“I went down yesterday to the Piraeus[.]” Kateben—“I went down”—is the first phrase of Plato’s Republic, and it indicates the theme of the dialogue as a whole, just as in a Homeric epic. Menin, “wrath”, and specifically the destructive wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles, is the first word and theme of the Iliad, and andra, “man,” the man of many turnings, the same for the Odyssey.
Though the subject of the discussion in the Republic is justice, the story of the Republic, what the dialogue is really about, is of Socrates’ descent into the Piraeus and his attempt to direct the young men there toward the light of philosophy.
The Republic as a whole is long and complex, full of twists and turns. Today, we will merely consider the prologue to the introductory book, a stand-alone dialogue often called the Thrasymachus.
The Piraeus was Athens’ port town, located a few miles from the city proper. Connecting the Piraeus to Athens were the famous Long Walls, the brainchild of Themistocles, one of the principle Athenian leaders during the Second Persian War. These walls allowed Athens to maintain her connection to the sea even while under siege. King Agis II of Sparta, when he occupied and ravaged Attica during the Peloponnesian War, watched helplessly as grain ships sailed into the Piraeus, nullifying all his efforts, and despaired.
The Piraeus was the keystone for Athens’ Aegean empire. It was also relatively commercial economically and relatively democratic politically. During the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, the democratic resistance was centered in the Piraeus, and it was from there that Thrasybulus collected his dissident army. The independent power of the Piraeus was considerable: when King Pausanias came from Sparta to support the Thirty, even after defeating the democratic forces in battle, he was sufficiently impressed that he elected to restore the democracy rather than continue a long and bloody struggle.
The reign of the Thirty lies in the future as far as the Republic is concerned. Not only was one of Socrates’ interlocutors, Polemarchus, killed by the Thirty, but a later dialogue, the Timaeus, gives clues to this effect. The Timaeus is set two days after the events of the Republic, and in this dialogue Socrates converses with a man named Critias. Scholars debate the identity of this Critias, but the most plausible interpretation is that he was the leader of the Thirty Tyrants, with whom Socrates was a known associate and in part for association with whom Socrates was put to death. We know from both Plato and Xenophon that Socrates and Critias had a falling out during the Thirty’s rule, so their amicable conversation is almost certainly set well before that time.
We can learn about more than the timing of the Republic from the Timaeus, as well. In the opening of the Timaeus, Socrates apparently summarizes the key points from the discussion in the Republic: the conversation concerned the construction of the ideal state, which required establishing the three castes, abolishing private property, creating equality with women, and instituting bizarrely convoluted mating procedures. Now, careful readers of the Republic will recall that this summary is completely false. The Republic was about justice, not the ideal state per se, and the various items listed were not even parts of the ideal state but rather came from a designedly sub-optimal state, one which was specifically understood as not perfectly ordered.
However, we know that Plato was criticized in Antiquity for precisely the proposals mentioned; in the Timaeus, he is evidently mocking those readers who managed to read ten books of the Republic and utterly miss the point. This conclusion is inescapable when we also consider the nigh-satirical dialogue Critias, a follow-up to the Timaeus, which is a clever mockery of the heroizing histories of Herodotus.
An unpleasant consequence of this interpretation, however, is that we cannot take Plato’s Socrates as authoritative as to his own opinions. Socrates misremembers, he exaggerates, and he even fabricates. But he doesn’t do these things dishonestly, with the intention to deceive. Socrates’ goal is always to guide his pupils toward Truth, and he does this neither by simply telling them what the truth is, nor by leading them along in the manner of a mathematics lecturer. The goal of Socratic education is contemplation not of Gershgorin disks, but of Truth beyond words, and Socrates will lead his students down many false roads in order to get them to this point. Indeed, the aporia at the conclusion of most Platonic dialogues is part of Socrates’ technique: though Socrates’ interlocutor may have no clearer conception of whatever was under discussion, his mind has been broadened and he has begun to shake off the shackles of the concrete, every-day world.
In the dialogues and especially in the Republic, serious discussion is mixed in with playfulness alien to readers of dry, conventional philosophy. Socrates goes down to the Piraeus, along with Plato’s brother Glaucon, for a very serious purpose: there is a new divinity being introduced to the Piraeus, and Socrates wishes to pay his respects to the goddess and witness the religious ceremonies. On the way back to Athens, Socrates is waylaid by a group of young men led by Polemarchus and Glaucon’s brother Adimantus. These youths threaten Socrates with violence if he does not consent to discourse. Socrates and Glaucon are both taken aback, but after some brief banter they agree to go home with Polemarchus and converse there with a number of characters.
This scene is puzzling if taken at face value. These young men are Socrates’ friends, so why would they threaten him with violence? And why would they need to compel, of all people, Socrates, who is on a mission from God to converse with the men of Athens and guide them toward virtue, to engage in discourse? And if Socrates and Glaucon are under threat of violence, how do they calmly banter with their captors? The truth of the matter is that the whole exchange is playful banter. Socrates’ friends are not going to actually force Socrates to discourse with them—because they know they don’t have to—but they together gain amusement by pretending that Socrates is a reluctant conversation partner who must be compelled or persuaded to join them.
The opening conversation sets the tone for the remainder of the dialogue. Polemarchus and company propose holding a man against his will, a most unjust action, but playfully rather than seriously. In the same way, the rest of the dialogue concerns justice and the pursuit of wisdom, two very serious matters, in a light and amusing fashion. Socrates is going to help his friends, and us the readers, come closer to contemplation of Truth, but the journey will be enjoyable rather than dull and plodding, and Socrates is going to have some fun of his own along the way.
It is when Socrates and his friends come to the house of Cephalus, Polemarchus’ father, that the dialogue begins in earnest.
Next time we will finish analyzing the Thrasymachus.
