Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic

First published Tue Apr 1, 2003; substantive revision Mon Aug 31, 2009

Plato's Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the grounds that a good city would be just and that defining justice as a virtue of a city would help to define justice as a virtue of a human being. Socrates is finally close to answering the question after he characterizes justice as a personal virtue at the end of Book Four, but he is interrupted and challenged to defend some of the more controversial features of the good city he has sketched. In Books Five through Seven, he addresses this challenge, arguing (in effect) that the just city and the just human being as he has sketched them are in fact good and are in principle possible. After this long digression, Socrates in Books Eight and Nine finally delivers three proofs that it is always better to be just than unjust. Then, because Socrates wants not only to show that it is always better to be just but also to convince Glaucon and Adeimantus of this point, and because Socrates' proofs are opposed by the teachings of poets, he bolsters his case in Book Ten by indicting the poets' claims to represent the truth and by offering a new myth that is consonant with his proofs. As this overview makes clear, the center of Plato's Republic is a contribution to ethics: a discussion of what the virtue justice is and why a person should be just. Yet because Socrates links his discussion of personal justice to an account of justice in the city and makes claims about how good and bad cities are arranged, the Republic sustains reflections on political questions, as well. Not that ethics and politics exhaust the concerns of the Republic. The account in Books Five through Seven of how a just city and a just person are in principle possible is an account of how knowledge can rule, which includes discussion of what knowledge and its objects are. Moreover, the indictment of the poets involves a wide-ranging discussion of art. This article, however, focuses on the ethics and politics of Plato's Republic. For more on what the Republic says about knowledge and its objects, see Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology, and for more about the discussion of the poets, see Plato: rhetoric and poetry. This article attempts to provide a constructive guide to the main issues of ethics and politics in the Republic. Two assumptions shape its organization. First, it assumes that an account of ethics and politics in the Republic requires a preliminary understanding of the question Socrates is facing and the strategy Socrates uses to answer the question. Second, it assumes that politics in the Republic is based upon the moral psychology in the Republic, and thus that the former is more profitably

discussed after the latter. With these assumptions in place, the following outline unfolds:

1. Introduction: The Question and the Strategy o 1.1 The Nature of the Question o 1.2 Rejected Strategies o 1.3 The Adopted Strategy 2. Ethics, Part One: What Justice Is o 2.1 Human Motivations o 2.2 Introducing Virtuous Motivations o 2.3 Perfectly Virtuous Motivations o 2.4 Imperfectly Virtuous Motivations 3. Ethics, Part Two: Why a Person should be Just o 3.1 Psychological Health o 3.2 Pleasure 4. Politics, Part One: The Ideal Constitution o 4.1 Utopianism o 4.2 Communism o 4.3 Feminism o 4.4 Totalitarianism 5. Politics, Part Two: Defective Constitutions 6. Conclusions about the Ethics and Politics of Plato's Republic Bibliography Other Internet Resources Related Entries

1. Introduction: The Question and the Strategy

1.1 The Nature of the Question

In Book One, the Republic's question first emerges in the figure of Cephalus. After Socrates asks his host what it is like being old (328d-e) and rich (330d)rather rude, we might thinkCephalus says that the best thing about wealth is that it can save us from being unjust and thus smooth the way for an agreeable afterlife (330d331b). This is enough to prompt more questions, for Socrates wants to know what justice is. Predictably, Cephalus and then Polemarchus fail to define justice in a way that survives Socratic examination, but they continue to assume that justice is a valuable part of a good human life. Thrasymachus erupts when he has had his fill of this conversation (336a-b), and he challenges the assumption that it is good to be just. On Thrasymachus' view (see especially 343c-344c), justice is conventionally established by the strong, in order that the weak will serve the interests of the

strong. The strong themselves, on this view, are better off disregarding justice and serving their own interests. Socrates sees in this immoralist challenge the explicit question of whether one should live a just or unjust life (344d-e), and he tries repeatedly to repel Thrasymachus' onslaught. Eventually, Thrasymachus withdraws sullenly, like Callicles in the Gorgias, but Socrates' victory fails to satisfy Glaucon and Adeimantus. The brothers pick up where Thrasymachus left off, providing reasons why most people think that justice is not intrinsically valuable but worth respecting only if one is not strong enough (or invisible enough) to get away with injustice. They want to be shown that most people are wrong, that justice is worth choosing for its own sake. More than that, Glaucon and Adeimantus want to be shown that justice is worth choosing regardless of the rewards or penalties bestowed on the just by other people and the gods, and they will accept this conclusion only if Socrates can convince them that it is always better to be just. So Socrates must persuade them that the just person who is terrifically unfortunate and scorned lives a better life than the unjust person who is so successful that he is unfairly rewarded as if he were perfectly just (see 360d-361d). The challenge that Glaucon and Adeimantus present has baffled modern readers who are accustomed to carving up ethics into deontologies that articulate a theory of what is right independent of what is good and consequentialisms that define what is right in terms of what promotes the good. The insistence that justice be praised itself by itself has suggested to some that Socrates will be offering a deontological account of justice. But the insistence that justice be shown to be beneficial to the just has suggested to others that Socrates will be justifying justice by reference to its consequences. In fact, both readings are distortions, predicated more on what modern moral philosophers think than on what Plato thinks. Socrates takes the basic challenge to concern how justice relates to the just person's objective success or happiness (Greek eudaimonia). In Book One, he argued that justice, as a virtue, makes the soul perform its function well and that a person who lives well is blessed and happy (352d-354a, quoting 354a1). At the beginning of Book Two, he retains his focus on the person who aims to be happy. He says, I think that justice belongs in the best class [of goods], that which should be loved both for its own sake and for the sake of its consequences by anyone who is going to be blessed (358a13). Given this perspective, Socrates has to show that smartly pursuing one's happiness favors being just (which requires always acting justly) over being unjust (which tolerates temptation to injustice and worse), apart from the consequences that attend to the appearance of being just or unjust. But he does not have to show that being just or acting justly brings abouthappiness. The function argument in Book One suggests

that acting justly is the same as being happy. If Socrates stands by this identity, he can simultaneously show that justice is valuable itself by itself and that the just are happier. But the function argument concludes that justice is both necessary and sufficient for happiness (354a), and this is a considerably stronger thesis than the claim that the just are always happier than the unjust. After the challenge Glaucon and Adeimantus present, Socrates might not be so bold. Even if he shows that justice is happiness, he might think that there are circumstances in which no one can be just and happy. This will nonetheless satisfy Glaucon and Adeimantus if the just are better off (that is, closer to happy) than the unjust in these circumstances.
1.2 Rejected Strategies

After the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus, Socrates takes off in a strange direction (from 367e). He suggests looking for justice as a virtue of cities before defining justice as a virtue of persons, on the unconvincing grounds that justice in a city is bigger and more apparent than justice in a person (368c-369b), and this leads Socrates to a rambling description of some features of a good city (369b-427c). This may seem puzzling. But Socrates' indirect approach is not unmotivated. The arguments of Book One and the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus rule out several more direct routes. First, Socrates might have tried to settle quickly on a widely accepted account of what justice is and moved immediately to considering whether that is always in one's interests. But Book One rules this strategy out by casting doubt on widely accepted accounts of justice. Socrates must say what justice is in order to answer the question put to him, and what he can say is constrained in important ways. Most obviously, he cannot define justice as happiness without begging the question. But he also must give an account of justice that his interlocutors recognize as justice: if his account of justice were to require us to torture red-headed children for amusement, he would fail to address the question that Glaucon and Adeimantus take themselves to be asking. Moreover, Socrates cannot try to define justice by enumerating the types of action that justice requires or forbids. We might have objected to this strategy for this reason: because action-types can be specified in remarkably various ways and at remarkably different levels of specificity, no list of just or unjust action-types could be comprehensive. But a specific argument in Book One suggests a different reason why Socrates does not employ this strategy. When Cephalus characterizes justice as keeping promises and returning what is owed, Socrates objects by citing a case in which returning what is owed would not be just (331c). This objection potentially has very wide force, as it seems that exceptions could always be found

for any action-type that does not include in its description a word like wrong or just. Wrongful killing may always be wrong, but is killing? Just recompense may always be right, but is recompense? So Book One makes it difficult for Socrates to take justice for granted. What is worse, the terms in which Socrates accepts the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus make it difficult for him to take happiness for granted. If Socrates were to proceed like a consequentialist, he might offer a full account of happiness and then deliver an account of justice that both meets with general approval and shows how justice brings about happiness. But Socrates does not proceed like that. He does not even do as much as Aristotle does in the Nicomachean Ethics; he does not suggest some general criteria for what happiness is. He proceeds as if happiness is unsettled. But if justice at least partly constitutes happiness and justice is unsettled, then Socrates is right to proceed as if happiness is unsettled. In sum, Socrates needs to construct an account of justice and an account of happiness at the same time, and he needs these accounts to entail without assuming the conclusion that the just person is always happier than the unjust.
1.3 The Adopted Strategy

The difficulty of this task helps to explain why Socrates takes the curious route through the discussion of civic justice and civic happiness. Socrates can assume that a just city is always more successful or happy than an unjust city. The assumption begs no questions, and Glaucon and Adeimantus readily grant it. If Socrates can then explain how a just city is always more successful and happy than an unjust city, by giving an account of civic justice and civic happiness, he will have a model to propose for the relation between between personal justice and flourishing. Socrates' strategy depends on an analogy between a city and a person. There must be some intelligible relation between what makes a city successful and what makes a person successful. But to answer the Republic's question, Socrates does not need any particular account of why the analogy holds, nor does he need the analogy to hold broadly (that is, for a wide range of characteristics). It works even if it only introduces an account of personal justice and happiness that we might not have otherwise entertained. Although this is all that the city-person analogy needs to do, Socrates seems at times to claim more for it, and one of the abiding puzzles about the Republic concerns the exact nature and grounds for the full analogy that Socrates claims. At times Socrates seems to say that the same account of justice must apply to both persons and cities because the same account of any predicate 'F' must apply

to all things that are F (e.g., 434d-435a). At other times Socrates seems to say that the same account of justice must apply in both cases because the F-ness of a whole is due to the F-ness of its parts (e.g., 435d-436a). Again, at times Socrates seems to say that these grounds are strong enough to permit a deductive inference: if a city's F-ness is such-and-such, then a person's F-ness must be such-and-such (e.g., 441c). At other times, Socrates would prefer to use the F-ness of the city as a heuristic for locating F-ness in persons (e.g., 368e-369a). Plato is surely right to think that there is some interesting and non-accidental relation between the structural features and values of society and the psychological features and values of persons, but there is much controversy about whether this relation really is strong enough to sustain all of the claims that Socrates makes for it in theRepublic. Still, the Republic primarily requires an answer to Glaucon and Adeimantus' question, and that answer does not depend logically on any strong claims for the analogy between cities and persons. Rather, it depends upon a persuasive account of justice as a personal virtue, and persuasive reasons why one is always happier being just than unjust. So we can turn to these issues before returning to Socrates' remarks about the successful city.

2. Ethics, Part One: What Justice Is

2.1 Human Motivations

Socrates seeks to define justice as one of the cardinal human virtues, and he understands the virtues as states of the soul. So his account of what justice is depends upon his account of the human soul. According to the Republic, every human soul has three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. (This is a claim about the embodied soul. In Book Ten, Socrates argues that the soul is immortal (608c-611a) and says that the disembodied soul might be simple (611a-612a), though he declines to insist on this (612a) and the Timaeus and Phaedrus apparently disagree on the question.) At first blush, the tripartition can suggest a division into beliefs, emotions, and desires. But Socrates explicitly ascribes beliefs, emotions, and desires to each part of the soul. In fact, it is not even clear that Plato would recognize psychological attitudes that are supposed to be representational without also being affective and conative, or conative and affective without also being representational. Consequently, belief and desire in translations or discussions of Plato (including this one) must be handled with care; they should not be understood along Humean lines as motivationally inert representations, on the one hand, and non-cognitive motivators, on the other.

