negative potentials of the infl uence that Thrasymachus exerts upon
Glaucon. But whereas readers know that Critias and Charmides became
members of the murderous Thirty Tyrants,^82 Glaucon is perhaps best
remembered for what he did not do: he did not follow the example of
Critias and Charmides and share in their notoriety. Socrates, who took
an interest in Glaucon for the sake of Plato, managed to check his politi-
cal ambitions.^83
To put things in this way is to dissent from certain readings of
the Republic that presuppose a “developmentalist” view of the Platonic
corpus.^84 These take Plato’s dramatization of Socrates’ relation with
Glaucon as indicating Plato’s giving up his earlier practice of depicting
a purely elenctic Socrates in order to begin to use Socrates as a mouth-
piece for the expression of positive philosophical-political doctrines of
his own. According to one such reading, Socrates’ three interlocutors
in book 1 are either too non-philosophical (Cephalus), too obsequious
(Polemarchus), or too hostile (Thrasymachus) to elicit from Socrates a
well-defended positive account of justice. Plato brings in Glaucon be-
cause he can provide Socrates with a real challenge and wrest from him
such an account. Glaucon is more “rational” than Thrasymachus be-
cause he is willing to engage in real dialectic. Plato puts his own ethical-
political views into the mouth of Socrates conversing with Glaucon.^85 An
a p p a r ent l y s er iou s pr ob le m w it h s u c h a n i nt er pr et a t ion i s t h a t it co m m it s
one to thinking that Plato endorses those political features of the “ideal
povli~” which many readers fi nd scandalous.^86 And it makes no sense of
the diagnostic dimension of Socrates’ conversation with Glaucon.
A view more in keeping with the reading expressed in the previous
section of this paper would take Glaucon as sharing some of the mis-
taken attitudes of Socrates’ interlocutors in book 1. In particular, Glau-
con shares with them the belief that justice is anti-erotic. They all think
that eros must be suppressed if justice is to be realized in povli~ and