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[373a]
For there are some, it appears, who will not be
contented with this sort of fare or with this way of life; but couches will
have to be added thereto and tables and other furniture, yes, and relishes
and myrrh and incense and girls1 and cakes—all sorts of all of them.
And the requirements we first mentioned, houses and garments and shoes, will
no longer be confined to necessities,2 but we must set painting
to work and embroidery, and procure gold and ivory and similar adornments,
must we not?”
[373b]
“Yes,” he said. “Then we shall have to
enlarge the city again. For that healthy state is no longer sufficient, but
we must proceed to swell out its bulk and fill it up with a multitude of
things that exceed the requirements of necessity in states, as, for example,
the entire class of huntsmen, and the imitators,3 many of them occupied with figures and colors and many
with music—the poets and their assistants, rhapsodists, actors,
chorus-dancers, contractors4—and
[373c]
the manufacturers of all kinds of
articles, especially those that have to do with women's adornment. And so we
shall also want more servitors. Don't you think that we shall need tutors,
nurses wet5 and dry, beauty-shop ladies, barbers6 and yet again cooks and
chefs? And we shall have need, further, of swineherds; there were none of
these creatures7 in our former city, for we had no need of
them, but in this city there will be this further need; and we shall also
require other cattle in great numbers if they are to be eaten,
[373d]
shall we not?”
“Yes.” “Doctors, too, are something whose
services8 we shall be much more likely to
require if we live thus than as before?”
“Much.”“And
the territory, I presume, that was then sufficient to feed the then
population, from being adequate will become too small. Is that so or
not?” “It is.” “Then we shall have
to cut out a cantle9 of our neighbor's land if we are to have enough for pasture and
ploughing, and they in turn of ours if they too abandon themselves to the
unlimited10 acquisition of wealth,
[373e]
disregarding the limit set by our
necessary wants.” “Inevitably, Socrates.”
“We shall go to war11 as the next step, Glaucon—or what will
happen?” “What you say,” he said.
“And we are not yet to speak,” said I, “of any
evil or good effect of war, but only to affirm that we have further12 discovered the origin of war, namely, from those things from
which13 the
greatest disasters, public and private, come to states when they
come.” “Certainly.” “Then, my
friend, we must still further enlarge our city
1 On flute-girls as the accompaniment of a banquet Cf. Symposium 176 E, Aristophanes Ach. 1090-1092, Catullus 13. 4. But apart from this, the sudden mention of an incongruous item in a list is a device of Aristophanic humor which even the philosophic Emerson did not disdain: “The love of little maids and berries.”
2 τὰ ἁναγκαῖα predicatively, “in the measure prescribed by necessity.” Cf. 369 D “the indispensable minimum of a city.” The historical order is: (1) arts of necessity, (2) arts of pleasure and luxury, (3) disinterested science. Cf. Critias 110 A, Aristotle Met. 981 b 20.
3 θηρευταί and μιμηταί are generalized Platonic categories, including much not ordinarily signified by the words. For a list of such Platonic generalizations Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, note 500.
4 Contractors generally, and especially theatrical managers.
5 The mothers of the idyllic state nursed their own children, but in the ideal state the wives of the guardians are relieved of this burden by special provision. Cf. 460 D.
6 The rhetoricians of the empire liked to repeat that no barber was known at Rome in the first 200 or 300 years of the city.
7 Illogical idiom referring to the swine. Cf. 598 C.
8 χρείαις: Greek idiom could use either singular or plural. Cf. 410 A;Phaedo 87 C;Laws 630 E. The plural here avoids hiatus.
9 Cf. Isocrates iii. 34.
10 Cf. 591 D. Natural desires are limited. Luxury and unnatural forms of wealth are limitless, as the Greek moralists repeat from Solon down.
11 The unnecessary desires are the ultimate causes of wars.Phaedo 66 C. The simple life once abandoned, war is inevitable. “My lord,” said St. Francis to the Bishop of Assisi, “if we possessed property we should have need of arms for its defense” (Sabatier, p. 81). Similarly that very dissimilar thinker, Mandeville. Cf. on 372 C. Plato recognizes the struggle for existence (Spencer, Data of Ethics, 6), and the “bellum omnium contra omnes,”Laws 625 E. Cf. Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, i, 2: “The Republic of Plato seems in many respects divergent from the reality. And yet he contemplates war as a permanent, unalterable fact to be provided for in the ideal state.” Spencer on the contrary contemplates a completely evolved society in which the ethics of militarism will disappear.
12 i.e. as well as the genesis of society. 369 B.
13 ἐξ ὧν: i.e.ἐκ τούτων ἐξ ὧν, namely the appetites and the love of money.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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