The Republic offers two general reasons for the tripartition. First, Socrates argues that we cannot coherently explain certain cases of psychological conflict unless we suppose that there are at least two parts to the soul. The core of this argument is what we might call the principle of non-opposition: the same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same respect, in relation to the same thing, at the same time (436b89). This is a perfectly general metaphysical principle, comparable to Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction (Metaphysics G3 1005b19 20). Because of this principle, Socrates insists that one soul cannot be the subject of opposing attitudes unless one of three conditions is met. One soul canbe the subject of opposing attitudes if the attitudes oppose each other in succession, even in rapidly alternating succession (as Hobbes explains mental conflict). One soul can also be the subject of opposing attitudes if the attitudes relate to different things, as a desire to drink champagne and a desire to drink a martini might conflict. Last, one soul can be the subject of opposing attitudes if the attitudes oppose in different respects. At first glance, this third condition is unclear. The way Socrates handles putative counter-examples to the principle of non-opposition (at 436c-e) might suggest that when one thing experiences one opposite in one of its parts and another in another, it is not experiencing opposites in different respects. That would entail, apparently, that it is not one thing experiencing opposites at all, but merely a plurality. But Socrates later rewords the principle of non-opposition's same respect condition as a same part condition (439b), which explicitly allows one thing to experience one opposite in one of its parts and another in another. The most natural way of relating these two articulations of the principle is to suppose that experiencing one opposite in one part and another in another is just one way to experience opposites in different respects. But however we relate the two articulations to each other, Socrates clearly concludes that one soul can experience simultaneously opposing attitudes in relation to the same thing, but only if different parts of it are the direct subjects of the opposing attitudes. Socrates employs this general strategy four times. In Book Four, he twice considers conflicting attitudes about what to do. First, he imagines a desire to drink being opposed by a calculated consideration that it would be good not to drink (439a-d). (We might think, anachronistically, of someone about to undergo surgery.) This is supposed to establish a distinction between appetite and reason. Then he considers cases like that of Leontius, who became angry with himself for desiring to ogle corpses (439e-440b). These cases are supposed to establish a distinction between appetite and spirit. In Book Ten, Socrates appeals to the principle of non-opposition when considering the decent man who has recently lost a son and is conflicted about grieving (603e-604b) and when considering conflicting attitudes about how things appear to be (602c-603b). These show a broad division between reason and

an inferior part of the soul; it is compatible with a further distinction between two inferior parts, spirit and appetite. Socrates' arguments from psychological conflict are well-tailored to explain akrasia (weakness of will). In the Protagoras, Socrates denies that anyone willingly does other than what she believes to be best, but in the Republic, the door is opened for a person to act on an appetitive attitude that conflicts with a rational attitude for what is best. How far the door is open to akrasia awaits further discussion below. For now, there are other more pressing questions about the Republic's explanation of psychological conflict. First, what kinds of parts are reason, spirit, and appetite? Some scholars believe that they are merely conceptual parts, akin to subsets of a set. They would object to characterizing the parts as subjects of psychological attitudes. But the arguments from conflict treat reason, spirit, and appetite as distinct subjects of psychological states and events, and it seems best to take Socrates' descriptions at face value unless there is compelling reason not to. At face value, Socrates offers a more robust conception of parts, wherein each part is like an independent agent. Indeed, this notion of parts is robust enough to make one wonder why reason, spirit, and appetite are parts at all, as opposed to three independent subjects. But the Republic proceeds as though every embodied human being has just one soul that comprises three parts. No embodied soul is perfectly unified: even the virtuous person, who makes her soul into a unity as much as she can (443c-e), has three parts in her soul. (She must, as we shall see, in order to be just.) But every embodied soul enjoys an unearned unity: every human's reason, spirit, and appetite constitute a single soul that is a unified source of that human's life and is a unified locus of responsibility. (It is not as though a man is held responsible for what his reason does but not for what his appetite does.) There are questions about what exactly explains this unearned unity of the soul. There are also questions about whether the arguments from conflict establish exactly three parts of the soul. Some worry that the discussion of Leontius does not warrant the recognition of a third part of the soul, and some worry that the appetitive part contains such a multitude of attitudes that it must be subject to further conflicts and further partitioning (and see 443e). Answering these questions requires us to characterize more precisely the kind of opposition that forces partitioning, in accordance with the principle of non-opposition, and to examine more carefully the broader features being attributed to the three parts of the soul. Fortunately, the arguments from conflict do not work alone. Indeed, they cannot, as the principle of non-opposition merely establishes a constraint on successful psychological explanations. Appeals to this principle can show where some

division must exist, but they do not by themselves characterize the parts so divided. So, already in Book Four's arguments from conflict, Socrates invokes broader patterns of psychology and appeals to the parts to explain these patterns (cf. 435d436b). This appeal to reason, spirit, and appetite to explain broader patterns of human thought and action constitutes the Republic's second general strategy to support tripartition. It receives its fullest development in Books Eight and Nine, where Socrates uses his theory of the tripartite soul to explain a variety of psychological constitutions. In the most basic implementation of this strategy, Socrates distinguishes people ruled by reason, those ruled by spirit, and those ruled by appetite (580d-581e, esp. 581c): the first love wisdom and truth, the second love victory and honor, and the third profit and money. This simplistic division, it might be noted in passing, fixes the sides for an ongoing debate about whether it is best to be a philosopher, a politician, or an epicure (see, e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I 5 and X 68). But more important for our purposes here, this basic classification greatly illuminates the division of the soul. First, we learn about the organizing aims of each of the psychological parts. In Book Four, reason is characterized by its ability to track what is good for each part and the soul as a whole (441e, 442c). In Book Nine, reason is characterized by its desire for wisdom. These are not bifurcated aims. Socrates argues that no one is satisfied merely with what he or she takes to be good for him- or herself but wants what is in fact good for him- or herself (505d). So reason naturally pursues not just what it takes to be good for the whole soul but also the wisdom that ensures that it would get this right. Nor is wisdom's value merely instrumental to discovering what is good for one. If wisdom is a fundamental constituent of virtue and virtue is a fundamental constituent of what is good for a human being, then wisdom turns out to be a fundamental constituent of what is good for a human being. So it should not be surprising that the part of the soul that tracks and pursues what is good for the whole soul also loves wisdom. Spirit, by contrast, tracks social preeminence and honor. If good is the organizing predicate for rational attitudes, honorable or fine (Greek kalon) is the organizing predicate for spirited attitudes. Finally, appetite seeks material satisfaction for bodily urges, and because money better than anything else provides this, people ruled by appetite often come to love money above all. The basic division of the world into philosophers, honor-lovers, and money-lovers also illuminates what Socrates means by talking of being ruled by one part of the soul. If one part dominates in you, then aims of that part are your aims. If, for example, you are ruled by spirit, then your reason conceives of your good in terms of what is honorable. Reason has its own aim, to get what is in fact good for the

whole soul, but in a soul perfectly ruled by spirit, where there are no genuine psychological conflicts between different parts, reason's love for truth and wisdom must be limited to that which is also held to be honorable. Still, Plato's full psychological theory is much more complicated than the basic division of persons would suggest. First, there are different kinds of appetitive attitudes (558d-559c, 571a-572b): some are necessary for human beings; some are unnecessary but regulable (lawful), and some are unnecessary and entirely uncontrollable (lawless). So there are in fact five kinds of pure psychological constitutions: aristocratically constituted persons (those ruled by their rational attitudes), timocratically constituted persons (those ruled by their spirited attitudes), oligarchically constituted persons (ruled by necessary appetitive attitudes), democratically constituted persons (ruled by unnecessary appetitive attitudes), and tyrannically constituted persons (ruled by lawless appetitive attitudes). The second complication is that some people are not perfectly ruled by one part of the soul, but are subject to continuing conflicts between, say, attitudes in favor of doing what is honorable and appetitive attitudes in favor of pursuing a shameful tryst. Socrates does not concentrate on these people, nor does he say how common they are. But he does acknowledge their existence (544c-d, cf. 445c). Moreover, the occurrence of akrasia would seem to require their existence. For if I am perfectly ruled by my spirit, then I take my good to be what is honorable, and how could I be akratic? My spirit and my reason are in line, so there will be no overpowering of rational preferences about what is best by spirit. You might suppose that my appetite could overcome my sense of what is honorable, but in that case, it would seem that I am not, after all, perfectly ruled by my spirit. Things might seem different with people ruled by their appetite. Certainly, if I were perfectly ruled by appetite, then I would be susceptible to akrasia of the impetuous sort, acting on appetitive desires without reflectively endorsing them as good. But impetuous akrasia is quite distinct from the standard akrasia in which I endorse ing as best for me and at just that moment intentionally instead, and standard akrasia would seem to be impossible in any soul that is perfectly ruled by any one part of the soul. If you think that competing appetitive attitudes could give rise to a strict case of standard akrasia, you should recall how Socrates would have to explain these cases of psychological conflict in order to avoid multiplying his divisions in the soul. The general strategy of the Republic's psychologyto explain human thought and action by reference to subpersonal homunculiremains both appealing and problematic. Moreover, the dialogue is filled with pointed observations and fascinating speculations about human psychology. Some of them pull us up short, as, for example, the Freudian recognition of Oedipal desires that come out only in

dreams (571c-d). The full theory is complex, and there remain numerous questions about many of its details. Fortunately, these questions do not have to be settled here for us to entertain Socrates' response to Glaucon and Adeimantus' challenge. Indeed, although his response builds closely on the psychological theory, some broad features of the response could be accepted even by those who reject the tripartite psychology.
2.2 Introducing Virtuous Motivations

In Book Four, Socrates defines each of the cardinal virtues in terms of the complicated psychology he has just sketched. A person is wise just in case her rational attitudes are functioning well, so that her rational part has in it the knowledge of what is advantageous for each part [of the soul] and for the whole in common of the three parts (442c58). So the unwise person has a faulty conception of what is good for him. A person is courageous just in case her spirited attitudes do not change in the face of pains and pleasures but stay in agreement with what is rationally recognized as fearsome and not (442bc). So the coward will, in the face of prospective pains, fail to bear up to what he rationally believes is not genuinely fearsome, and the rash person will, in the face of prospective pleasures, rush headlong into what he rationally believes to be fearsome. A person is temperate or moderate just in case the different parts of her soul are in agreement. So the intemperate person has appetitive or spirited attitudes in competition with the rational attitudes, appetitive or spirited attitudes other than those the rational attitudes deem to be good. Finally, a person is just just in case all three parts of her soul are functioning as they should (441d12-e2; cf. 443c9-e2). Justice, then, brings the other virtues in its wake: anyone who is just is entirely virtuous. So the unjust person fails to be moderate, or fails to be wise, or fails to be courageous. Actually, the relation among the virtues seems tighter than that, for it seems that the unjust person necessarily fails to be wise, courageous, and temperate. You might try to deny this. You might say that a person could be courageouswith spirited attitudes that track perfectly what the rational attitudes say is fearsome and not, in the face of any pleasures and painsbut still be unjust insofar has her rational attitudes are inadequately developed, failing to know what really is fearsome. But Socrates seems to balk at this possibility by contrasting the civically courageous whose spirit preserves law-inculcated beliefs about what is fearsome and not and the genuinely courageous in whom, presumably, spirit preserves knowledge about what is fearsome and not (430a-c). So you might say instead that a person could be moderateutterly without appetitive attitudes at odds with what his rational attitudes say is good for himbut still be unjust insofar as his rational attitudes are inadequately developed and fail to know what really is good. But this picture of a meek, but moderate soul seems to sell short the requirements of moderation, which

are not merely that there be no insurrections in the soul but also that there be agreement that the rational attitudes should rule. This would seem to require that there actually be appetitive attitudes that are in agreement with the rational attitudes' conception of what is good, which would in turn require that the rational attitudes be sufficiently strong to have a developed conception of what is good. Moreover, it would seem to require that the rational attitudes which endorse ruling be ruling, which would in turn require that the rational attitudes are at least on the path toward determining what really is good for the person. If these considerations are correct, then the unjust are lacking in virtuetout court, whereas the just possess all of the virtues. After sketching these four virtues in Book Four, Socrates is ready to move from considering what justice is in a person to why a person should be just (444e). But this is premature. Socrates is moving to show that it is always better to have a just soul, but he was asked to show that it is always better to be the just person who does just actions. We might doubt that an answer concerning psychological justice is relevant to the question concerning practical justice. It is easy to misstate this objection. The problem is not that the question is about justice as it is ordinarily understood and Socrates is failing to address conventional justice. Neither the question nor the answer is bound to how justice is ordinarily understood, given what happened in Book One. Moreover, the problem is not that Socrates' answer is relevant only if the class of the psychologically just and the class of the practically just are coextensive. That would require Socrates to show that everyone who acts justly has a just soul, and Socrates quite reasonably shows no inclination for that thesis. He may have to establish some connection between doing just actions and becoming psychologically just if he is to give reasons to those who are not yet psychologically just to do just actions, but an account of habituation would be enough to do this (cf. 443e, 444c-d). The real problem raised by the objection is this: how can Socrates justify the claim that people with just souls are practically just? First, he must be able to show that the psychologically just refrain from injustice, and second, he must be able to show that the psychologically just do what is required by justice. The first point receives a gesture when Socrates is trying to secure the claim that harmonious functioning of the whole soul really deserves to be called justice (442e-443a), but he offers no real argument. Perhaps the best we can do on his behalf is to insist that the first point is not a thesis for argument but a bold empirical hypothesis. On this view, it is simply an empirical question whether all those who have the motivations to do unjust things happen to have souls that are out of balance, and an army of psychologists would be needed to answer the question.

