creation of the smoke screen of the city’s Greek identity is admittedly risky and double-edged. He hopes that the city’s newfound sense of community with its immediate neighbors can be used to broaden Glaucon’s attachments and forestall disruptive wars without resorting to the cunning machinations required by his earlier discussion with Adeimantus. Yet Glaucon, not one to be satisfied by a city that eschews war (372b9 ff.), is inclined to view Greek unity as a pretext to initiate a still larger war against the barbarians. Socrates hopes that he can counteract this tendency by joining the city to a Greek nation deemed gentle rather than savage. But does Socrates ever fully purge Glaucon of his aggressive, Panhellenic longings? I do not think that the dialogue ever provides any conclusive proof. When Socrates announces that the rule of the philosophers is most likely to come into being “in some barbarian place, far outside our range of vision” (499c9–d1), it is Adeimantus who consents, but at least Glaucon does not interrupt.24
The Untraceable Origin of the City
The introduction of the theme of Greek kinship serves several distinct purposes. It softens the attitudes of the city, reconciles its citizens to their fractious neighbors, and helps prepare Glaucon for the introduction of philosophy. Yet it does not succeed in integrating the city into any ethnic community, or in shedding light on its origins.
Socrates’s attribution of the city to a remote barbarian place (499c9) dislocates the city from Greece, without locating it in Phoenicia, Egypt, Thrace, or any other known barbarian region. The basic problem inherent in the founding scene is never resolved: where is the city located, and who are its first inhabitants? To the best of my knowledge, there is but one passage in the Republic that gives an account of their origins. It is, of course, the notorious “noble lie” (414d ff., cf. 369c1–4, 470d8–9). This tale is literally no more true than it purports to be, but its shameless mendacity points to the heart of the problem: we know nothing whatsoever about the origins of this city and its people. They might just as well have sprung from the earth.
Socrates’s refusal to elucidate the origins of the city’s first inhabitants serves the convenient purpose of avoiding all the thorny problems associated with settling actual cities. The location of the city and the origins of the first inhabitants become from the very beginning a major obstacle to the legislative project of the Laws (704c ff.), but there is no comparable discussion in the Republic. The appearance of the philosopher-kings, who are ostensibly introduced to render the city possible (471c6 ff.), reorients the discussion away from the founding of a new city, and toward explaining how philosophers might emerge and come to power in existing cities. The new-found emphasis on existing cities pushes the question of the new city and its origins into the background.
Adeimantus senses that the prolonged discussion of philosophy and its travails in existing cities has somehow shifted the terrain. He asks Socrates whether any of the current regimes is worthy of philosophy (497a9–10). Socrates replies that none are, but that the best regime would be (497b1–c3). However, Socrates no longer identifies the best regime with the one that has been elaborated in the dialogue, since he anticipates the question of “what this [best] regime is” (497c4). Somewhat confused, Adeimantus responds by asking Socrates whether the best regime and the city founded by the interlocutors in the dialogue are indeed the same (497c5–6). Socrates seems to answer in the affirmative, but with a major qualification: the philosophers could rule in any city possessing the same logos that was embodied in Adeimantus’s lawgiving (497c7–d2). Socrates also substitutes the second person singular “you” for Adeimantus’s “we” (cf. 497c6, 497d2), as if to suggest that he has again ceased to take part in this lawgiving. Furthermore, the use of the imperfect tense of the verb tithēmi to signify Adeimantus’s lawgiving seems to relegate it to the past. Whatever one might make of this surprising exchange,25 this much is clear: in the ensuing discussion the city that dominated the first half of the dialogue plays a diminished role. Socrates drops the phrases “this city” and “our city” in explaining how an indefinite “city” can take up philosophy without being destroyed (497d8). The word “city” without an article recurs multiple times as Socrates explores the possibility of the rule of philosophers (499b2, 499c7, 501a2, 502b4). Socrates’s attention has shifted away from the city founded in the first half of dialogue toward whatever existing city might be amenable to the rule of philosophers. He now speaks of the sons of kings or other current rulers acquiring a passion for philosophy, which would indeed seem a much quicker and less risky route to philosopher-kings than establishing a new city from scratch (499b7–c1, 502a5–6). It allows Socrates to evade the unresolved question of the city’s ethnic identity. And yet this new proposal will soon meet opposition from the ethnos as well.
In the subsequent discussion, Socrates does reintroduce “the laws and practices that we have gone through” in the first half of the dialogue (502b6–7). But the absence of the city for which these laws were initially intended means that they have been detached from their original context and integrated into a program of legislative reform for a preexisting city that has been rendered obedient to philosopher rulers (502b4–5). The old approach was based on “beholding a city coming to be in speech” (369a5–6), while the new approach is based on philosophers designing a divine model and striving to implement it in existing cities (500e1–3). It now seems that the city was never meant to be founded in deed, but rather elaborated in speech, so that it may serve as a model for the drastic reforms that philosophers will impose once they have taken over existing cities. When Socrates and Glaucon return as founders, their primary task is no longer to design legislation for a new city, but rather to compel the philosophers to concern themselves with government in general (519c8ff.).
The philosopher kings, once they have been compelled to rule, would not be content with existing norms. They would have to purify the city and the ways of its inhabitants, like a tablet that an eraser has returned to a state of pristine blankness. Only then can they initiate the desired reforms (501a2–c2). The precise meaning of this purification appears in graphic terms at the end of Book VII, with its ludicrous proposal for the expulsion of all the inhabitants over ten years of age, once “the true philosophers, either one or many, come to power in a city” (540d3–4, italics mine). The sweeping expulsion of the parents followed by the sound education of the children along the lines elaborated in the first half of the dialogue is the only way a city in any nation (ethnos) could become truly happy (541a5–6). Socrates’s rare mention of the ethnos here is highly significant. By noting that such an expulsion would be equally necessary in any ethnos, Socrates indicates how completely the customs of every nation are likely to resist the establishment of his city. The notion that a city rooted in parricide and the destruction of ancestral customs could somehow “profit the nation in which it arises” (541a6–7) is absurd: it recalls and generalizes Socrates’s earlier assertion that the city that had just abolished the family and introduced women into the army could reconcile warring Greeks (471a6–7). The broadening of the dialogue’s concern from a city to the nation to which the city belongs serves to reiterate the practical impossibility of the city. Glaucon was induced to call the city Greek; Socrates eventually consigned it to some remote barbarian place; now it has become equally anathema to the ways of every nation on earth. Socrates eventually confirms that this city is a model existing only in heaven and in the minds of the humans who contemplate it (592a10–b4). Since no founder of an earthly city would have the luxury of flouting the ways of the nation in which the city comes to be (cf. 541a6–7), it is only as a founder of a heavenly city that Socrates can afford to abstract from merely “ethnic” considerations.26
Back to the Nation: Poetry and the Myth of Er
The conclusion that the city of the Republic does not bear any ethnic stamp seems to have brought our discussion of ethnicity in the Republic to an end. But the dialogue does not end with an elaboration of the city. In Book X, Socrates once again discusses poetry, a subject more closely linked to Greek national character than the city that has dominated much of the dialogue.
Socrates’s purpose is ostensibly to justify his earlier policy of restricting
