___________________________________________
71 This wonderful scene is full of resonant language. The discussion of the best polity may need to go back to its beginning in Bk. II, but the words of the participants hearken back to their first interactions in Bk. I, from the grabbing of a man’s cloak to a majority decision stated in the form of a legislative enactment. See the footnote to 328B.
72 Literally “She who can’t be run away from,” a name given by Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound, line 936) to the goddess who takes vengeance on proud speech.
73 The word “not” is not in any manuscript or other ancient source, but the sense seems to require it, and most editors, though not the most recent and thorough one, have inserted it.
74 The line from Pindar is just “plucks his wisdom while it’s still an unripe fruit,” aimed at philosophers. Socrates adds a word that makes the line turn back in its author’s general direction, since Pindar too was making fun of the incongruities philosophic speculation presents to conventional eyes.
75 In the sea of troubles they’ve landed in, as remarked at 453B, in which they still face the danger of going under for the third time before the end of Bk. V.
76 The word Socrates uses ordinarily would mean “happy people.” Socrates would certainly argue that lack of restraint in sexual indulgence couldn’t make anyone happy, but since he links it here with piety rather than moderation, the root sense of the word “happy” is reinforced: having a good divinity or destiny.
77 The balancing act going on in this passage is evident here in various ways. Sex among the guardians is not to be a right, unregulated (ataktôs, 458D), but a privilege more or less unrestricted (aphthonestera), and while the pairings are solemnized with all the trappings of marriages, they are apparently not meant to last beyond the festive occasions at which they are celebrated.
78 The word refers to a pen for young livestock, but also to a special enclosed place within a temple.
79 The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Presumably the rulers would know which cases involved actual incest and avoid them, and would take her into their confidence.
80 The discovery that the soul has parts justified the use of a city as an analogy to it. It is the listeners’ insistence that Socrates look more closely within the city that leads to this hypothesis that the kind of unity necessary within each person is also the right standard for a city. The analogy that was operative in Bks. II-IV is now being applied in reverse.
81 The word despotês literally meant slaveholder, and was sometimes used for tyrants. People who would use that word for their king or oligarchic rulers would be acknowledging that they themselves had no power.
82 Athletes at the Olympic games represented their cities, and the winners were given meals at public expense all their lives.
83 This would direct everyone’s attention to Adeimantus, but it also softens the blow when Socrates says what he thinks of such an opinion just below. To some degree, the reproach would probably be felt by all the listeners.
84 Works and Days, line 40. Socrates echoes the words of Glaucon in 362A. The word for “more” is also the one that Thrasymachus constantly used in Bk. I, when he was claiming that more is always better.
85 Iliad VII, 321. The quotation in Socrates’ next speech is VIII, 162.
86 This is clearly a quotation of Works and Days 122-123, but Hesiod wrote (about people who lived in a past golden age), “They are divinities by the will of great Zeus,/ Good guardians on earth for mortal humans.”
87 That is, by consulting the priestess of Apollo at Delphi. See 427B-C.
88 At 461E Socrates called the city Glaucon’s, and his wording here strengthens that way of speaking. It is as if the content of Bk. V has made Socrates less willing to claim the city as his own.
89 Festivals held throughout the winter and early spring in Athens and its environs at which comedies and tragedies were staged. This reference might remind the reader that those passing the time at this discussion will have already missed the torchlight spectacle at the festival of Bendis.
90 This is the third person dual pronoun (autô). Formulations to the effect “each is one and both together (amphoterô) are two” occur repeatedly in Plato’s dialogues, for example at Theaetetus 185B. There, as here, the context of the remark is an approach to the central presupposition that distinguishes philosophic learning from all other kinds, the conviction that knowledge and opinion are different in kind. The relevance to that distinction of knowing how to count up to two returns to the dialogue both playfully and seriously in 522C, where the following discussion uncovers a capacity of the soul higher than reasoning, much as a part of the soul between reasoning and desire was uncovered in Bk. IV.
91 The word form (eidos) is now used for the first time in the dialogue with the precise sense spelled out just below: the invisible look by which thinking can grasp an intelligible thing itself.
92 The word used here for knowledge (gnômê) is the root of the verb translated as “discern” (gignôskein), implying a grasping of something by evidence. The verb translated “accept the seeming” (doxazein) is built on the word for opinion (doxa) and related to the word used constantly to mean “it seems” (dokein). Discernment is what Socrates implied in Bk. I that Thrasymachus lacked (347D). It goes beyond a merely passive relation to appearances, and is a step toward knowing in the unqualified sense (eidenai), a verb Socrates will begin to use just below. None of this is technical jargon; it is vivid, shared, ordinary speech, evoking familiar experiences. For that reason, the precision in the intricate stretch of argument about to begin is not merely verbal or logical, but is itself a potential step toward knowing.
93 “A man and not a man saw and didn’t see a bird and not a bird on a stick and not a stick and threw and didn’t throw at it a rock and not a rock.” The eunuch had bad eyesight, the bat was on a reed, the rock was a piece of pumice, and the throw missed.