That might seem bad enough, but the second point does not even receive a gesture. There is no denying the presence of this second requirement on the grounds that justice is a matter of refraining from harm (negative duties) and not of helping others (positive duties). Socrates does not criticize the Book One suggestion that justice requires helping friends (332a ff.); he and his interlocutors agree that justice requires respect for parents and care for the gods (443a); and they treat the principle that each should do his job (and thereby contribute to the city) as the image of justice (443c). So according to Plato's Republic justice includes both negative and positive duties. Before we can consider Socrates' answer to the question of the Republic, we must have reason to accept that those who have harmonious souls do what is required by justice. Otherwise, we cannot be sure that psychological harmony is justice. Unfortunately, Socrates does not give any explicit attention to this worry at the end of Book Four or in the argument of Books Eight and Nine. But there are other places to look for a solution to this worry. First, we might look to Books Five through Seven. Second, we might look to Books Two and Three.
2.3 Perfectly Virtuous Motivations

In Book Four Socrates says that the just person is wise and thus knows what is good for him, but he does not say anything about what knowledge or the good is. In Books Five through Seven he clearly addresses these issues and fills out his account of virtue. He shows, in sum, that one is virtuous if and only if one is a philosopher, for he adds to Book Four's insistence that virtue requires knowledge the new claim that only philosophers have knowledge (esp. 474b-480a). His account also opens the possibility that knowledge of the good provides the crucial link between psychological justice and just actions. The philosophers are initially distinguished from non-philosophers because they answer questions like What is beautiful? by identifying the non-sensible property (form) of beauty instead of some sensible property or particulars (474b-480a). Socrates does not name any philosophers who can knowledgeably answer questions like that. In fact, his account of how philosophers would be educated in the ideal city suggests that the ability to give knowledgeable answers requires an enormous amount of (largely mathematical) learning in advance of the questions themselves (521b-540a). How would this mathematical learning and knowledge of forms affect one's motivations? One effect can be found by interpreting the form of the good that the philosopher comes to grasp, since this should shape the philosopher's rational conception of what is good for her. The form of the good is a shadowy presence in the Republic, hiding behind the images of the Sun, Line, and Cave. But it is clear enough that

Socrates takes goodness to be unity. He explicitly emphasizes that a virtuous person makes himself a unity (443c-e) and insists that a city is made good by being made a unity (462a-b). The assumption that goodness is unity also explains why mathematics is so important to the ascent to the good (through mathematics an account of the one over the many is learned), why the good is superior to other forms (the good is the unity or coherence of them, and not another alongside them), why the other forms are good (by being part of the unified or coherent order), and why goodness secures the intelligibility of the other forms (they are fully known teleologically). (It also comports with the evidence concerning Plato's lecture on the good (e.g., Aristoxenus, Elementa Harmonica II 1; cf. Aristotle Eudemian Ethics 1218a20 and Metaphysics 988a816 and b1015.) So the philosophers, by grasping the form of the good, will recognize goodness in themselves as the unity in their souls. They will see that the harmony or coherence of their psychological attitudes makes them good, that each of their attitudes is good insofar as it is part of a coherent set, and that their actions are good insofar as they sustain the unity in their souls (cf. 443e). But there are other ways in which mathematical learning and knowledge of forms might affect one's motivations. Socrates suggests one way when he says that a philosopher will aspire to imitate the harmony among the forms (500b-d). Some scholars have understood Socrates to be saying that philosophers will desire to reproduce this order by cultivating more order and virtue in the world, as Diotima suggests in the Symposium. On this reading, knowledge of the forms motivates just actions that help other people, which helps to solve the standing worry about the relation between psychological justice and practical justice. Unfortunately, it is far from obvious that this is what Socrates means. He does not actually say in the Republic that knowledge of the forms freely motivates beneficence. In fact, he says eight times that the philosophers in the ideal city will have to be compelled to rule and do their part in sustaining the perfectly just city (473d4, 500d4, 519e4, 520a8, 520e2, 521b7, 539e3, 540b5). It is possible to understand this compulsion as the constraint of justice: the philosophers rule because justice demands that they rule. But Socrates himself suggests a different way of characterizing the compulsion. He suggests that compulsion is a law that requires those who are educated to be philosophers to rule. Moreover, this characterization better fits Socrates' insistence that the philosophers are the best rulers because they prefer not to rule even while they are ruling (520e-521b, with 519c and 540b). For on this account, the philosophers' justice alone does not motivate them to rule; rather, their justice motivates them to obey the law, which justly compels them to rule.

There is another reason to worry about explaining just actions by the motivating power of knowledge. If the philosophers are motivated to do what is just by their knowledge of the forms, then there would seem to be an enormous gap between philosophers and non-philosophers. In addition to the epistemic gap the philosophers have knowledge and the non-philosophers do notwe have a motivational gap: the philosophers' knowledge gives them motivations to do what is required by justice, and the non-philosophers are not similarly motivated. This gap suggests some rather unpalatable conclusions about the character of nonphilosophers' lives even in the ideal city, and it also sits poorly with Socrates' evident desire to take the philosophers' justice as a paradigm that can be usefully approximated by non-philosophers (472c-d).
2.4 Imperfectly Virtuous Motivations

Socrates' long discussion in Books Two and Three of how to educate the guardians for the ideal city offers a different approach. This education is most often noted for its carefully censored reading list; the young guardians-to-be will not be exposed to inappropriate images of gods and human beings. Less often noted is how optimistic Socrates is about the results of a sufficiently careful education. A welltrained guardian will praise fine things, be pleased by them, receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine and good, and each will rightly object to what is shameful, hating it while he's still young and unable to grasp the reason (401e4402a2; cf. 441e). Note that Socrates has the young guardians not only responding to good things as honorable (with spirited attitudes), but also becoming fine and good. Moreover, Socrates is confident that the spirited guardians are stably good: when he is describing the possibility of civic courage in Book Four, he suggests that proper education can stain the spirited part of the soul with the right dispositions so deeply that they will be preserved through everything (429b8, 429c8, 430b23). This optimism suggests that the motivations to do what is right are acquired early in moral education, built into a soul that might become, eventually, perfectly just. And this in turn suggests one reason why Socrates might have skipped the question of why the psychologically just can be relied upon to do what is right. Socrates might assume that anyone who is psychologically just must have been raised well, and that anyone who has been raised well will do what is right. So understood, early childhood education, and not knowledge of the forms, links psychological justice and just action. Of course, there are questions about how far Socrates could extend this optimism about imperfect virtue among non-philosophers. Perhaps honor-loving members of the auxiliary class have psychological harmony secured by their consistent attachment to what they have learned is honorable, but what about the members of

the producing class? Can their attachment to the satisfaction of bodily desires be educated in such a way that they enjoy, in optimal social circumstances, a wellordered soul? Do they even receive a primary education in the ideal city? These questions will be considered more fully below. Open questions aside, it should be clear that there are two general ways of linking psychological justice to just action: one that depends upon the motivational power of knowledge in particular and the other that depends upon the early training of a wide range of attitudes in the young. If one of these ways works, then Socrates is entitled to argue that it is always better to be just than unjust by showing why it is always better to have a harmonious soul.

3. Ethics, Part Two: Why a Person should be Just

3.1 Psychological Health

It is possible to find in the Republic as many as five separate arguments for the claim that it is better to be just than unjust, without regard to how other people and gods perceive us. The first appeals to an analogy between psychological health and physical health in Book Four (445a-b). The second, third, and fourth are what Socrates calls his three proofs in Books Eight and Nine (543c-580c, esp. 576b580c; 580c-583a; 583b-588a). And the fifth is the image of the human soul consisting of a little human being (reason), a lion (spirit), and a many-headed beast (appetite) (588b ff.). Yet the first of these is interrupted and said in Book Eight to be continuous with the first proof of Books Eight and Nine (543c), and the last of them seems to be offered as a closing exhortation. This whittling leaves us with the three arguments that Socrates labels his proofs (580c9, cf. 583b), the first discussing psychological health and disease at length and the second and third concerning pleasure. Already in Book Four, Glaucon is ready to declare that unjust souls are ruined and in turmoil. But Socrates presses for a fuller reckoning. When he finally resumes in Book Eight where he had left off in Book Four, Socrates offers a long account of four defective psychological types. The list is not exhaustive (544cd, cf. 445c), but it captures the four imperfect kinds of pure psychological constitutions: pure rule by spirited attitudes, pure rule by necessary appetitive attitudes, pure rule by unnecessary but regulable appetitive attitudes, and pure rule by lawless appetitive attitudes. At the end of this long discussion, Socrates will again ask which sort of person lives the best life: the aristocratic soul of Books Six and Seven, or one of the other souls of Books Eight and Nine? We might expect Socrates and Glaucon to argue carefully by elimination, showing the just life to be better than every sort of unjust life. But they do not. Instead, they

quickly contrast the tyrannical soul with the aristocratic soul, the most unjust with the most just. This might seem to pick up on Glaucon's original demand (in Book Two) to see how the perfectly justwho is most unfortunate but still justis better than the perfectly unjustwho is unjust but still esteemed. But it does not even do that, since Socrates is very far from portraying the best soul in the least favorable circumstances and the worst soul in the most favorable circumstances. Nevertheless, Socrates' limited comparison in Book Nine might provide the resources to explain why it is better to be the unluckiest philosopher than the luckiest tyrant and why it is better to be just than to be unjust in any way whatsoever, for it might provide general lessons that apply to these other comparisons. Socrates and Glaucon characterize the person ruled by his lawless attitudes as enslaved, as least able to do what it wants, as full of disorder and regret, as poor and unsatisfiable, and as fearful (577c-578a). These characterizations fit in a logical order. The tyrant is enslaved because he is ruled by an utterly unlimited appetite, which prompts in him appetitive desire whenever any chance object of appetite presents itself to his consideration. Given this condition, he experiences appetitive desires that he cannot satisfy, either because they are too difficult for him to satisfy or because satisfying them would prevent satisfying other of his desires. His experience of unsatisfied desires must make him wish that he could satisfy them and feel poor and unsatisfiable because he cannot. Worse, because his unsatisfied appetitive desires continue to press for satisfaction over time, they make him aware of his past inability to to do what he wants, which prompts regret, and of his likely future inability to do what he wants, which makes him fearful. The result is a miserable existence, and the misery is rooted in unlimited attitudes that demand more satisfaction than a person can achieve. In a nutshell, the tyrant lacks the capacity to do what he wants to do. The philosopher, by contrast, is most able to do what she wants to do, for she wants to do what is best, and as long as one has agency, there would seem to be a doable best. (Should circumstances make a certain apparent best undoable, then it would no longer appear to be best.) But this is not to say that the philosopher is guaranteed to be able to do what she wants. First, Socrates is quite clear that some appetitive attitudes are necessary, and one can well imagine circumstances of extreme deprivation in which the necessary appetitive attitudes (for food or drink, say) are unsatisfiable. Second, the capacity to do what is best might require engaging in certain kinds of activities in order to maintain itself. So even if the philosopher can satisfy her necessary appetitive attitudes, she might be prevented by unfortunate circumstances from the sorts of regular thought and action that are required to hold onto the capacity to do what is best. Thus, even if a philosophical soul is most able

