Aristocracy (aristokratia) Rule by those few who are best qualified, by natural abilities, character, and education, to be rulers. Never used in this dialogue for rule by those who inherit wealth or honored names.
Art (technê) A combination of universal knowledge, particular experience, and practice at a skill that permits someone to produce a result in a reliable way. The word “science” would miss the point on one side, the word “craft” on the other. Though the examples in the dialogue range from a knowledge of medicine to an ability to ride a horse, an art is never mere book learning or mere manual skill. Any artful pursuit involves a range of capacities including some theory, an acquired recognition of how the theory applies to particulars, and sufficient adroitness to carry out that application. Socrates introduces the example of art in 332C as an uncontroversial instance of a power to do good.
Becoming (to gignesthai, genesis, to gignomenon) Existence in time and place as a changing and perishable thing. In 508D, Socrates says that there can be no knowledge of anything in the state of becoming, but only fluctuating opinion.
Being (to einai, ousia, to on) Refers not to existence but to stable identity. In the dative (tô onti) the participle may mean “in its being” as opposed to seeming, or “in its very being,” that aspect or part of anything that makes it what it is. In the plural (ta onta) it refers to the things that are in the most emphatic sense, including whatever is always exactly what it is.
Character (êthos) A deep and stable tendency in a human being that has a natural basis but needs to be formed by education and built by thinking (400E). What Cephalus speaks of in 329D as the condition for a good old age is merely the natural disposition (tropos). It is the need to provide trustworthy guardians for a city that leads Socrates to introduce the notion of character in 375C; at the same time he displays what he is talking about by his efforts to help change the tropos of Glaucon and Adeimantus to respect justice (368B) into a state of character that could adhere to it.
City (polis) The sovereign and self-sufficient political community, limited in size by the capacity of people to work in association toward common ends. The principal alternative form of rule in Plato’s time was an empire such as that of Persia; to link the two under a single name such as “state” would be contrary to Greek usage and to the nature of the things themselves. The Persian Wars of the 6th century BC provided an occasion for Greeks to discover what was distinctive in their political ways when the survival of those ways was threatened. The realization that the city is not land and buildings is displayed by Herodotus in Bk. VIII, Chap. 61 of his History, and made explicit by Thucydides in Bk. I, Chap. 10 of The Peloponnesian War. Thrasymachus turns to the city in 338D as the arena in which justice can be seen for what it is. Socrates takes that examination a step further, beginning in 369A, by turning from the haphazard array of actual cities to an attempt to see the city for what it is by tracing it to its origins.
Contemplation (theôria) The direct and calm beholding of anything visible or intelligible, that takes it in whole and simply as it is.
Courage (andreia) The virtue that permits someone to persevere in a freely chosen course of action in the face of frightening obstacles. It is not the natural fearlessness that might be found in animals as well as human beings, but a capacity that can be developed only by education.
Cross-examination (elegchos) The word comes from a verb that orignally means to expose someone to disgrace, and comes to apply to refutation of an adversarial kind. Socrates transforms the word to mean the testing of an assertion or opinion by tracing its implications and assumptions, and throughout Plato’s dialogues he encourages others to welcome the experience and invites them to subject him to it as well. It is what people are referring to when they speak pedantically of the Socratic elenchus or vaguely of the Socratic method. In Bk. I of this dialogue, Cephalus walks away from it, Polemarchus accepts it gracefully, and Thrasymachus fights it tooth and nail. Someone who welcomes it, applies it to his own opinions, and presses it as far as it can go, Socrates calls dialectical (534B-C); only such a person does he regard as capable of becoming fully educated.
Democracy (demokratia) Rule by the mass of the population, understood in this dialogue as animated by the desire for the greatest possible freedom from restraint.
Dialectic (dialektikê) Thinking or inquiry that proceeds the way a constructive conversation does, from opinions through the testing of opinions, to more well-founded opinions. As part of the whole education of the whole human being, Socrates claims (533C-D), dialectical inquiry can lead beyond opinion to knowledge, but dialectic is also the humble approach to other people that allows discussion to be shared learning and not competitive debate (348A-B). Socrates understands it to be a power inherent in rational speech itself, driving it to move beyond the assumptions it rests on at any time (511B).
