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⁹⁴ Glaucon appears to want to hedge his answer the way a practical person would, rather than displaying the erotic desire for truth that Socrates attributed to his nature (474C-475C).

⁹⁵ Is this in conflict with the need to go along with the noble lie of 414B-C and the abundance of falsehoods and deceptions mentioned at 459C-D, or does it perhaps determine the difference between those things and the true lie described in 382A-B? This may not be easy to decide.

⁹⁶ This is a more civilized version of the complaint Thrasymachus made in anger in Bk. I, when he claimed Socrates had to lie and twist the words of others to defeat them in arguments (340D).

⁹⁷ Literally “stickily.” The point is generally missed in translations that take the word in the sense of either of its common uses, to mean “eagerly” or “stingily,” rather than as a live metaphor. The image Socrates is about to use was not new (see for example Sophocles’ Antigone, lines 162-163), but it was probably never elaborated with so much painstakingly chosen detail as it is here.

⁹⁸ A narcotic plant.

⁹⁹ Reportedly the poet Simonides.

¹⁰⁰ See the note to 409A on the force of this word. It is meant to sum up the qualities of character listed in 487A, when Adeimantus was moved to object.

¹⁰¹ This seems to mean you pay for your pleasures one way or another. Various attempts have been made to explain who the Diomedes in question was and whether he paid the price or forced others to.

¹⁰² Notice that Socrates is not saying that most people are incapable of philosophy, but only that a large group of people has no such capacity when acting or thinking as one mass. Socrates would probably say that, given enough time in one-on-one discussion with someone who has begun to grasp philosophic possibilities, there would be hope for anyone. See Plato’s Gorgias, 471E-472D.

¹⁰³ Everyone who has been around the academic world has known some of these overgrown whiz kids whose careers reached their peaks before they actually happened, but the details of this passage point particularly to one young man named Alcibiades. Xenophon (Memorabilia I, ii, 39-46) displays Alcibiades’ arrogance toward his guardian, Pericles. Almost half of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, from Bk. V, Chap. 43 on, is dominated by an account of Alcibiades’ ambitions, which successively destroyed chances for peace between Athens and Sparta, led Athens to a disastrous expedition that proved to be its downfall, and took Alcibiades himself over to the side of the Spartans and then to that of the King of Persia. Plato, in his Symposium (216D-219D), makes Alcibiades reveal his belief in his irresistible good looks. During Socrates’ lifetime, Alcibiades was considered the most promising of his young associates, while a younger man named Plato went almost unnoticed in the background.

¹⁰⁴ In Plato’s Apology (31C-32A), this is described as “something like a voice” that came to Socrates when he was about to make a bad choice, and always kept him out of ordinary political life. The following passage in the Apology describes the way he simply did his duty when the law gave him some public function, and refrained from doing things popular opinion or powerful leaders tried to force him into.

¹⁰⁵ See 507B.

¹⁰⁶ Fragment 6 (Diels-Kranz numbering): “The sun is new each day.” Fr. 30: “This cosmos…was, is, and always will be everliving fire, kindled in measures and quenched in measures.”

¹⁰⁷ The last eight words translate eidon genomenon to nun legomenon (lit. “seen in existence what’s now being spoken of”), a rhyming dactylic jingle. The translation is too contrived to convey the unforced simplicity of the original, which is as natural as “I’m a poet but I don’t know it.” On the meaning of the balanced phrases, see the Glossary entries for becoming and being.

¹⁰⁸ In a handful of characters in both the Iliad and the Odyssey Homer labels certain qualities theoeides or theoeikelon. Socrates and Homer agree that men and women are outstanding by the presence of something godlike, but they don’t necessarily find it in the same people. There is no apparent irony when Homer uses the first of the two epithets for Paris (Il. 3.16), whom he depicts as lacking most, if not all, of the virtues.

¹⁰⁹ The word is idea. It is a synonym for, and cognate with, eidos, usually translated here as form, but since it refers to an intelligible look it is easy to slide over to the English word “idea.” That would be a mistake, since the visual metaphor is strongly at work in it. The word idea was used in 369A for the look of justice in a soul, in 380D-E for the look of a god, in 479A for the look of beauty itself, and in 486D for the look of each kind of thing that truly is and draws the receptive soul to discern it. Commentators seem to think that Plato is putting in Socrates’ mouth an anachronistic piece of jargon from his own later school, but I suspect Socrates simply means that Adeimantus has often heard one needs to gain clarity about, and keep one’s eye fixed on, the ultimate good sought in any practical endeavor.

¹¹⁰ The Greek word tokos means both child and monetary interest.

¹¹¹ Glaucon literally says “that’s a preternatural exaggeration,” but his words (daimonias huperbolês), as Reeve notes, play on the sound of Socrates’ words “surpassing it in power” (dunamei huperechontos). This is not particularly funny, but Socrates may mean that Glaucon is clowning to soften the impact of an implicit criticism, one that some readers share, that to say anything is “over and above being” is nonsensical. But the careful reader will see that Socrates delineates the notion of “being” in his last speech in a twofold way, as to einai or to on, substantives that posit that something is, and as ousia, the being-what-it-is at the core of anything; neither of these is the same as the grammatical copula that merely serves to attach a predicate to a subject.

¹¹² In Plato’s Cratylus (396C), Socrates pretends to derive the word for “heavens” from the words for “looking up.”

¹¹³ The first cut is visible || intelligible and the intelligible realm must occupy the bigger part if length is analogous to clarity. The re-division, keeping the scale determined by the first ratio, gives the pattern __|____||____|________ . Visible images of visible things occupy the first segment on the left.

¹¹⁴ A geometrical line is understood as having no breadth, and a plane figure as having no depth. A drawing in the sand, a shape cut out of some flat material, or even any appearance in our pictorial imaginations must falsify what it images if it is to image it at all.

¹¹⁵ This is the most striking implication of the divided line, which is itself a mathematical image. If the pattern in the previous footnote, now regarded as upright with its left end at the bottom, has the ratio of image to original represented as we have drawn it, as 1:2 (though it can be anything and need not be commensurable), the upper segment of the visible part will be 2/3 of 1/3 of the whole line, and the lower segment of the intelligible part will be 1/3 of 2/3 of it. That this equality of the two middle segments holds in all cases is proved algebraically in James Adam’s commentary on the Republic (Vol. II, p. 64), and in the authentically ancient manner, in the same number of steps, in Jacob Klein’s A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (UNC Press, 1965, p. 119). That equality implies that mathematical precision gains nothing in clarity or truth over observation by the senses, but stands at the same level. Conversely, the same equality makes the claim that the visible, and tangible, things around us are images and not the original beings.

¹¹⁶ This is the point at which professors go to blackboards, students fill notebooks, commentators pontificate about “the Platonic theory of forms,” and translators resort to words like “intellection.” But there are no technical terms here to be memorized, no theory laid down, and no language outside the scope of ordinary speech. The style of this passage is not casual but it is conversational, and the words used remain fluid, offered for their usefulness and constantly subject to revision, and not dictated to make a chorus of disciples. The divided line is itself the best corrective for those who seek to make it a rigid theoretical structure, since that way of thinking is represented in it as the lower of the two ways of dealing with intelligible things, the one that adopts presuppositions, cancels the dialectical process, and cannot achieve full clarity or truth. Exploration of the details of the image is not an end but a beginning. The reader may also find entries in the Glossary to get more of a sense for the Greek words used here, but this passage is intended, like everything else in the dialogue, to invite and promote one’s own thinking.