to do what it wants, and the closest thing to a sure bet for this capacity, it does not retain this ability in every circumstance. This comparison between the tyrannical soul and the philosophical soul does all the work that Socrates needs if the capacity to do what one wants correlates closely with human success or happiness and if the lessons about the tyrant's incapacity generalize to the other defective psychological constitutions. Socrates does not need happiness to be the capacity to do what one wants, or the absence of regret, frustration, and fear. He could continue to think, as he thought in Book One, that happiness is virtuous activity (354a). But if his argument here works, happiness, whatever it is, must require the capacity to do what one wants and be inconsistent with regret, frustration, and fear. How does the argument apply to unjust people who are not psychologically tyrannical? Anyone who is not a philosopher either has a divided soul or is ruled by spirit or appetite. A divided soul plainly undercuts the ability to do what one wants. Can one be seek honor or money above all and do what one wants? Although the ability to do what is honorable or make money is not as flexible as the ability to do what is best, it is surely possible, in favorable circumstances, for someone to be consistently able to do what is honorable or money-making. This will not work if the agent is conflicted about what is honorable or makes money. So he needs to be carefully educated, and he needs limited options. But if he does enjoy adequate education and an orderly social environment, there is no reason to suppose that he could not escape being racked by regret, frustration, or fear. This explains how the members of the lower classes in Socrates' ideal city can have a kind of capacity to do what they want, even though it is slavishly dependent upon the rulers' work (cf. 590c-d). The characterization of appropriately ruled non-philosophers as slavish might suggest a special concern for the heteronomous character of their capacity to do what they want and a special valorization of the philosophers' autonomous capacity. But we should be hesitant about applying these frequently confused and possibly anachronistic concepts to the Republic. Plato would probably prefer to think in terms of self-sufficiency (369b), and for the purposes of Socrates' argument here, it is enough to contrast the way a producer's capacity is deeply dependent upon social surroundings and the way a philosopher's capacity is relatively free from this dependence. This contrast must not be undersold, for it is plausible to think that the selfsufficiency of the philosopher makes him better off. Appropriately ruled nonphilosophers can enjoy the capacity to do what they want only so long as their circumstances are appropriately ruled, and this makes their success far less stable

than what the philosophers enjoy. Things in the world tend to change, and the philosopher is in a much better position to flourish through these changes. Those of us living in imperfect cities, looking to the Republic for a model of how to live (cf. 592b), need to emulate the philosopher in order to pursue stable, reliable happiness. Nevertheless, so far as this argument shows, the happiness of appropriately ruled non-philosophers is just as real as the happiness of philosophers. Judged exclusively by the capacity to do what one wants and the presence or absence of regret, frustration, and fear, philosophers are not happier than very fortunate nonphilosophers. (The non-philosophers have to be so fortunate that they do not even recognize any risk to their good fortune. Otherwise, they would fear a change in their luck.) The philosopher's success is more secure than the non-philosopher's, but if it is also better as success than the non-philosopher's, Socrates' first argument does not show that it is. Socrates needs further argument in any case if he wants to convince those of us in imperfect circumstances (like Glaucon and Adeimantus) to pursue the philosophical life of perfect justice. The first argument tries to show that anyone who wants to satisfy her desires perfectly should cultivate certain kinds of desires rather than others. We can reject this argument in either of two ways, by taking issue with his analysis of which desires are regularly satisfiable and which are not, or by explaining why a person should not want to satisfy her desires perfectly. The first response calls for a quasi-empirical investigation of a difficult sort, but the second seems easy. We can just argue that a good human life must be subject to regret and loss. Of course, it is not enough to say that the human condition is in fact marked by regret and loss. There is no inconsistency in maintaining that one should aim at a secure life in order to live the best possible human life while also realizing that the best possible human life will be marked by insecurity. In fact, one might even think that the proper experience of fragility requires attachment to security as one's end. So to reject Socrates' argument, we must show that it is wrong to aim at a life that is free of regret and loss: we must show that the pursuit of security leads one to reject certain desires that one should not reject. In this way, we move beyond a discussion of which desires are satisfiable, and we tackle the question about the value of what is desired and the value of the desiring itself. To address this possible objection, Socrates needs to give us a different argument.
3.2 Pleasure

This explains why Socrates does not stop after offering his first proof. Many readers are puzzled about why he offers two more. After all, the geometer does not need to offer multiple proofs of his theorem. What might seem worse, the additional proofs concern pleasure, and thereby introduceseemingly at the eleventh houra heap of new considerations for the ethics of the Republic. But as

the considerations at the end of the previous section show, these pleasure proofs are crucial. Plato merely dramatizes these considerations. Socrates has offered not merely to demonstrate that it is always better to be just than unjust but to persuade Glaucon and Adeimantus (but especially Glaucon: see, e.g., 327a, 357a-b, 368c) of this claim. Insofar as Glaucon shows sympathy for spirited attitudes (372d with the discussion in section 4.1 below, and cf. 548d), his attachment to these attitudes could survive the realization that they are far from perfectly satisfiable. He may say, I can see the point of perfectly satisfiable attitudes, but those attitudes and the objects of those attitudes are not as good as my less-than-perfectly satisfiable attitudes. Glaucon needs to be shown that the rewards of carrying insecure attitudes do not make up for the insecurity. The additional proofs serve a second purpose, as well. At the end of Book Five, Socrates says that faculties (at least psychological faculties) are distinguished by their results (their rate of success) and by their objects (what they concern) (477cd). So far, he has discussed only the success-rates of various kinds of psychological attitudes. He needs to discuss the objects of various kinds of psychological attitudes in order to complete his account. If we did not have the discussion of the second proof, in particular, we would have an incomplete picture of the Republic's moral psychology. The two arguments that Socrates proceeds to make are frustratingly difficult. They are very quick, and though they concern pleasures, Socrates never says exactly what pleasure is. (At one point (585d11), the now-standard translation of the Republic by Grube and Reeve suggests that being filled with what is appropriate to our nature is pleasure, but it is better to read less into the Greek by rendering the clause being filled with what is appropriate to our nature is pleasant.) The first argument suggests that pleasures might be activities of a certain kind, but the remarkably abstract second argument does not provide any special support to that suggestion. Even if a convincing account of how Plato wants us to conceive of pleasure in the Republic is wanting, however, we can get a grasp on the form of the two pleasure proofs. The first pleasure proof is a kind of appeal to authority, in four easy steps. First, Socrates suggests that just as each part of the soul has its own characteristic desires and pleasures, so persons have characteristic desires and pleasures depending upon which part of their soul rules them. The characteristic pleasure of philosophers is learning. The characteristic pleasure of honor-lovers is being honored. The characteristic pleasure of money-lovers is making money. Next, Socrates suggests that each of these three different kinds of person would say that her own her own pleasure is best. So, third, to decide which pleasure really is best, we need to

determine which sort of person's judgment is best, and Socrates suggests that whoever has the most reason, experience, and argument is the best judge. Finally, Socrates argues that the philosopher is better than the honor-lover and the moneylover in reason, experience, and argument. It is sometimes thought that the philosopher cannot be better off in experience, for the philosopher has never lived as an adult who is fully committed to the pleasures of the money-lover. But this point does not disable Socrates' argument. The philosopher does not have exactly the experience that the money-lover has, but the philosopher has far more experience of the money-lover's pleasures than the moneylover has of the philosopher's pleasures. The comparative judgment is enough to secure Socrates' conclusion: because the philosopher is abetter judge than the others, the philosopher's judgment has a better claim on the truth. But this first proof does not explain why the distinction in pleasures is made; the appeal to the philosopher's authority as a judge gives no account of the philosopher's reasons for her judgment. Moreover, the first pleasure proof does not say that the philosopher's pleasures are vastly superior to those of the money-lover and the honor-lover. So Glauconor anyone else tempted to avoid the mathematical studies of Book Sevenmight think that the superiority of the philosopher's psychological justice is slight, and given the disrepute heaped on the philosophers (487a ff.), Glaucon or anyone else might decide that the less-thanperfectly just life is better overall. Socrates needs to show that the philosopher's activities are vastly better than the non-philosopher's activities in order to answer the challenge originally put forth in Book Two by Glaucon and Adeimantus. So it is for very good reason that Socrates proceeds to offer a second pleasure proof that he promises to be the greatest and most decisive overthrow for the unjust (583b67). Socrates' final argument moves in three broad steps. The first establishes that pleasure and pain are not exhaustive contradictories but opposites, separated by a calm middle that is neither pain nor pleasure. This may sometimes seem false. The removal of pain can seem to be pleasant, and the removal of a pleasure can seem to be painful. But Socrates argues that these appearances are deceptive. He distinguishes between pleasures that fill a lack and thereby replace a pain (these are not genuine pleasures) and those that do not fill a lack and thereby replace a pain (these are genuine pleasures). The second step in the argument is to establish that most bodily pleasuresand the most intense of thesefill a painful lack and are not genuine pleasures. Finally, Socrates argues that the philosopher's pleasures do not fill a painful lack and are genuine pleasures. Contra the epicure's assumption, the philosopher's pleasures are more substantial than pleasures of the flesh.

The pleasure proofs tempt some readers to suppose that Socrates must have a hedonistic conception of happiness. After all, he claims to have shown that the just person is happier than the unjust (580a-c), and he says that his pleasure arguments are proofs of the same claim (580c-d, 583b). But these arguments can work just as the first proof works: Socrates can suppose that happiness, whatever it is, is marked by pleasure (just as it is marked by the absence of regret, frustration, and fear). This is not to say that one should take pleasure to be one's goal any more than it is to say that one should pursue fearlessness as one's goal. Pleasure is a misleading guide (see 581c-d and 603c), and there are many false, self-undermining routes to pleasure (and fearlessness). Socrates' indirect approach concerning happiness (cf. section 1.2 above) makes sense if he thinks that justice (being just, acting justly) is happiness (being happy, living well) (354a). Anyone inclined to doubt that one should always be just would be inclined to doubt that justice is happiness. So Socrates has to appeal to characteristics of happiness that do not, in his view, capture what happiness is, in the hope that the skeptics might agree that happiness correlates with the absence of regret, frustration, and fear and the presence of pleasure. That would be enough for the proofs. Even at the end of his three proofs, Socrates knows that he cannot yet have fully persuaded Glaucon and Adeimantus that it is always better to be just than unjust. Their beliefs and desires have been stained too deeply by a world filled with mistakes, especially by the misleading tales of the poets. To turn Glaucon and Adeimantus more fully toward virtue, Socrates needs to undercut their respect for the poets, and he needs to begin to stain their souls anew. But Socrates' theoretical arguments on behalf of justice are finished. The work that remains to be done especially the sketch of a soul at the end of Book Nine and the myth of an afterlife in Book Tenshould deepen without transforming our appreciation for the psychological ethics of the Republic.

4. Politics, Part One: The Ideal Constitution

4.1 Utopianism

Just as Socrates develops an account of a virtuous, successful human being and contrasts it with several defective characters, he also develops an account of a virtuous, successful city and contrasts it with several defective constitutions. So the Republic contributes to political philosophy in two main ways. I will take them up in turn, starting with four disputed features of Socrates' good city: its utopianism, communism, feminism, and totalitarianism.

To sketch a good city, Socrates does not take a currently or previously extant city as his model and offer adjustments (see 422e, and cf. Statesman 293e). He insists on starting from scratch, reasoning from the causes that would bring a city into being (369a-b). This makes his picture of a good city an ideal, a utopia. The Republic's utopianism has attracted many imitators, but also many critics. The critics typically claim that Plato's political ideal rests on an unrealistic picture of human beings. The ideal city is conceivable, but humans are psychologically unable to create and sustain such a city. According to this charge, then, Plato's ideal constitution is a nowhere-utopia (ou-topia = no place). But if 'ought' implies 'can', then a constitution that cannot exist is not one that ought to exist. So, the objection goes, Plato's ideal constitution fails to be an ideal-utopia (eu-topia = good place). To consider the objection, we first need to distinguish two apparently ideal cities that Socrates describes. The first, simple city is sketched very briefly, and is rejected by Glaucon as a city of pigs though Socrates calls it the healthy city (369b-372e). It contains no provision for war, and no distinction among classes. The second, initially called by Socrates a fevered city and a city of luxuries (372e) but later purified of its luxuries (see especially 399e) and characterized as Kallipolis (527c2), includes three classes, two that guard the city and its constitution (ruling and auxiliary guardians) and one that produces the goods that the city needs. (At 543c-d, Glaucon suggests that one might find a third city, as well, by distinguishing between the three-class city whose rulers are not explicitly philosophers and the three-class city whose rulers are, but a three-class city whose rulers are not philosophers cannot be an ideal city, according to Socrates (473b-e). It is better to see Books Five through Seven as clarifications of the same three-class city first developed without full explicitness in Books Two through Four (cf. 497cd, 499c-d).) The charge of utopianism would apply well to the first city Socrates describes. This city resembles a basic economic model since Socrates uses it in theorizing how a set of people could efficiently satisfy their necessary appetitive desires. At the center of his model is a principle of specialization: each person should perform just the task to which he is best suited. But Socrates' model makes no provision for reason's rule, and he later insists that no one can have orderly appetitive attitudes unless they are ruled by reason (esp. 590c-d; cf. 586a-b). So the first city cannot exist, by the lights of the Republic's account of human nature. It is a nowhere-utopia, and thus not an ideal-utopia. This is not to say that the first city is a mistake. Socrates introduces the first city not as a free-standing ideal but as the beginning of his account of the ideal, and his way of starting highlights two features that make the eventual ideal an ideal. One is the principle of specialization. With it Socrates sketches how people might

