The Republic’s Blame of Eros

Abstract

In the Republic, Socrates criticizes eros most consistently. To be sure, even in this dialogue, Socrates’s harshness toward eros is not complete: Socrates’s attribution of an eros for truth to the philosophic nature would seem to point us toward his praises of eros in the Phaedrus and Symposium (485a10–b1, 490b1–2).¹ But it is the harshness of Socrates’s treatment of eros in its most ordinary and, as I argue in chapter 3, precise sense, eros as the love of other human beings, that we are concerned to understand here. This harshness toward eros is most prominent in Book Five’s sexual legislation, where Socrates’s proposals entail the destruction of the private family, and in Book Nine’s treatment of the tyrannical soul, where the soul’s greatest corruption is traced to eros.² Accordingly, we divide our study of Socrates’s treatment of eros in the Republic into two parts. The first part begins with Socrates’s treatment of the family in Book Five, and then, in order to explain why Socrates’s best city requires this treatment of the family, we turn back to his discussion of the guardians’ education in Books Two and Three, as well as to his return to the topic of mourning in Book Ten, which helps clarify his earlier discussion of the guardians’ education. The second part of our study of Republic then focuses on the discussion of the tyrannical soul in Book Nine. As we shall see, the interpretation of each part complements the other.