Education (paideia) In Plato’s Sophist (229D) this is distinguished from training in particular skills and said to have been recognized and named by the Athenians. There the Eleatic Stranger says that its traditional form is a combination of stern discipline and gentle encouragement. In 376E Socrates particularizes its two components as gymnastic exercise and music. The latter involves all the influences that refine and civilize the soul, the Muse-inspired arts of poetry, pictorial representation, and especially storytelling, in addition to melody, harmony, and song. Much of the Republic examines music in its broad sense as the first and most far-reaching aspect of education. And since Socrates says here that the true Muse educates by means of philosophy (548B-C), and in the Phaedo (61A) that the greatest form of music is philosophy, all of the Republic can be seen as a musical education aimed at spirited young souls.
Freedom (eleutheria) First of all, the condition of anyone who is not a slave, and of any city not under foreign domination. Conventionally, the condition of assumed superiority among those born rich enough not to need to earn a living. More deeply, the condition of anyone who gains any degree of leisure by participating in a political partnership. Less deeply, the mere absence of restraint prized in democracies; the argument to show the slavery inherent in this kind of freedom is made at 577D-E. Ultimately, the aim of the whole discussion in the Republic is to display freedom as the self-rule of a properly educated soul (590D-591C), capable of choosing its own life.
Imagination (eikasia) The power of perceiving the likeness of an absent or invisible thing in some other thing. That other thing may be anything: a three-dimensional object, a pattern of colors, a vocal utterance, or a description in words. Imagination in this sense has an active character, and is not the mere having of mental pictures, which would be phantasia. Socrates’ image of the divided line (509D-511E) is founded throughout on the relation between image and original, and suggests that active imagination is the power that holds together all thought and perception to make our experience one and whole.
Imitation (mimêsis) The production of a likeness recognizable by an active imagination. The image produced is always perceptible to the senses or imagination, but the thing likened and revealed in the image need not be: at 375C and following, Socrates discovers a type of human character that is at once gentle and fierce in the image of a dog, and the resemblance points to a philosophic nature in the original not possible in the image. The effect of the imitation of human character in stories becomes a major theme of the Republic.
Insight (nous) The kind of thinking that beholds the things it thinks. The active exercise of this power (noêsis) is taken by Socrates to be the highest activity of the soul (511D), attaining truth and clarity to the greatest extent.
Justice (dikaiosunê) The virtue that governs actions and speech involving other human beings, only in an organized city, according to Thrasymachus (338D-339A), or in human society at large, according to an argument given by Glaucon (358E-359B), or in any group of people, according to Socrates (351C). That last way of thinking about what justice is has the surprising consequence that justice may be present within one person, as the power that permits any of us to be one source of action rather than many impulses; that possibility in turn leads to the analogy between a city and a soul that drives the whole inquiry in the Republic. The polity within a human soul, as the root of all human life, is what the title of the dialogue primarily refers to.
King (basileus) In this dialogue, always a sole ruler whose title to rule comes from merit and who rules by and is subject to laws.
Moderation (sôphrosunê) The virtue that permits the human response to desires, as for food, drink, or sex, or to aversions, as to authority, to be results of choice rather than of irrational impulse. The word is used in a broad, conversational way in Plato’s dialogues, where there is no consistent distinction made between the settled state of character and the self-control (en-krateia) that needs to be exerted anew on each occasion. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, does distinguish those two things, as well as a general capacity to recognize and adhere to a mean that belongs to all virtues of character; in such a context, the word moderation would not adequately convey the meaning of sôphrosunê.
Music (mousikê) See Education.
Oligarchy (oligarchia) Literally rule by a few, but used in this dialogue only for a polity animated by the love of money, in which the sole qualification to rule is ownership of some amount of property.