harmoniously satisfy their appetitive attitudes. If reason could secure a society of such people, then they would be happy, and reason does secure a society of such people in the third class of the ideal city. (So the model turns out to be a picture of the producers in Kallipolis.) But the principle can also explain how a single person could flourish, for a version of it explains the optimal satisfaction of all psychological attitudes (442d-444a with 432b-434c). Indeed, this principle is central to the first proof for the superiority of the just life. The second feature crucial to Socrates' ideal enters when Glaucon insists that the first city is fit for pigs and not human beings. He objects that it lacks couches, tables, relishes, and the other things required for a symposium, which is the cornerstone of civilized human life as he understands it. Glaucon is not calling for satisfaction of unnecessary appetitive attitudes, for the relishes he insists on are later recognized to be among the objects of necessary appetitive attitudes (559b). Rather, he is expressing spirited indignation, motivated by a sense of what is honorable and fitting for a human being. He insists that there is more to a good human life than the satisfaction of appetitive attitudes. This begins to turn Glaucon away from appetitive considerations against being just. It also completes the first city's introduction of the two kinds of arguments for the superiority of the just life, by appealing, as the pleasure proofs do, to the intrinsic value of different kinds of psychological satisfaction. Does the utopianism objection apply to the second city, with its philosopher rulers, auxiliary guardians, and producers? Some readers would have Plato welcome the charge. As they understand the Republic, Socrates sketches the second city not as an ideal for us to strive for but as a warning against political utopianism or as an unimportant analogue to the good person. There are a couple of passages to support this approach. At 472b-473b, Socrates says that the point of his ideal is to allow us to judge actual cities and persons based on how well they approximate it. And at 592a-b, he says that the ideal city can serve as a model (paradeigma) whether or not it were ever to come into existence. But these passages have to be squared with the many in which Socrates insists that the ideal city could in fact come into existence (just a few: 450c-d, 456bc, 473c, 499b-d, 502a-c, 540d-e). His considered view is that although the ideal city is meaningful to us even if it does not exist, it could exist. Of course, realizing the ideal city is highly unlikely. The widespread disrepute of philosophy and the corruptibility of the philosophical nature conspire to make it extremely difficult for philosophers to gain power and for rulers to become philosophers (487a-502c). Nevertheless, according to what Socrates explicitly says, the ideal city is supposed to be realizable. The Laws imagines an impossible ideal, in which all the citizens are fully virtuous and share everything (739a-740 with Plato: on utopia), but the Republic is more practical than that. So if Plato does not intend for us to think of the Republic's ideal city as a serious goal

worth striving for, something other than Socrates' explicit professions must reveal this to us. I consider this possibility in section 6 below. But if Socrates would not welcome the utopianism charge, does he successfully avoid it? This is not clear. It is difficult to show that the ideal city is inconsistent with human nature as the Republic understands it. Socrates supposes that almost all of its citizensnot quite all (415d-e)have to reach their fullest psychological potential, but it is not clear that anyone has to do more than this. Nevertheless, we might make the utopianism charge stick by showing that the Republic is wrong about human nature. This version of the criticism is sometimes advanced in very sweeping terms: Plato's psychology is too optimistic about human beings because it underplays self-interest, say. In these general terms, the criticism is false. Socrates builds his theory on acute awareness of how dangerous and selfish appetitive attitudes are, and indeed of how self-centered the pursuit of wisdom is, as well. Indeed, it might be easier to argue in sweeping terms that the Republic's ideal city is too pessimistic about what most people are capable of, since it consigns most human beings to lives as slaves (433c-d, cf. 469b-471c) or as citizens who are slavishly dependent upon others' ruling (590c-d). Still, more specific criticisms of Plato's psychology may well be tenable, and these might show that the Republic is too optimistic about the possibility of its ideal city. Such criticism should be distinguished from a weaker complaint about the Republic's utopianism. One might concede to the Republic its psychology, concede the possibility of the ideal city, and nevertheless insist that the ideal city is so unlikely to come about as to be merely fanciful. A hard-nosed political scientist might have this sort of response. But this sounds like nothing more than opposition to political theory proposing ideals that are difficult to achieve, and it is not clear what supports this opposition. It is not as though political theorizing must propose ideas ready for implementation in order to propose ideas relevant to implementation. The Republic's ideal can affect us very generally: we can consider the unity and harmony fundamental to it, and consider whether our own cities and souls should be allowed to fall short in unity and harmony where they do. But it can also work in more specific terms: we should be able to recognize and promote the strategies and policies crucial to the Republic's ideal, including careful moral education societally and habitual regulation of appetitive desire personally and the equal opportunity for work societally and the development of multiple kinds of psychological attitudes personally. So the Republic's ideal city might be objectionably nowhere-utopian, but the point is far from obvious. Of course, even if it is not nowhere-utopian, it might fail to be attractively ideal-utopian. We need to turn to other features of the second city that have led readers to praise and blame it.

4.2 Communism

One of the most striking features of the ideal city is its abolition of private families and sharp limitation on private property in the two guardian classes. Starting with Aristotle, this communism in the Republic's ideal city has been the target of confusion and criticism. On the one hand, Aristotle (at Politics 1264a1122) and others have expressed uncertainty about the extent of communism in the ideal city. On the other, they have argued against the provision of any communism in an ideal political community. There should be no confusion about private property. When Socrates describes the living situation of the guardian classes in the ideal city (415d-417b), he is clear that private property will be sharply limited, and when he discusses the kinds of regulations the rulers need to have in place for the whole city (421c ff.), he is clear that the producers will have enough private property to make the regulation of wealth and poverty a concern. But confusion about the scope of communal living arrangements is possible, due to the casual way in which Socrates introduces this controversial proposal. The abolition of private families enters as an afterthought. Socrates says that there is no need to list everything that the rulers will do, for if they are well educated, they will see what is necessary, including the fact that marriage, the having of wives, and the procreation of children must be governed as far as possible by the old proverb: friends possess everything in common (423e6424a2). It is not immediately clear whether this governance should extend over the whole city or just the guardian classes. Still, when he is pressed to defend the communal arrangements (449c ff.), Socrates focuses on the guardian classes (see, e.g., 461e and 464b), and it seems most reasonable to suppose that the communism about families extends just as far as the communism about property does, on the grounds that only the best people can live as friends with such things in common (cf.Laws 739c-740b). To what extent the communism of the ideal city is problematic is a more complicated question. The critics either claim that communism is undesirable or impossible. The charge of impossibility essentially extends one of Plato's insights: while Plato believes that most people are incapable of living without private property and private families, the critics argue that all people are incapable of living without private property. This criticism fails if there is clear evidence of people who live communally. But the critic can fall back on the charge of undesirability. Here the critic needs to identify what is lost by giving up on private property and private families, and the critic needs to show that this is more valuable than any unity and extended sense of family the communal arrangements offer. It is not clear how this debate should go. Plato's position on this question is a stubbornly persistent ideal, despite the equally stubborn persistence of criticism.

4.3 Feminism

Socrates ties the abolition of private families among the guardian classes to another radical proposal, that in the ideal city the education for and job of ruling should be open to girls and women. The exact relation between the proposals is contestable. Is Socrates proposing the abolition of families in order to free up women to do the work of ruling? Or is Socrates putting the women to work since they will not have the job of family-caregiver anymore? But perhaps neither is prior to the other. Each of the proposals can be supported independently, and their dovetailing effects can be claimed as a happy convergence. Many readers have seen in Plato's Republic a rare exception in western philosophy's long history of sexist denigration of women, and some have even decided that Plato's willingness to open up the best education and the highest jobs to women shows a kind of feminism. Other readers disagree. They point to Plato's indifference to the needs of actual women in his own city, to Socrates' frequent, disparaging remarks about women and womanish attitudes, and to the illiberal reasons Socrates offers for educating and empowering women. The broad claim that Plato or the Republic is feminist cannot be sustained, and the label feminist is an especially contested one, but still, there are two features of the Republic's ideal city that can be reasonably called feminist. First, Socrates suggests that the distinction between male and female is as relevant as the distinction between having long hair and having short hair for the purposes of deciding who should be active guardians: men and women, just like the long-haired and the short-haired, are by nature the same for the assignment of education and jobs (454b-456b). This suggestion seems to express the plausibly feminist point that one's sex is generally irrelevant to one's qualifications for education or employment. The second plausibly feminist commitment in the Republic involves the abolition of private families. The feminist import of this may be obscured by the way in which Socrates and his interlocutors talk of women and children shared in common. In fact, Socrates' companions might well have been forgiven if this way of talking had called to mind pictures of orgiastic free love in the guardians' camp, for that, after all, is how Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae plays the proposal of sharing women and children for laughs. But as Socrates clarifies what he means, both free love and male possessiveness turn out to be beside the point. (The talk of sharing women and children reflects the male perspective of the men having the conversation but not the content of the proposal.) Then Socrates' proposal can seem especially striking. Plato is clearly aware that an account of how the polis should be arranged must give special attention to how families are arranged. Relatedly, he is clearly aware that an account of the ideal citizens must explain how sexual desire, a

paradigmatic appetitive attitude, should fit into the good human life. Only very recently, with feminist interventions, have sexual desire and its consequences come to seem crucial to political theory, and we might think that Plato's awareness of these as topics of political philosophy shows at least proto-feminist concern. All the more might this awareness seem feminist when we relate it back to the first plausibly feminist commitment, for Plato wants the economy of desire and reproduction to be organized in such a way that women are free for education and employment alongside men, in the guardian classes, at any rate. Three of the objections to calling the Republic feminist say more about the contest over the label feminist than they do about Plato. First, some have said that feminism requires a concern for women's rights and have then argued that Plato is not a feminist on the grounds that he shows no interests in women's rights. This particular argument is not quite to the point, for it says nothing about Plato's view of women per se. He is not interested in women's rights just to the extent that he is not interested in anyone's rights. Second, some have said that feminism requires attention to what actual women want. Since Plato shows no interest in what actual women want, he would seem on this view of feminism to be anti-feminist. But the limitations of this criticism are apparent as soon as we realize that Plato shows no interest in what actual men want. Plato focuses instead on what women (and men) should want, what they would want if they were in the best possible psychological condition. Actual women (and actual men), as we might put Plato's point, are subject to false consciousness. Third, some have insisted that feminism requires attention to and concern for the particular interests and needs of women as distinct from the particular interests and needs of men. Since Plato does not admit of particular women's interests and needs, he would not, in this view, be a feminist (except insofar as he accidentally promoted any supposed particular interests by, say, proposing the abolition of the private family). Again, however, this objection turns on what we understand by feminism more than on what Socrates is saying in the Republic. There should be no doubt that there are conceptions of feminism according to which the Republic is anti-feminist. But this does not undercut the point that the Republic advances a couple of plausibly feminist concerns. Better ground for doubting Plato's apparent feminist commitments lies in the reasons that Socrates gives for them: Socrates consistently emphasizes concern for the welfare of the whole city, but not for women themselves (esp. 456c ff.). But Socrates' emphasis in Book Five on the happiness of the city as a whole rather than the happiness of the rulers (and cf. 465e-466c) might have more to do with his worries about convincing his interlocutors that ideal rulers do not flourish by exploiting the ruled. Thus, his emphasis need not be taken to represent a lack of concern for the women's interests. After all, what greater concern could Socrates show for the women than to insist that they be fully educated and allowed to hold

the highest offices? Socrates goes on to argue that the philosopher-rulers of the city, including the female philosopher-rulers, are as happy as can be. The best reason for doubting Plato's feminism is provided by those disparaging remarks about women. We might try to distinguish between Plato's rather harsh view of the women around him and his more optimistic view of women as they would be in more favorable circumstances. It is also possible to distinguish between the traditional sexist tropes as they feature in Plato's drama and the rejection of sexism in Plato's ideas. But it is not clear that these distinctions will remove all of the tension, especially when Socrates and Glaucon are saying that men are stronger or better than women in just about every endeavor (455c). Final judgment on this question is difficult. The disparaging remarks have to be taken one-by-one, as it is doubtful that all can be understood in exactly the same way. Moreover, it is of the utmost importance to determine whether each remark says something about the way all women are by nature or essentially. If Plato thinks that women are essentially worse than men, then Socrates' claim that men and women have the same nature for education and employment is puzzling. But if the disparagements do not express any considered views about the nature of women, then we might be able to conclude that Plato is deeply prejudiced against women and yet committed to some plausibly feminist principles.
4.4 Totalitarianism

Some of the most heated discussions of the politics of Plato's Republic have surrounded the charge of totalitarianism famously advanced by Karl Popper (in The Open Society and its Enemies). Like the other isms we have been considering, totalitarianism applies to the Republic only conditionally, depending on the definition of totalitarianism offered. But it is worth thinking through the various ways in which this charge might be made, to clarify the way the philosopher-rulers wield political authority over the rest of the city. Critics of Plato's Republic have characterized the aims of Kallipolis' rulers as totalitarian. Socrates is quite explicit that the good at which the rulers aim is the unity of the city (462a-b). Is this an inherently totalitarian and objectionable aim? The problem, Popper and others have charged, is that the rulers aim at the organic unity of the city as a whole, regardless of the individual interests of the citizens. But this would be surprising, if true. After all, the Republic provides a picture not just of a happy city but also of a happy individual person, and in Book One, Socrates argues that the ruler's task is to benefit the ruled. So how could the rulers of Kallipolis utterly disregard the good of the citizens?

