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¹⁷⁰ Naming it for desiring is too broad if the other parts of the soul also have desires, and naming it ‘money-loving’ is too narrow if some people with strong desires have contempt for money; it can’t be called the irrational or passionate or impulsive part since all those things are equally true of spiritedness.

¹⁷¹ In Book IV, it took quite a bit of argument to establish that there are three distinct parts of the soul (435C and following) corresponding to the three functions required by a city, but there was an old Pythagorean parable to the effect that human lives reflect the differing reasons people go to the Olympic games: most go to buy and sell, a few to compete, and the smallest number just to see the contests.

¹⁷² In 376B, Socrates said flatly that the love of wisdom and the love of learning are the same thing. He thus does not think of wisdom as something opposite to philosophy, which would cancel the need for the latter if it were attained. He implies that any experience of learning attains truth and no knowledge puts an end to learning.

¹⁷³ Two allusions are combined here; a third fall was needed to complete an Olympic wrestling victory, and three toasts were commonly drunk at a dinner party, the first to Olympian Zeus and the third to Zeus the Protector.

¹⁷⁴ This clause seems in the manuscripts to be out of parallel with the following one, but the verb and preposition in it may be elastic enough to bear the sense that seems called for, and is given here.

¹⁷⁵ A poet who had maligned Helen, and later recanted by saying she wasn’t really at Troy. That claim is mentioned in Plato’s Phaedrus (243A-B); Herodotus thinks it likely to have been true (History II, 120).

¹⁷⁶ The number Socrates has uttered, probably without pausing for breath, is in Greek a single word of seventeen syllables. He has also finagled a simple list of five kinds of people into a three-by-three array, a “plane number,” and cubed it for no apparent reason. The point of all this playfulness comes out in the next speech. The tyrant’s wretchedness is measured not only by the pains he must feel by day, but also by the pleasures he chases after by night. By one ancient calculation of the period of the sun, that would total 729 alternations a year of the cycle in which he is caught. Near the beginning of Bk. VIII there was an elaborate mathematical excursus on the beginnings of the decay of political order; here near the end of Bk. IX, it is echoed in this numerical summation of the ultimate human result of that process.

¹⁷⁷ The first monster named was a combination of lion, goat, and snake, the second of a woman, dogs, and snakes, and the third of dogs and snakes.

¹⁷⁸ A string of disasters followed when Eriphyle was bribed by Polyneices to persuade her husband to join the attack of the Seven against Thebes: her husband Amphiaraus was killed in the fighting, she was killed in retaliation by her son Alcmaeon, and he was killed in retribution for giving the same necklace to his wife after he’d sworn to dedicate it to the god at Delphi.

¹⁷⁹ In the 16^th century, Thomas More coined the word “utopia,” a noplace, from the Greek words ou and topos for a community governed by reason and co-operation.