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¹⁰ Note that Glaucon’s completely unjust person is the third version so far. At 344A, Thrasymachus identified complete injustice with tyranny, which had no need for concealment, but in 352C-D, Socrates concluded that complete injustice would be an inability to do anything, being always at odds with itself.

¹¹ A reference to Amphiaraus in the Seven against Thebes (line 592). Glaucon quotes the two following lines shortly below.

¹² From Hesiod’s Works and Days, parts of lines 232-234. Note that the last line suggests a partial reply to Thrasymachus’s earlier claim about shepherds (343B-C), since an economy dependent on sheep herding benefits primarily from a commodity the removal of which benefits the sheep as well. Socrates will quietly reinforce this point in 370D-E. Glaucon’s quotation of Aeschylus just above seems to have roused Adeimantus’s competitive spirit. His next quotation is from Bk. XIX of the Odyssey, lines 109 and 111-113.

¹³ Hesiod, Works and Days, 287-289. The lines of Homer quoted next are from Iliad IX, 497 and 499-501.

¹⁴ A poet from whom we have some fragments of fables about the fox, including a cryptic line usually translated as “The fox knows many little things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

¹⁵ Looking ahead to the line quoted, “that man” would mean that eminent man who is your father, and whose name means “best,” but looking back to the way Glaucon and Adeimantus have taken up the argument, they are also figuratively “children” of Thrasymachus, inheriting his position in much the way Polemarchus was heir to Cephalus’s in 331D. Glaucon’s lover would have been an older man, established in life and probably married. Sexual attachments between such men and those in early manhood were not only respectable but fashionable among the aristocracy in much of Greece at the time. A conventional view of this practice may be found in a speech in Plato’s Symposium, 180C-185E.

¹⁶ The last word refers to everything other than bread that people eat, but also has the sense of savory or appealing food, and particularly meat. Socrates, playing dumb, replies to the literal meaning.

¹⁷ The words Socrates uses allude to a saying of Heracleitus (Diels-Kranz fragment 85): “Spiritedness is hard to fight against; whatever it wants to happen, it will pay for with its life.”

¹⁸ This word (êthos) refers to something formed, in part, through choice and discipline; it differs from the word Cephalus used at 329D (tropos), translated as disposition, which can be a merely natural inclination. The use of the former word in E below is intentionally incongruous.

¹⁹ The comparison to the dog, meant about half-seriously, gives no explanation of such a conclusion other than the resemblance. The verb in 375D meaning “set beside for comparison” later came to mean “tell a parable.” What is posited is that people who care most about learning and knowing are less at odds with those among whom they live.

²⁰ This word includes our meaning, but within a broad sense that takes in all the arts that refine the sensibilities and civilize a human being. The name comes from attributing these pursuits to the inspiration of the Muses.

²¹ This word is not in the Greek, but is used here to approximate the effect of making Hesiod and Homer the subject of a verb not plural but dual in number. These two preeminent poets were responsible between them for most of the prevalent lore about the Greek gods. What Socrates proposes would be a bit like saying that children shouldn’t be told any stories from Shakespeare or the Bible.

²² The curious can find the salacious details in Hesiod’s Theogony, lines 154-210 and 453-506.

²³ The next three quotations are from Bk. XXIV of the Iliad, lines 527-528, 530, and 532, with some slight discrepancies from our texts of Homer in the first and third. The fourth is loosely related to IV, 84 of that poem, the last line of the passage about Athena and Zeus alluded to next, and the allusion to Themis and Zeus refers to the beginning of Bk. XX. The Aeschylus play quoted is not extant.

²⁴ Odyssey XVII, 485-486, a reason for treating all strangers well. The following line is thought to be from a lost play of Aeschylus; the river’s sons are its tributaries.

²⁵ Iliad II, 1-42. The quotation from Aeschylus is thought to be from the lost play The Decision of the Arms. Tragedies were performed in Athens at public festivals, with choruses provided from funds donated by rich citizens but allocated by a government official.