Some readers answer Popper by staking out a diametrically opposed position. They maintain that Plato conceives of the city's good as nothing more than the aggregate good of all the citizens. On this view, citizens need to contribute to the city's happiness only because they need to contribute to the happiness of other citizens if they are to achieve their own maximal happiness. Any totalitarian control of the citizens is paternalistic. Yet this view, too, seems at odds with much of the Republic. When Socrates says that the happiest city is a maximally unified city (462a-b), or when he insists that all the citizens need to be bound together (519e-520a), he seems to be invoking a conception of the city's good that is not reducible to the aggregate good of the citizens. So a mixed interpretation seems to be called for. In the Republic, the good of the city and the good of the individual are independently specifiable, and the citizens' own maximal good coincides with the maximal good of the city. Since Plato believes that this coincidence is realized only through propagandistic means in the ideal city, then the propaganda is paternalistically targeted at the citizens' own good but not exclusively at the citizens' own good. On this view, if the citizens do not see themselves as parts of the city serving the city, neither the city nor they will be maximally happy. This does not leave Kallipolis' aims beyond reproach, for one might well be skeptical of the good of unity, of Plato's assumption that individuals reap their own maximal good when the city is most unified, or of the Republic's claims about how this unity (and these individual goods) might be achieved. But it is not obvious that the rulers of Kallipolis have inherently totalitarian and objectionable aims. Kallipolis has more clearly totalitarian features. First, totalitarian regimes concentrate political power in one bloc and offer the ruled no alternative. The ideal city of Plato's Republic is plainly totalitarian in this respect. But the concentration of political power in Kallipolis differs in at least two ways from the concentration in actual totalitarian states. First, Socrates insists that in the ideal city, all the citizens will agree about who should rule. This agreement is the city's moderation (430d-432a), caused by the city's justice (433b, cf. 351d). Socrates also suggests some ways of explaining how the non-philosophers will agree that the philosophers should rule. First, he offers a way of persuading those who lack knowledge that only the philosophers have knowledge (476d-480a), which in effect offers a way of explaining to the non-philosophers that only the philosophers have the knowledge required to rule. Second, he suggests that the non-philosophers will be struck by the philosophers' obvious virtue (500d-502a). (Their virtue would be especially striking to the producers, since the philosophers do without private property, which the producers love so much.) Finally, he suggests that in Kallipolis, the producers will be grateful to the guardian classes for

keeping the city safe and orderly, wherein they can achieve their good, as they see it, by optimally satisfying their necessary appetitive attitudes (463a-b). The second way in which Kallipolis' concentration of political power is special that it does not concentrate anything good for the rulers. Socrates is clear that the philosophers despise political power (519c, 540a), and they rule not to reap rewards but for the sake of the ruled (cf. 341c-343a), because their justice obligates them to obey the law that commands them to rule (see section 2.3 above). In fact, the rulers of Kallipolis benefit the ruled as best they can, helping them realize the best life they are capable of. These benefits must include some primary education for the producer class (see 414d), to make good on the commitment to promote especially talented children born among the producers (415c, 423d) and to enable the producers to recognize the virtue in the philosophers. But the benefits extend to peace and order: the producers do not have to face warfare. A second totalitarian feature of Kallipolis is the control that the rulers exert over daily life. There is nothing especially totalitarian about the rule of law pervasive in Kallipolis (see esp. 415d-e, and cf. the laws that apply to the rulers, such as the marriage law and the law commanding philosophers to rule). But the rulers control mass culture in the ideal city, and they advance a noble lie to convince citizens of their unequal standing and deep tie to the city (414b-415d). This propagandistic control plainly represents a totalitarian concern, and it should make us skeptical about the value of the consent given to the rulers of Kallipolis. It is one thing to identify totalitarian features of Kallipolis and another thing to say why they are wrong. Three very different objections suggest themselves. First, we might reject the idea of an objectively knowable human good, and thus reject the idea that political power should be in the hands of those who know the human good. Here we should distinguish between Plato's picture of the human good and the very idea of an objective human good, for even if we want to dissent from Plato's view, we might still accept the very idea. At least, it does not seem implausible to suppose that some general psychological capacities are objectively good for their possessors (while others are objectively bad), and at that point, we can ask whether political power should be used to foster the good capacities and to restrain or prevent the bad ones. Given that state-sponsored education cannot but address the psychological capacities of the pupils, only very austere political systems could be supported by a thorough-going skepticism about the human good. Second, we might accept the idea of an objectively knowable human good, but be wary of concentrating extensive political power in the hands of a few knowers. We might reject Plato's apparent optimism about the trustworthiness of philosopherrulers and insist on greater checks upon political power, to minimize the risks of abuse. If this is our objection, then we might wonder what checks are optimal.

Finally, we might reject Plato's scheme on the grounds that political selfdetermination and free expression are themselves more valuable than Plato recognizes. This sort of response is perhaps the most interesting, but it is by no means easy. For it is difficult to assess the intrinsic value of self-determination and free expression, apart from skepticism about the knowledge or power of those limiting self-determining or free expression. Moreover, it is difficult to balance these values against the concerns that motivate Plato. Where does the power over massive cultural forces lie when it is not under political control? And to what extent can we live well when our culture is not shaped by people thoughtfully dedicated to living a good human life? These are not questions that can be easily shrugged off, even if we cannot embrace Kallipolis as their answer.

5. Politics, Part Two: Defective Constitutions

The best human life is ruled by knowledge and especially knowledge of what goodness is and of what is good for human beings. So, too, is the best city. For Plato, philosophers make the ideal rulers for two main reasons. First, they know what is good. Second, they do not want to rule (esp. 520e-521b). The problem with existing cities is correspondingly twofold. They are ruled by people who are ignorant of what is good, and they suffer from strife among citizens all of whom want to rule. These flaws are connected: the ignorant are marked by their desire for the wrong objects, such as honor and money, and this desire is what leads them to seek political power. All existing regimes, whether ruled by one, a few, or many, show these defects. So in the Republic Socrates does not distinguish between good and bad forms of these three kinds of regime, as the Stranger does in the Plato's Statesman (301a-303b, cf. Aristotle, Politics III 7). Nonetheless, Socrates has much to say in Books Eight and Nine about the individual character of various defective regimes. He organizes his account to emphasize appetite's corrupting power, showing how each defective regime can, through the corruption of the rulers' appetites, devolve into a still worse one. In the timocracy, for example, nothing checks the rulers from taking money to be a badge of honor and feeding their appetites, which grow in private until they cannot be hidden anymore. The account is thus deeply informed by psychology. It does not purport to be an account of what has happened (despite Aristotle's treatment of it in Politics V 12), any more than Books Two through Seven purport to give an historical account of an ideal city's genesis. It is not, for all that, ahistorical, for Plato's concerns about corruption are clearly informed by his experiences and his understanding of history. The account, psychologically and historically informed, does not offer any hint of psychological or historical determinism. Socrates does not identify the transitions from one defective regime to the next as inevitable, and he explicitly allows for transitions other than the ones he highlights. This is just one

story one could tell about defective regimes. But this particular story is valuable as a morality tale: it highlights the defective regimes' vulnerability to the corruption of the rulers' appetites. The political psychology of Books Eight and Nine raises a host of questions, especially about the city-soul analogy (see section 1.3 above). Is the account of political change dependent upon the account of psychological change, or vice versa? Or if this is a case of mutual interdependence, exactly what accounts for the various dependencies? It seems difficult to give just one answer to these questions that will explain all of the claims in these books, and the full, complex theory that must underlie all of the claims is by no means clear. But those questions should not obscure the political critiques that Socrates offers. First, he criticizes the oligarchs of Athens and Sparta. His list of five regimes departs from the usual list of rule by one, rule by a few, and rule by many (cf. 338d) because he distinguishes among three different regimes in which only a few rule. He contrasts the ideal city, in which the wise rule, and two would-be aristocracies, the timocracy in which the militaristically virtuous rule and the oligarchy in which the rich rule. Socrates argues that these are not genuine aristocracies, because neither timocracy nor oligarchy manages to check the greed that introduces injustice and strife into cities. This highlights the deficiencies of the Spartan oligarchy, with its narrow attention to valor (cf. Laws, esp. Books One and Two), and the Athenian oligarchs, many of whom pursued their own material interests narrowly, however much they eyed Sparta as a model. So the Republic distances Plato from oligarchic parties of his time and place. Second, Socrates criticizes the Athenian democracy, as Adeimantus remarks (563d). Many readers think that Socrates goes over the top in his description, but the central message is not so easy to dismiss. Socrates argues that without some publicly entrenched standards for evaluation guiding the city, chaos and strife are unavoidable. Even the timocracy and oligarchy, for all their flaws, have public standards for value. But democracy honors all pursuits equally, which opens the city to conflict and disorder. Some readers find a silver lining in this critique. They note that the democracy's tolerance extends to philosophers (cf. 561c-d), allowing such things as the conversation that Socrates, Glaucon, and the others are having (557d). Some readers have even tried to bring the Republic's judgment of democracy into line with the Statesman, where the Stranger ranks democracy above oligarchy. But the Republic also records considerable skepticism about democratic tolerance of philosophers (487a-499a, cf. 517a).

It is not clear what, in the end, one should think about Plato's comparison of democracy and oligarchy. Probably the contest does not matter much in his eyes, since both are beset by the same essential strife between the rich (oligarchs) and poor (democrats) (422e-423a). Perhaps the Republic and Statesman appear to disagree only because Plato has different criteria in view. Or perhaps he just changed his mind. The ideal city of the Laws, which Plato probably wrote shortly after the Statesman, accords a greater political role for unwise citizens than the Republic does (see Plato: on utopia).

