Summary: Book V, 449a-472a
Having identified the just city and the just soul, Socrates
now wants to identify four other constitutions of city and soul,
all of which are vicious to varying degrees. But before he can get
anywhere in this project, Polemarchus and Adeimantus interrupt him.
They would like him to return to the statement he made in passing
about sharing spouses and children in common. Socrates launches
into a lengthy discussion about the lifestyle of the guardians.
In the first of several radical claims that he makes
in this section Socrates declares that females will be reared and
trained alongside males, receiving the same education and taking
on the same political roles. Though he acknowledges that in many
respects men and women have different natures, he believes that
in the relevant respect—the division among appetitive, spirited,
and rational people—women fall along the same natural lines as men.
Some are naturally appetitive, some naturally spirited, and some
naturally rational. The ideal city will treat and make use of them
as such.
Socrates then discusses the requirement that all spouses
and children be held in common. For guardians, sexual intercourse
will only take place during certain fixed times of year, designated
as festivals. Males and females will be made husband and wife at
these festivals for roughly the duration of sexual intercourse.
The pairings will be determined by lot. Some of these people, those
who are most admirable and thus whom we most wish to reproduce,
might have up to four or five spouses in a single one of these festivals.
All the children produced by these mating festivals will be taken
from their parents and reared together, so that no one knows which
children descend from which adults. At no other time in the year
is sex permitted. If guardians have sex at an undesignated time
and a child results, the understanding is that this child must be
killed.
To avoid rampant unintentional incest, guardians must
consider every child born between seven and ten months after their
copulation as their own. These children, in turn, must consider
that same group of adults as their parents, and each other as brothers
and sisters. Sexual relations between these groups is forbidden.
Socrates explains that these rules of procreation are
the only way to ensure a unified city. In most cities the citizens’
loyalty is divided. They care about the good of the whole, but they
care even more about their own family. In the just city, everyone
is considered as family and treated as such. There are no divided
loyalties. As Socrates puts it, everyone in the city says “mine”
about the same things. The city is unified because it shares all
its aims and concerns.
The final question to be asked is whether this is a plausible requirement—whether
anyone can be asked to adhere to this lifestyle, with no family
ties, no wealth, and no romantic interludes. But before answering
this question, Socrates deals with a few other issues pertaining
to the guardians’ lifestyle, all of them relating to war. He states
that children training to become guardians should be taken to war
so they can watch and learn the art as any young apprentice does.
He recommends that they be put on horseback so that they can escape
in the case of defeat. He also explains that anyone who behaves
cowardly in war will be stripped of their role as a guardian. He
ends by discussing the appropriate manner in which to deal with
defeated enemies. When it comes to Greek enemies, he orders that
the vanquished not be enslaved and that their lands not be destroyed
in any permanent way. This is because all Greeks are really brothers,
and eventually there will be peace between them again. When it comes
to barbarian—i.e., non-Greek—enemies, anything goes.
