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²⁶ The next seven quotations are, in order, Odyssey XI, 489-491, Iliad XX, 64-65, XXIII, 103-104, Od. X, 495, Il. XVI, 856-857, XXIII, 100, and Od. XXIV, 6-9.

²⁷ River of Shrieking and Abominable River.

²⁸ The next seven displayed quotations are from the Iliad: XXIV, 10-11, 12, XVIII, 23-24, XXII, 414-415, XVIII, 54, XXII, 168-169, XVI, 433-434. Some have slight discrepancies from our texts of Homer.

²⁹ Iliad I, 599-600.

³⁰ Why does Socrates say this? Possibly to indicate that he has undertaken the whole project of banning poetry as a dialectical elaboration of the claims made by Adeimantus in Bk. II (especially 365A-B). Or possibly he is just teasing Adeimantus because he enjoys a laugh, even if not a belly-laugh. In any case, those who are confident they know what Socrates, much less Plato, thinks about “censorship” might be advised to be cautious. John White has called attention to the oddity of quoting in public passages one thinks should not be heard. (See “Imitation,” Afterword, p. 323.)

³¹ Odyssey XVII, 383-384.

³² This line, Iliad IV, 412, begins a passage in which Diomedes demands from an older companion not just obedience to himself but respect for their commander and their fathers, in a stern and gracious speech. The following couplet telescopes III, 8 with IV, 431. The insult quoted next is I, 225.

³³ Odysseus, Odyssey IX, 8-10. The next quotation is XII, 342 of that poem, the following one is Iliad XVI, parts of 295 and 296, and the Ares-Aphrodite story is in Od. VIII, beginning at 266.

³⁴ Odysseus, Odyssey XX, 17-18; the word for “humiliating” is literally “dog-like.” The next line quoted is thought to be from Hesiod. The three following references to Achilles are to Iliad IX, 515-518, XIX, 145-147, 278-281, and XXIV, 592-594.

³⁵ Iliad XXII, 15, 20, followed by XXIII, 151. The two references following that are to XXIV, 14-18 and XXIII, 172-177.

³⁶ Thought to be lines from Aeschylus’s lost play Niobe.

³⁷ Iliad I, 15-16.

³⁸ This is the first use in the Republic of the Greek word that is the title of the dialogue (politeia). It refers not only to associated group of people but to the form of their association, the arrangement of functions and responsibilies that holds them together. It can apply by extension to the arrangement that constitutes any other whole out of parts. The joining of the word with the notion of harmonizing is no accident.

³⁹ Musical modes are ways of tuning a melodic scale. The placement of a semitone among whole tones in a half-octave changes the character of the intervals. The difference between the major and minor modes of modern music will give some sense of the differences Socrates is asking about. A tuning would be chosen in accordance with the occasion and purpose of what was to be played, and on a stringed instrument, a change of mode would result from a tightening or loosening. The Greek word used technically for “mode” is harmonia, translated just above as “melody” and at 397B as “tonal range”; it originally referred to a joining or fitting in carpentry, and is used for any fitting together of high and low tones.

⁴⁰ A satyr who challenged Apollo to a contest. The Muses preferred Apollo’s music on the cithara to that of Marsyas on the flute.

⁴¹ This is a common oath of Socrates’ but was rarely used by others. Eva Brann explains it as an invocation of Hermes (depicted by the Egyptians with a dog’s head, as Anubis), used in contexts that associate Socrates with Heracles, the hero who brought a monster up from Hades into the light of day. (See The Music of the Republic, pp. 118-119.)

⁴² These forms are usually taken to be the ratios of syllable lengths within a foot, 2:2, 3:2, and 2:1, where one is a short syllable or half a long syllable. The analogous forms among tones are probably the ratios of string lengths of the principal intervals, the octave (2:1), fifth (3:2), fourth (4:3), and whole tone (9:8).

⁴³ An older contemporary of Socrates, famous as one of the teachers of Pericles.

⁴⁴ A place that provides the benefits found, for example, in the city constructed first in Bk. II. See 372E.

⁴⁵ The word is eidos, usually translated “form,” as at 400a. There the reference was to an intelligible look, the 2:2 ratio, for example, shared by a dactyl and a spondee. Here it refers to the recognizable pattern of a state of character, as grasped immediately by the senses, though the claim seems to be that only someone nourished properly on music when very young would be capable of recognizing it. This passage is one of the primary preparations in the dialogue for the deeply philosophic sense the word eidos is given later in the dialogue, beginning at 476A.

⁴⁶ Asclepius was the legendary first doctor, from the generation before the Trojan war, and centuries later doctors used his name as a badge of respectability. His two sons are characters in the Iliad. In his next speech, Socrates appears to mix up some details from Book XI of that poem, but they don’t affect the point he makes. Pramneian wine was thickened into a sort of broth, perhaps used as a comfort food not unlike our chicken soup.

⁴⁷ This is perhaps a reference to a practice like one still in use in the mid-20^th century, of treating headaches by lying in a darkened room with a damp washcloth on the forehead, with camphor or some other aromatic medicine on the cloth.

⁴⁸ A writer of moral aphorisms in verse.

⁴⁹ Iliad IV, 218, slightly altered by Socrates.

⁵⁰ The last phrase, literally “beautiful and good,” was translated at 402A as “gentlemanly.” It was a standard phrase used by the Athenian nobility to describe itself. At 396C Socrates begins to speak of being that way “in one’s very being” in contrast to the external advantages of one’s birth.

⁵¹ Iliad XVII, 588.

⁵² In fact the metaphors Socrates uses are taken from Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, a rhetorical display that exalts the manipulative power of rhetoric in lavish terms.

⁵³ See 382C-D. Some of the things said there about a lie that would be acceptable are that it is about ancient things no one knows the truth of, is fashioned like truth, and is useful as a preventive medicine for unreliable friends.

⁵⁴ Cadmus, the legendary founder of the Greek city Thebes, came from Phoenicia (the region roughly the same as modern Lebanon). To found the city he had to kill a dragon. A god told him to plant the dragon’s teeth, and the first inhabitants of the city sprang up from those seeds. When Socrates says the story was current in many places, he means there were other local legends of races sprung from the ground they now live on, all originally brothers and sisters whose first mother is the land that feeds them and that they defend and love. Some readers have also suspected an allusion to stories Odysseus tells in the Odyssey, that either embellish or lie about his past but always contain some deeper truth.

⁵⁵ This is the same word translated “wages” earlier, but the details make clear that it is set up here not as a fee for service but as a public provision of the means of living, as Socrates points out in 420A. The soldiers and rulers are not given monetary incentives to perform their jobs but spared the need to think about money.