Polity (politeia) The title of the dialogue, meaning a political community or association, or the arrangement of functions and responsibilities among the people who belong to it. It is what makes a city one, and not merely many people living near each other, or subjected in common to force. It is a richer and more flexible word in this dialogue than “regime” or “constitution,” and provides its central and governing metaphor of an arrangement of parts or powers within each human soul that leads to happiness or misery. See, for example, its use at 605B and 608B.
Presupposition (hupothesis) Anything taken as known and clear without examination. The English cognate “hypothesis” would be a perfectly good translation of the word, except that it refers to something deliberately adopted, while Socrates leaves open the possibility that it may be merely an unexamined assumption (510C-D). Something like “underpinning” or “underprop” might get at its literal sense of something set down underneath, which Socrates plays on at 511B.
Speech (logos) The intelligible content of language that is neither Greek nor English, spoken nor written. In particular, a logos can be any unity in the medium of speech: a word, a meaning, a sentence, a statement, a story, an argument, a discourse, a description, an explanation. In mathematics, a logos is a ratio, an intelligible pattern of relation in size. The city repeatedly built and rebuilt through the Republic is frequently referred to as having its being in speech.
Spiritedness (thumos) Passionate exuberance on behalf of anything to which one feels an attachment or in opposition to anything one feels as threatening or demeaning to one’s attachments. It is the source of the craving for honor, but also the source of the feeling of respect. Socrates argues (439E-441C) that spiritedness is the middle part of the soul that can harness the desires to the intellect or vice versa. Glaucon displays spiritedness in an exemplary way when he objects in 372D to Socrates’ portrait of a healthy city in which all natural appetites are satisfied and all rational necessities are provided for; he pronounces such a life unfit for human beings, feeling it as an insult to our dignity and insulting it in turn as fit only for pigs. The word has no connection with anything “spiritual” but names the same quality evident in a spirited horse or aroused by a pep talk (375A-B).
Thinking (dianoia) The way of dealing with intelligible things that moves from presuppositions to conclusions, contrasted by Socrates with insight (510B-511C). He uses first the former (at 524D), and later the latter (at 534A), in a wider sense for the whole thinking power.
Timocracy, timarchy (timokratia, timarchia) Words coined in this dialogue (545B) for a polity like that of Sparta, animated by the love of honor, and in which those who earn the most honor also earn the right to rule.
Trust (pistis) The attitude of the soul toward the things perceived by the senses, taking them uncritically as the true, original, or only beings.
Tyrant (turannos) A sole ruler who takes over a political community previously ruled in some other fashion, or a monarchy in which the succession prescribed by law would go to someone else. Socrates argues (565D) that the natural way for a tyrant to come to power is within a democracy, after being chosen as leader of the popular faction.
Virtue (aretê) The excellence of anything as an instance of its kind. The virtue of a jug would be to hold liquids without leaking, sit on a surface without tipping over, and have a handle for easy carrying. Liddell and Scott’s lexicon derives the word from the name of Ares, the war god, but it is more likely to come from the verb arariskô, meaning to fit or be fitting. The virtue of anything is to be well fitted to its ends. But the word had a special application to human beings, referring to any quality of character that makes someone outstanding and admired, and to four such qualities as the primary or cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. When Thrasymachus denies that justice is a virtue (348C), he is challenging the conventional opinion that there is anything moral about human excellence, which he regards instead as excelling others in getting the things one wants. Socrates responds by arguing that all successful activities depend on a knowledge of exactly what a situation calls for. Human virtue, then, would not be a comparative or competitive superiority, but the same in kind as the virtue of anything else.
Wisdom (sophia) The directing knowledge by which anyone can assess the best way to do or make anything. Hence its first and most widespread application is to those who possess arts. But then it becomes identified primarily with the intelligent judgment that can direct the whole life of a human being or community (429A), and the word for intelligence, phronêsis, is then used interchangeably with it (433B). But all these uses presuppose an ability to assess evidence of things that are true in themselves, and this is made explicit in the account of a presuppositionless, and therefore contemplative, knowing of unchanging being (511B-E). The gradual deepening of the meaning of sophia through the dialogue supersedes any verbal distinction between practical and theoretical wisdom, and Socrates denies that the two are separable.