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¹⁴³ Socrates seems to assume that political life in its full sense came onto the scene among the Greeks. See the glossary note on the word “city.”

¹⁴⁴ Odyssey XIX, 163.

¹⁴⁵ Aristocracy is the name Socrates gave to the best polity in 445D, except for the case in which only one person fit to rule is available. It is one of three kinds of rule by a small minority of citizens that he distinguishes here. It means rule by the best, which he takes to apply to merit and not family titles. Oligarchy, which means rule by few, he uses only for rule by the rich, and the word timocracy, coined here, means rule by those most honored or most devoted to honor.

¹⁴⁶ Modeled on Iliad XVI, 112-113, the point at which things are about to spin completely out of control.

¹⁴⁷ The following passage, down to “the cubic number from three,” is notoriously obscure, and has given rise to considerable speculation through the centuries. The present translator has no great confidence in his rendering, and refers the curious reader to the source on which it primarily relies, James Adam’s commentary The Republic of Plato, Vol. II, pp. 205-208 and 264-312. Socrates has just warned us that this whole speech is playful mimicry of Homeric grandeur, but that alone is no reason not to take it seriously, since Socrates has also told us that much of the Republic, and of learning, consists of play (536C).

¹⁴⁸ This phrase has the double sense that each of the numbers entering into the calculation has some geometrical look, of a square, cube, or 3:4:5 triangle, but also that the number measures continuous magnitudes, making them harmonious with one another and intelligible to us. The interplay of arithmetic and geometry makes each realm more amenable to form and intelligibility. The number calculated here is interpreted by some as the measure, in solar years, of what was called the Great Year, the shortest period that would contain the cycle of every celestial body an exact whole number of times.

¹⁴⁹ The Muses, who preside over all the civilizing influences, are still speaking.

¹⁵⁰ See 469A and note.

¹⁵¹ Iliad VI, 211.

¹⁵² Since there are well-known books that claim “Plato’s ideal state” includes slavery, it may be worth noticing this explicit statement of Socrates that the first enslavement within it destroys the best city.

¹⁵³ Socrates is arguing that these are universal patterns found in human souls and communities, but details of his account of the timocratic pattern match up with historical accounts of Sparta. Socrates was accused of being a Spartan sympathizer (as indicated in Plato’s Gorgias, 515E), possibly, in part, because the polity he advocated resembled the Spartan one in some respects. It is therefore worth comparing the strong criticisms he makes here with the factual records of the time. For one spectacular instance of the corruption of a Spartan ruler, compare the descriptions of Pausanias in IX, 82 of Herodotus’ History and I, 130 of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. In the latter work, see I, 95 for Sparta’s recognition that its leaders couldn’t be trusted outside its borders, and IV, 80 for an extreme instance of its duplicity and brutality toward slaves.

¹⁵⁴ A conflation of lines 451 and 570 of the Seven against Thebes.

¹⁵⁵ See 462A-B.

¹⁵⁶ The last two roles would go to people who could afford a horse or armor. There were military opportunities for the poor at the time, as light infantry troops or rowers in warships, but these are just the options this sort of polity is reluctant to use.

¹⁵⁷ The phrase the Greeks used at the time for the king of Persia, indicating kingship to the ultimate degree.

¹⁵⁸ Plutus, the god of wealth, was regarded as blind because riches are distributed so arbitrarily.

¹⁵⁹ That is, if the law didn’t permit seizing the debtor’s property when he defaulted on a loan, the lender would have to assess someone’s character before making a loan, and there would be no financial incentive for some people to encourage the ruin of others. But Socrates says it would be even better for the law to restrict the kinds of expenditure that would lead someone into ruinous debt in the first place.

¹⁶⁰ The message might mean “[those] men are ours [for the taking], because they’re nothing.” This is one of the rare places where the translation follows an alternate reading in the 2003 Oxford Classical Texts version, in this case one in which the particle gar is absent.

¹⁶¹ Elections were considered an aristocratic practice. In Plato’s Apology (32B), Socrates mentions a day when he was president of the Athenian assembly, the position having come to his tribe by rotation and to him by lot.

¹⁶² The necessary desire to eat is doubly limited by Socrates, in its extent and object, but is not confined to bare subsistence. The word for side dishes was translated “delicacies” in Bk. II. See 372C-D and note.

¹⁶³ Literally, “of a moneymaking sort.” The word chrêmatistikos plays on the previous clause in meaning, having the sense of gaining rather than wasting, and on the following one in sound, since the word for useful is chrêsimos.

¹⁶⁴ Odyssey IX, 91-97.

¹⁶⁵ The words quoted are from Aeschylus’s excuse when he was accused of revealing details of secret religious rites.

¹⁶⁶ The word turannos meant someone who takes over as sole ruler without any regular lawful authority to do so. Socrates has confined the word basileus to lawfully chosen non-hereditary kings, and he referred to hereditary monarchy (dunasteia) in 544D as something outside the pattern of legitimate polities. His claim here, then, is that the natural growth of tyranny in a community under the rule of law occurs only in a democracy, or at least where there is a strong popular party.

¹⁶⁷ The fabulously rich Asian king of Lydia. The oracle is given in Herodotus’ History, I, 55.

¹⁶⁸ Iliad XVI, 776 and XVIII, 26; Odyssey XXIV, 40.

¹⁶⁹ The line is found in a fragment by Sophocles, but was also widely attributed to Euripides by his contemporaries. Its meaning was obviously something along the lines of the “cute remark” of Simonides mentioned in 489B, that since tyrants are rich they have no shortage of wise advisors available, but Socrates inverts the logic of it to produce the cynical claim that those who know what side of their bread the butter is on are the truly wise. What Adeimantus quotes next is from Euripides’ Trojan Women, 1169.