This text is part of:
ἐπιμελείᾳ = ‘deliberately,’ ‘consulto,’ is a rare but well-established adverb: see Xen. Cyr. V 3. 47, Mag. Eq. 7. 9 and cf. κατ᾽ ἐπιμέλειαν in Hell. IV 4. 8. The magistrates resign themselves to the presence of these κακοῦργοι, and instead of removing the cause—ἀπαιδευσία καὶ κακὴ τροφὴ καὶ κατάστασις τῆς πολιτείας—as they should do, they ‘deliberately hold them down by force.’ Plato emphatically believed that ‘force is no remedy.’ Cf. the corresponding account of the oligarchical man in 554 C, D κατέχει ἄλλας κακὰς ἐπιθυμίας ἐνούσας, οὐ πείθων ὅτι οὐκ ἄμεινον, οὐδ᾽ ἡμερῶν λόγῳ, ἀλλ᾽ ἀνάγκῃ καὶ φόβῳ κτλ. Schneider's translation ‘carefully’ (sorgfältig) is inaccurate; but he was right in holding that ἐπιμελείᾳ and not βίᾳ (as J. and C. suppose) is the adverb. We certainly cannot understand ἐπιμελείᾳ as = ὑπὸ τῆς ἄλλης ἐπιμελείας in spite of 554 C. The suggestions καὶ βίᾳ (Stephanus) and [ἐπιμελεία] βίᾳ (J. J. Hartman) are superfluous. ἀπαιδευσίαν . ἀπαιδευσία is a feature of the oligarchical State and man: cf. 554 B, 559 D.
The Republic of Plato. James Adam. 1902. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.