[451a]
a fearful and slippery venture. The fear is not of being
laughed at,1
for that is childish, but, lest, missing the truth, I fall down and drag my
friends with me in matters where it most imports not to stumble. So I salute
Nemesis,2 Glaucon, in what I am about to say. For,
indeed,3 I
believe that involuntary homicide is a lesser fault than to mislead opinion
about the honorable, the good, and the just. This is a risk that it is
better to run with enemies4
[451b]
than with friends, so that your
encouragement is none.” And Glaucon, with a laugh, said,
“Nay, Socrates, if any false note in the argument does us any
harm, we release you as5 in a homicide case, and warrant you pure
of hand and no deceiver of us. So speak on with confidence.”
“Well,” said I, “he who is released in that
case is counted pure as the law bids, and, presumably, if there, here
too.” “Speak on, then,” he said,
“for all this objection.” “We must return
then,” said I, “and say now what perhaps ought to have
been said in due sequence there.
[451c]
But
maybe this way is right, that after the completion of the male drama we
should in turn go through with the female,6 especially since you are so urgent.”“For men, then, born and bred as we
described there is in my opinion no other right possession and use of
children and women than that which accords with the start we gave them. Our
endeavor, I believe, was to establish these men in our discourse as the
guardians of a flock7?”
“Yes.”
[451d]
“Let us preserve the analogy, then, and assign them a generation
and breeding answering to it, and see if it suits us or not.”
“In what way?” he said. “In this. Do we expect
the females of watch-dogs to join in guarding what the males guard and to
hunt with them and share all their pursuits or do we expect the females to
stay indoors as being incapacitated by the bearing and the breeding of the
whelps while the males toil and have all the care of the flock?”
“They have all things in common,”
[451e]
he replied, “except that we treat the females
as weaker and the males as stronger.” “Is it possible,
then,” said I, “to employ any creature for the same ends
as another if you do not assign it the same nurture and
education?” “It is not possible.”
“If, then, we are to use the women for the same things as the men,
1 Cf. on 452 C-D, Euthydemus 3 C “To be laughed at is no matter,”Laws 830 Bτὸν τῶν ἀνοήτων γέλωτα, Euripides fr. 495.
2 Ἀδράστειαν: practically equivalent to Nemesis. Cf. our “knock on wood.” Cf. Posnansky in Breslauer Phil. Abhandl. v. 2, “Nemesis und Adrasteia”: Herodotus i. 35, Aeschylus Prom. 936, Euripides Rhesus 342, Demosthenes xxv. 37καὶ Ἀδράστειαν μὲν ἄνθρωπος ὢν ἐγὼ προσκυνῶ. For the moral earnestness of what follows cf. 336 E, Gorgias 458 A, and Joubert apudArnold, Essays in Crit. p. 29 “Ignorance . . . is in itself in intellectual matters a crime of the first order.”
3 γὰρ οὖν, “for in fact,” but often with the suggestion that the fact has to be faced, as e.g. in Timaeus 47 E, where the point is often missed.
4 Almost proverbial. Cf. my note on Horace, Odes iii. 27. 21. Plato is speaking here from the point of view of the ordinary man, and not from that of his “Sermon on the Mount ethics.” Cf. Philebus 49 D and Gorgias 480 E, where Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, ii. pp. 332 and 350, goes astray. Cf. Class. Phil. vol. i. p. 297.
5 ὥσπερ marks the legal metaphor to which ἐκεῖ below refers. Cf. Laws 869 E, and Euripides Hippolytus 1433 and 1448-1450, with Hirzel,Δίκη etc. p. 191, n. 1, Demosthenes xxxvii. 58-59. Plato transfers the idea to the other world in Phaedo 114 A-B, where the pardon of their victims is required for the release of sinners. The passage is used by the older critics in the comparison of Plato with Christianity.
6 Sophron's Mimes are said to have been so classified. For δρᾶμα cf. also Theaetetus 150 A.
7 For the use of analogies drawn from animals cf. 375-376, 422 D, 466 D, 467 B, 491 D-E, 537 A, 546 A-B, 564 A. Plato is only pretending to deduce his conclusions from his imagery. Aristotle's literal-minded criticism objects that animals have no “economy,”Politics 1264 b 4-6.
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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