6. Conclusions about the Ethics and Politics of Plato's Republic

The Republic is a sprawling work with dazzling details and an enormously wideranging influence. But what, in the end, does the work say to us, insofar as we are trying to live well or help our society live well, and what does it say to us, insofar as we are trying to understand thinking about how to live well? In ethics, the Republic's main practical lesson is that one should, if one can, pursue wisdom and that if one cannot, one should follow the wisest guides one can find. This lesson is familiar from Plato's Socratic dialogues: the philosophical life is best, and if one lacks knowledge, one should prefer to learn from an expert. But the Republic characterizes philosophy differently. First, it goes much further than the Socratic dialogues in respecting the power of passions and desires. Wisdom still requires being able to survive Socratic examination (534b-c), but it also explicitly requires careful and extensive habituation of attitudes of spirited and appetitive motivations (485a486b, 519a8b1), sublimation of psychological energy from spirited and appetitive desires to philosophical desire (cf. 485d), and continued attention to and maintenance of the desires that arise from the non-calculating parts of one's soul (571d-572b, 589a-b, cf. 416e-417b). Second, as opposed to the Socrates of the Socratic dialogues, who avows ignorance and rests with his belief that the world is well-ordered, the Socrates of the Republic insists that wisdom requires understanding how the world is, which involves apprehending the basic mathematical and teleological structure of things. Third, although the Socrates of the Socratic dialogues practices philosophy instead of living an ordinarily engaged political life, he insists that his life is closer to what the political art demands than the ordinarily engaged life is. According to the Republic, by contrast, the philosopher prefers to be entirely apart from politics, especially in ordinary circumstances (496c-e, 592a, cf. 520a-b). One facet of this advice that deserves emphasizing is the importance it places on the influence of others. Plato plainly believes that one's living well depends upon one's fellows and the larger culture. This is most obvious in the case of those who cannot pursue wisdom for themselves. They will live as well as those who lead

them allow. But even those who can pursue wisdom must first be raised well and must later meet with tolerance, which philosophers do not often receive. The ethical theory the Republic offers is best characterized as eudaimonist, according to which a person should act for the sake of his or her own success or happiness (eudaimonia). Socrates does not argue for this as opposed to other approaches to ethics. Rather, he simply assumes that a person's success gives him or her conclusive reasons to act, and he argues that success requires acting virtuously. This eudaimonism is widely thought to be an egoistic kind of consequentialism: one should act so as to bring about states of affairs in which one is happy or successful. But there is no reason to suppose that the Republic rejects the identity of eudaimonia and good activity (eu prattein, eupragia) which Socrates often assumes in Plato's Socratic dialogues (Charmides 171e172a, Crito 48b, Euthydemus 278e-282d, Gorgias 507c). If the Republic takes this identity seriously, as the function argument of Book One does (354a), it says that virtuous activity is good not because it brings about success, but because it is success. This is the explicit view of Aristotle and the Stoics, who had considered Plato's work carefully. Metaethically, the Republic presupposes that there are objective facts concerning how one should live. Much of its account of these facts sounds naturalist. After all, Socrates uses the careful study of human psychology to reveal how our souls function well or ill, and he grounds the account of what a person should do in his understanding of good psychological functioning. Socrates' particular deployment of this general strategy suggests that good actions are those that sustain the virtuous soul (443e) and that the virtuous soul is the one with a maximally unified set of commitments (443d-e, cf. 534b-c). Whether this is plausible depends upon what careful study of human psychology in fact shows. It depends in particular on whether, as a matter of fact, the actions that we would pre-theoretically deem good sustain a coherent set of psychological commitments and those that we would pretheoretically deem bad are inconsistent with a coherent set of psychological commitments. Ethical naturalism such as this still awaits support from psychology, but it has not been falsified, either. Although this naturalist reading of the Republic is not anachronisticAristotle and the Stoics develop related naturalist approaches, and Plato had naturalist contemporaries in a hedonist traditionPlato himself would not be content to ground his account of good actions on empirical facts of human psychology. On his view, actions are good because of their relation to good agents, and agents are good because of their relation to goodness itself. But goodness itself, the Good, transcends the natural world; it is a supernatural property. This commits Plato to a non-naturalist version of ethical realism, which modernity's creeping tide of

naturalism threatens to wash away. But non-naturalism in ethics will retain some appeal insofar as the other ways of trying to explain our experiences of the moral life fail to answer the serious objections they face. The take-home lessons of the Republic's politics are subject to special controversy. In the sections above, I take what Socrates says about the ideal and defective cities at face value, but many readers believe that this is a mistake. Some think that Plato does not intend the Republic as a serious contribution to political thought, because its political musings are projections to clarify psychological claims crucial to the ethical theory that Plato does seriously intend. Others think that Plato intends political lessons strikingly different from what is suggested by the face value of Socrates' words. One can concede that the Republic's politics are a reflection of its moral psychology without thinking that they are merely that. In antiquity, starting with Aristotle, Plato's Republic was recognized as part of a large genre of politically serious works, many of them inspired by Sparta, and Socrates' explicit claims about the ideal and defective constitutions were taken seriously as political proposals. Moreover, one can concede that the Republic calls into question many of its political proposals without thinking that Plato means to cancel them or suggest other, radically different political advice. It is striking that Socrates is ready to show that it is better to be just than unjust before he has even said that the just and wise person must be a philosopher and that the just city must be ruled by philosophers (444e445a). It is also striking that Adeimantus enthusiastically endorses the idea of holding the women and children in common (424a) and then later asks Socrates to explain it (449c-450a). And it is striking that Socrates recognizes that Greeks would ridicule his proposal that women take up the arts of war (452a). But Plato might signal for his readers to examine and re-examine what Socrates says without thereby suggesting that he himself finds fault with what Socrates says. But still some readers, especially Leo Strauss and his followers, want to distance the Republic's take-home political message from Kallipolis. They typically appeal to three considerations that are supposed to indicate Plato's awareness that the political ideal is impossible or ruinous. First, they note that the philosophers have to be compelled to rule the ideal city. But this involves no impossibility. The founders of the ideal city would have to make a law compelling those educated as philosophers to rule (cf. section 2.3 above), but founders could make such a law. If philosophers have to be compelled to sustain the maximally happy city, one might wonder why anyone would found such a city. But one might wonder why anyone was inspired to compose the Iliad, as well. People sometimes do remarkable things. Second, Straussian readers appeal to the ideal city's predicted demise, and they assert that the rulers' eventual inability to calculate the marriage number (546a-

547a) shows an ineliminable conflict between the eros in human nature and the mathematical perfection of a political ideal. But it is also possible to blame the anticipated degeneration on sense-perception (see 546b23), not calculation, and to see in Kallipolis' demise a common fact of life for perceptible entities (546a2). After all, Socrates does not say that eros makes the creation or maintenance of Kallipolis impossible. Finally, the Straussians note that Kallipolis is not sketched as an ideal in a political treatise, exactly, but proposed by Socrates in a long dramatic conversation, which includes twists and turns that come after he stops discussing Kallipolis. This is true, and it renders difficult inferences from what is said in the Republic to what Plato thinks. But it does not provide any reason for thinking that Plato rejects the ideal that Socrates constructs in the Republic. In fact, Socrates expresses several central political theses in the Republic that appear in other Platonic dialogues, as well, especially in the Gorgias, Statesman, and Laws. First, the best rulers are wise. Second, the best rulers rule for the benefit of the ruled, and not for their own sake. Third, a city is highly unlikely to have the best rulers, in part because there is a gulf between the values of most people and the values of the wise. Fourth, the greatest harm to a city is disagreement about who should rule, since competing factions create civil strife. So, fifth, the goal of politics is harmony or agreement among the citizens about who should rule. Last, harmony requires that the city cultivate virtue and the rule of law. The consistency of these messages across several Platonic dialogues might well make us so bold as to think that they are the take-home message of the Republic's politics.

Plato: The State and the Soul The Republic The most comprehensive statement of Plato's mature philosophical views appears in (The Republic), an extended treatment of the most fundamental principles for the conduct of human life. Using the character "Socrates" as a fictional spokesman, Plato considers the nature and value of justice and the other virtues as they appear both in the structure of society as a whole and in the personality of an individual human being. This naturally leads to discussions of human nature, the achievement of knowledge, the distinction between appearance and reality, the components of an effective education, and the foundations of morality. Because it covers so many issues, The Republic can be read in several different ways: as a treatise on political theory and practice, as a pedagogical handbook, or as a defence of ethical conduct, for example. Although we'll take notice of each of these features along the way, our primary focus in what follows will be on the basic metaphysical and epistemological issues, foundational questions about who we are, what is real, and about how we know it. Read in this fashion, the dialogue as a whole invites us to share in Plato's vision of our place within the ultimate structure of reality. What is Justice? Book I of The Republic appears to be a Socratic dialogue on the nature of justice (Gk. [dikaisun]). As always, the goal of the discussion is to discover the genuine nature of the subject at hand, but the process involves the proposal, criticism, and rejection of several inadequate attempts at defining what justice really is. The elderly, wealthy Cephalus suggests that justice involves nothing more than telling the truth and repaying one's debts. But Socrates points out that in certain (admittedly unusual) circumstances, following these simple rules without exception could produce disastrous results. (Republic 331c) Returning a borrowed weapon to an insane friend, for example, would be an instance of following the rule but would not seem to be an instance of just action. The presentation of a counter-example of this sort tends to show that the proposed definition of justice is incorrect, since its application does not correspond with our ordinary notion of justice. In an effort to avoid such difficulties, Polemarchus offers a refinement of the definition by proposing that justice means "giving to each what is owed." The new definition codifies formally our deeply-entrenched practice of seeking always to help our friends and harm our enemies. This evades the earlier counter-example, since the just act of refusing to return the borrowed weapon would clearly benefit

one's friend. But Socrates points out that harsh treatment of our enemies is only likely to render them even more unjust than they already are. ( Republic 335d) Since, as we saw in the Phaedo, opposites invariably exclude each other, the production of injustice could never be an element within the character of true justice; so this definition, too, must be mistaken. The Privilege of Power At this point in the dialogue, Plato introduces Thrasymachus the sophist, another fictionalized portrait of an historical personality. After impatiently dismissing what has gone before, Thrasymachus recommends that we regard justice as the advantage of the stronger; those in positions of power simply use their might to decree what shall be right. This, too, expresses a fairly common (if somewhat pessimistic) view of the facts about social organization. But of course Socrates has other ideas. For one thing, if the ruling party mistakenly legislates to its own disadvantage, justice will require the rest of us to perform the (apparently) contradictory feat of both doing what they decree and also doing what is best for them. More significantly, Socrates argues that the best ruler must always be someone who knows how to rule, someone who understands ruling as a craft. But since crafts of any sort invariably aim to produce some external goal (Gk. [tlos]), good practitioners of each craft always act for the sake of that goal, never in their own interest alone. Thus, good rulers, like good shepherds, must try to do what is best for those who have been entrusted to them, rather than seeking their own welfare. (Republic 342e) Beaten down by the force of Socratic questioning, Thrasymachus lashes out bitterly and then shifts the focus of the debate completely. If Socrates does happen to be right about the nature of justice, he declares, then it follows that a life devoted to injustice is be more to one's advantage than a life devoted to justice. Surely anyone would prefer to profit by committing an act of injustice against another than to suffer as the victim of an act of injustice committed by someone else. ("Do unto others before they do unto you.") Thus, according to Thrasymachus, injustice is better than justice. Some preliminary answers come immediately to mind: the personal rewards to be gained from performing a job well are commonly distinct from its intrinsic aims; just people are rightly regarded as superior to unjust people in intelligence and character; every society believes that justice (as conceived in that society) is morally obligatory; and justice is the proper virtue (Gk. [aret]) of the human soul. But if Socrates himself might have been satisfied with responses of this sort, Plato the philosophical writer was not. There must be an answer that derives more fundamentally from the nature of reality.

Is Justice Better than Injustice? When Thrasymachus falls silent, other characters from the dialogue continue to pursue the central questions: what is justice, how can we achieve it, and what is its value? Not everyone will agree that justice should be defended as worthwhile for its own sake, rather than for the extrinsic advantages that may result from its practice. It helps to have a concrete example in mind. So Glaucon recounts the story of Gyges, the shepherd who discovered a ring that rendered him invisible and immediately embarked on a life of crime with perfect impunity. The point is to suggest that human beingsgiven an opportunity to do so without being caught and therefore without suffering any punishment or loss of good reputation would naturally choose a life of injustice, in order to maximize their own interests. Adeimantus narrows the discussion even further by pointing out that the personal benefits of having a good reputation are often acquired by anyone who merely appears to act justly, whether or not that person really does so. (Republic 363a) This suggests the possibility of achieving the greatest possible advantage by having it both ways: act unjustly while preserving the outward appearance of being just, instead of acting justly while risking the outward appearance of injustice. In order to demonstrate once and for all that justice really is valuable for its own sake alone, Plato must show that a life of the second sort is superior to a life of the first sort. Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus have given voice to a fundamental issue at the heart of any effort to improve human conduct by appealing to the principles of moral philosophy. If what I am morally required to do can (in some circumstances) be different from what I would choose do for my own benefit, then why should I be moral? Plato wrote the remainder of The Republic in an attempt to provide an adequate, satisfying answer to this question. After Book I, the entire dialogue is pervaded by an extended analogy between the justice of individual human beings and the that of an entire society or city-state. Since the crucial elements of justice may be easier to observe on the larger scale (Republic 369a), Plato began with a detailed analysis of the formation, structure, and organization of an ideal state before applying its results to a description of personal life. Why We Form a Society Imagining their likely origins in the prehistorical past, Plato argued that societies are invariably formed for a particular purpose. Individual human beings are not self-sufficient; no one working alone can acquire all of the genuine necessities of life. In order to resolve this difficulty, we gather together into

