The Four Virtues (Book IV)

Here Adeimantus interrupted. "What would you say, Socrates, if someone objected that you are not making these men very happy? The city belongs to them, and yet they get nothing good out of it: no land, no fine houses, no gold, not even travel or a mistress. They are like hired soldiers, sitting in the city with nothing to do but keep watch."

We are not founding the city, I answered, to make any one class exceptionally happy, but to make the whole city as happy as possible. Suppose we were painting a statue, and someone told us that the eyes, the most beautiful part, should be painted purple, not black. We would answer: we must not make the eyes so beautiful that they no longer look like eyes; we must give each part what belongs to it, and so make the whole beautiful. In the same way, we must not give the guardians a happiness that would make them anything rather than guardians.

The guardians must also keep out both wealth and poverty, for wealth produces luxury, idleness and change, and poverty produces meanness and bad work, and both produce discontent. The city must grow only as large as it can while remaining one; for most cities are not one but two, at war with each other, the city of the poor and the city of the rich. And above all, the guardians must guard against innovation in education. Once a good education has been established, it works like a circle, growing ever stronger. But when new modes of music enter, the most fundamental laws of the city change with them.

So, I said, son of Ariston, the city is now founded. Now light a lamp, and let us look inside it to see where justice is, and where injustice. If we have founded it rightly, it is perfectly good; and so it is wise, brave, moderate and just. Let us find the first three, and the one left over will be justice.

Wisdom first. The city is wise, not because of the knowledge of its carpenters or smiths or farmers, but because of the knowledge of its rulers, the smallest class, who deliberate for the city as a whole. So the city is wise through its smallest part.

Courage next. The city is brave through its soldiers, the auxiliaries, who preserve through everything, in pleasure and pain, desire and fear, the right belief, instilled by education, about what is truly to be feared. It is like dyeing wool. The dyers choose white wool, prepare it carefully, and then dye it so that no washing, with or without soap, can take the color out. That is what we did with music and gymnastics: we prepared the soldiers so that their belief about what is to be feared would take like a dye, and not be washed out by pleasure, which is more powerful than any soap, or by pain, fear or desire.

Then moderation. Unlike wisdom and courage, it is not in one part only, but spread through the whole city, like a harmony. It is the agreement of the better and the worse, of rulers and ruled, about who should rule.

And justice? We have been tumbling over it all along, I said, like people looking for something they are holding in their hands. From the beginning we laid down a principle: that each person must do the one thing for which his nature best suits him. That, or something like it, is justice: to do one's own work, and not to meddle with the work of others. And injustice is the meddling and the exchange of roles, above all when a craftsman, puffed up by wealth, tries to become a soldier, or a soldier a ruler. That is the greatest harm to the city.

Now let us return to the individual. Is the soul, too, made of three parts, corresponding to the three classes of the city? We know that the same thing cannot do or suffer opposite things in the same respect at the same time. And yet a thirsty man sometimes refuses to drink. There must be something in him that bids him drink, and something else that forbids him. The first is appetite; the second is reason.

Is the spirited part, anger, the same as either? Here is a story I once heard. Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Piraeus, under the outside of the north wall, when he saw some corpses lying by the executioner. He felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time he was disgusted and turned away. For a while he struggled and covered his face; but at last, overcome by his desire, he ran up to the bodies with his eyes wide open and cried: "There, you wretches, take your fill of the fine sight!" That shows that anger sometimes makes war against the desires, as one thing against another. And anger is not the same as reason either: children are full of spirit from birth, and some never reach reason at all.

So the soul has three parts, as the city has three classes: reason, which should rule, being wise and caring for the whole soul; spirit, its ally, which obeys reason and fights for it; and appetite, the largest part, and by nature the most insatiable for money and pleasure, which the other two must govern.

Justice in a man, then, is not a matter of outward action, but of what is inside. The just man does not allow the parts of his soul to meddle with each other's work. He sets his own house in order, is his own master, and makes himself one instead of many, harmonizing the three parts like the high, low and middle notes of a scale. And injustice is a kind of civil war among the three parts, a rebellion of a part against the whole. Justice is to the soul what health is to the body; injustice is disease.

"Then the question whether it pays to be just or unjust has become ridiculous," Glaucon said. "If life is not worth living when the body is ruined, even with every kind of food and drink and wealth and power, how could it be worth living when the very thing by which we live is disordered and corrupt?"

It is ridiculous, I agreed. But since we have come this far, we must not give up. I seem to see from a height, as it were, that there is one form of virtue, and countless forms of vice, of which four are worth mentioning. There are, I think, as many types of soul as there are types of constitution: five.

(End of Episode 4 — continued in Episode 5: The Three Waves)