Polytropy

I continue to review and revise some notes I made during a recent reading of Plato’s Republic. The reading was with a group of people on four continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America), meeting weekly, by means of Zoom, from June, 2022, till May, 2023; I joined only in August.

My last post included a summary in some detail of Books I–VII, with a terser summary of the remaining Books VIII–X. I asked what Plato hoped to accomplish with the Republic, because if he meant to inspire dictators, he seemed to have succeeded with Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi (a.k.a. Ruhollah Khomeini, 1900–89), Saloth Sâr (a.k.a. Pol Pot, 1925–98), and the like. But then is Plato to be blamed if such men did not pay attention to Books VIII and IX, where even the best state is shown to devolve into tyranny?

Here I look at a passage in Book IX that struck me when I read it in Robin Waterfield’s 1998 translation in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. This is at 572e–3a, in the account of how the son of the democratic father becomes tyrannical:

When these black magicians, these creators of dictators, realize that there’s only one way they’re going to gain control of the young man, they arrange matters until they implant in him a particular lust, to champion the rest of his desires which are too idle to do more than share out anything that readily comes their way. And don’t you think this kind of lust is exactly like a great, winged drone?

Waterfield is interpreting, but justifiably, I think. I’ll look at the Greek later, along with a number of other translations.

Meanwhile, the passage has me thinking that desire is not normally able to satisfy itself. It is a barnacle or anemone, sitting and waiting for nutriment to come to it.

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