communities for the mutual achievement of our common goals. This succeeds because we can work more efficiently if each of us specializes in the practice of a specific craft: I make all of the shoes; you grow all of the vegetables; she does all of the carpentry; etc. Thus, Plato held that separation of functions and specialization of labor are the keys to the establishment of a worthwhile society. The result of this original impulse is a society composed of many individuals, organized into distinct classes (clothiers, farmers, builders, etc.) according to the value of their role in providing some component part of the common good. But the smooth operation of the whole society will require some additional services that become necessary only because of the creation of the social organization itself the adjudication of disputes among members and the defense of the city against external attacks, for example. Therefore, carrying the principle of specialization one step further, Plato proposed the establishment of an additional class of citizens, the guardians who are responsible for management of the society itself. In fact, Plato held that effective social life requires guardians of two distinct sorts: there must be bothsoldiers whose function is to defend the state against external enemies and to enforce its laws, and rulerswho resolve disagreements among citizens and make decisions about public policy. The guardians collectively, then, are those individuals whose special craft is just the task of governance itself. Training the Guardians In order to fulfill their proper functions, these people will have to be special human beings indeed.Plato hinted early on that one of their most evident characteristics will be a temperamental inclination toward philosophical thinking. As we've already seen in the Apology and in the Phaedo, it is the philosopher above all others who excels at investigating serious questions about human life and at judging what is true and best. But how are personal qualities of this sort to be fostered and developed in an appropriate number of individual citizens? (Republic 376d) The answer, Plato believed, was to rely upon the value of a good education. (Remember, he operated his own school at Athens!) We'll have an opportunity to consider his notions about higher education later, but his plan for the elementary education of guardians for the ideal state appears in Book III. Its central concern is an emphasis on achieving the proper balance of many disparate components physical training and musical performance along with basic intellectual development. One notable feature of this method of raising children is Plato's demand for strict censorship of literary materials, especially poetry and drama. He argued that early absorption in fictional accounts can dull an person's ability to make accurate judgments regarding matters of fact and that excessive participation in dramatic

recitations might encourage some people to emulate the worst behavior of the tragic heros. (Republic 395c) Worst of all, excessive attention to fictional contexts may lead to a kind of self-deception, in which individuals are ignorant of the truth about their own natures as human beings. (Republic 382b) Thus, on Plato's view, it is vital for a society to exercise strict control over the content of everything that children read, see, or hear. As we will later notice, Aristotle had very different ideas. Training of the sort described here (and later) is intended only for those children who will eventually become the guardians of the state. Their performance at this level of education properly determines both whether they are qualified to do so and, if so, whether each of them deserves to be a ruler or a soldier. A society should design its educational system as a means to distinguish among future citizens whose functions will differ and to provide training appropriate to the abilities of each. Divisions of the State The principle of specialization thus leads to a stratified society. Plato believed that the ideal state comprises members of three distinct classes: rulers, soldiers, and the people. Although he officially maintained that membership in the guardian classes should be based solely upon the possession of appropriate skills, Plato presumed that future guardians will typically be the offspring of those who presently hold similar positions of honor. If citizens express any dissatisfaction with the roles to which they are assigned, he proposed that they be told the "useful falsehood" that human beings (like the metals gold, silver, and bronze) possess different natures that fit each of them to a particular function within the operation of the society as a whole. (Republic 415a) Notice that this myth (Gk. [mythos]) cuts both ways. It can certainly be used as a method of social control, by encouraging ordinary people to accept their position at the bottom of the heap, subject to governance by the higher classes. But Plato also held that the myth justifies severe restrictions on the life of the guardians: since they are already gifted with superior natures, they have no need for wealth or other external rewards. In fact, Plato held that guardians should own no private property, should live and eat together at government expense, and should earn no salary greater than necessary to supply their most basic needs. Under this regime, no one will have any venal motive for seeking a position of leadership, and those who are chosen to be guardians will govern solely from a concern to seek the welfare of the state in what is best for all of its citizens. Having developed a general description of the structure of an ideal society, Plato maintained that the proper functions performed by its disparate classes, working together for the common good, provide a ready account of the need to develop significant social qualities or virtues.

Since the rulers are responsible for making decisions according to which the entire city will be governed, they must have the virtue of wisdom (Gk. [sopha]), the capacity to comprehend reality and to make impartial judgments about it. Soldiers charged with the defense of the city against external and internal enemies, on the other hand, need the virtue of courage (Gk. [andreia]), the willingness to carry out their orders in the face of danger without regard for personal risk. The rest of the people in the city must follow its leaders instead of pursuing their private interests, so they must exhibit the virtue of moderation (Gk. [sophrosn]), the subordination of personal desires to a higher purpose.

When each of these classes performs its own role appropriately and does not try to take over the function of any other class, Plato held, the entire city as a whole will operate smoothly, exhibiting the harmony that is genuine justice. (Republic 433e) We can therefore understand all of the cardinal virtues by considering how each is embodied in the organization of an ideal city.

Rulers Wise Decisions

Soldiers Courageous Actions

Farmers, Merchants, and other People (Moderated Desires)

Justice itself is not the exclusive responsibility of any one class of citizens, but emerges from the harmonious interrelationship of each component of the society

with every other. Next we'll see how Plato applied this conception of the virtues to the lives of individual human beings. The Virtues in Human Souls Remember that the basic plan of the Republic is to draw a systematic analogy between the operation of society as a whole and the life of any individual human being. So Plato supposed that people exhibit the same features, perform the same functions, and embody the same virtues that city-states do. Applying the analogy in this way presumes that each of us, like the state, is a complex whole made up of several distinct parts, each of which has its own proper role. But Plato argued that there is ample evidence of this in our everyday experience. When faced with choices about what to do, we commonly feel the tug of contrary impulses drawing us in different directions at once, and the most natural explanation for this phenomenon is to distinguish between distinct elements of our selves. (Republic 436b) Thus, the analogy holds. In addition to the physical body, which corresponds to the land, buildings, and other material resources of a city, Plato held that every human being includes three souls (Gk. [psych]) that correspond to the three classes of citizen within the state, each of them contributing in its own way to the successful operation of the whole person.

The rational soul (mind or intellect) is the thinking portion within each of us, which discerns what is real and not merely apparent, judges what is true and what is false, and wisely makes the rational decisions in accordance with which human life is most properly lived. The spirited soul (will or volition), on the other hand, is the active portion; its function is to carry out the dictates of reason in practical life, courageously doing whatever the intellect has determined to be best. Finally, the appetitive soul (emotion or desire) is the portion of each of us that wants and feels many things, most of which must be deferred in the face of rational pursuits if we are to achieve a salutary degree of selfcontrol.

In the Phaedrus, Plato presented this theory even more graphically, comparing the rational soul to a charioteer whose vehicle is drawn by two horses, one powerful but unruly (desire) and the other disciplined and obedient (will). On Plato's view, then, an human being is properly said to be just when the three souls perform their proper functions in harmony with each other, working in consonance for the good of the person as a whole.

Rational Soul (Thinking) Wisdom

Spirited Soul (Willing) Courage

Appetitive Soul (Feeling) Moderation

As in a well-organized state, the justice of an individual human being emerges only from the interrelationship among its separate components. (Republic 443d) Plato's account of a tripartite division within the self has exerted an enormous influence on the philosophy of human nature in the Western tradition. Although few philosophers whole-heartedly adopt hishypostasization of three distinct souls, nearly everyone acknowledges some differentiation among the functions of thinking, willing, and feeling. (Even in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's quest depends upon the cooperation of her three friendsScarecrow, Lion, and Tin Woodsman each of whom exemplifies one of the three aspects of human nature.) Perhaps any adequate view of human life requires some explanation or account (Gk. [logos]) of how we incorporate intellect, volition, and desire in the whole of our existence. In the context of his larger argument, Plato's theory of human nature provides the foundation for another answer to the question of why justice is better than injustice. On the view developed here, true justice is a kind of good health, attainable only through the harmonious cooperative effort of the three souls. In an unjust person, on the other hand, the disparate parts are in perpetual turmoil, merely coexisting with each other in an unhealthy, poorly-functioning, dis-integrated personality. Plato developed this theme in greater detail in the final books of The Republic.

Aristotle's Political Theory

First published Wed Jul 1, 1998; substantive revision Wed Jan 26, 2011

Aristotle (b. 384 d. 322 BCE), was a Greek philosopher, logician, and scientist. Along with his teacher Plato, Aristotle is generally regarded as one of the most influential ancient thinkers in a number of philosophical fields, including political theory. Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece, and his father was a court physician to the king of Macedon. As a young man he studied in Plato's Academy in Athens. After Plato's death he left Athens to conduct philosophical and biological research in Asia Minor and Lesbos, and he was then invited by King Philip II of Macedon to tutor his young son, Alexander the Great. Soon after Alexander succeeded his father, consolidated the conquest of the Greek city-states, and launched the invasion of the Persian Empire. Aristotle returned as a resident alien to Athens, and was a close friend of Antipater, the Macedonian viceroy. At this time (335323 BCE) he wrote, or at least worked on, some of his major treatises, including the Politics. When Alexander died suddenly, Aristotle had to flee from Athens because of his Macedonian connections, and he died soon after. Aristotle's life seems to have influenced his political thought in various ways: his interest in biology seems to be expressed in the naturalism of his politics; his interest in comparative politics and his sympathies for democracy as well as monarchy may have been encouraged by his travels and experience of diverse political systems; he criticizes harshly, while borrowing extensively, from Plato's Republic, Statesman, and Laws; and his own Politics is intended to guide rulers and statesmen, reflecting the high political circles in which he moved.

1. Political Science in General o Supplement: Characteristics and Problems of Aristotle's Politics 2. Aristotle's View of Politics o Supplement: Presuppositions of Aristotle's Politics 3. General Theory of Constitutions and Citizenship o Supplement: Political Naturalism 4. Study of Specific Constitutions Glossary of Aristotelian Terms Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries

1. Political Science in General

The modern word political derives from the Greek politikos, of, or pertaining to, the polis. (The Greek term polis will be translated here as city-state. It is also translated as city or polis, or simply anglicized as polis. City-states like Athens and Sparta were relatively small and cohesive units, in which political, religious, and cultural concerns were intertwined. The extent of their similarity to modern nation-states is controversial.) Aristotle's word for politics is politik, which is short for politik epistm or political science. It belongs to one of the three main branches of science, which Aristotle distinguishes by their ends or objects. Contemplative science (including physics and metaphysics) is concerned with truth or knowledge for its own sake; practical science with good action; and productive science with making useful or beautiful objects (Top. VI.6.145a1416, Met. VI.1.1025b24, XI.7.1064a1619, EN VI.2.1139a268). Politics is a practical science, since it is concerned with the noble action or happiness of the citizens (although it resembles a productive science in that it seeks to create, preserve, and reform political systems). Aristotle thus understands politics as a normative or prescriptive discipline rather than as a purely empirical or descriptive inquiry. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle describes his subject matter as political science, which he characterizes as the most authoritative science. It prescribes which sciences are to be studied in the city-state, and the others -- such as military science, household management, and rhetoric fall under its authority. Since it governs the other practical sciences, their ends serve as means to its end, which is nothing less than the human good. Even if the end is the same for an individual and for a city-state, that of the city-state seems at any rate greater and more complete to attain and preserve. For although it is worthy to attain it for only an individual, it is nobler and more divine to do so for a nation or city-state (EN I.2.1094b7-10). Aristotle's political science encompasses the two fields which modern philosophers distinguish as ethics and political philosophy. (See the entry on Aristotle's ethics.) Political philosophy in the narrow sense is roughly speaking the subject of his treatise called the Politics. For a further discussion of this topic, see the following supplementary document: Supplement: Characteristics and Problems of Aristotle's Politics

2. Aristotle's View of Politics

Political science studies the tasks of the politician or statesman (politikos), in much the way that medical science concerns the work of the physician (see Politics IV.1). It is, in fact, the body of knowledge that such practitioners, if truly expert, will also wield in pursuing their tasks. The most important task for the politician is, in the role of lawgiver (nomothets), to frame the appropriate constitution for the citystate. This involves enduring laws, customs, and institutions (including a system of moral education) for the citizens. Once the constitution is in place, the politician

needs to take the appropriate measures to maintain it, to introduce reforms when he finds them necessary, and to prevent developments which might subvert the political system. This is the province of legislative science, which Aristotle regards as more important than politics as exercised in everyday political activity such as the passing of decrees (see EN VI.8). Aristotle frequently compares the politician to a craftsman. The analogy is imprecise because politics, in the strict sense of legislative science, is a form of practical knowledge, while a craft like architecture or medicine is a form of productive knowledge. However, the comparison is valid to the extent that the politician produces, operates, maintains a legal system according to universal principles (EN VI.8 and X.9). In order to appreciate this analogy it is helpful to observe that Aristotle explains the production of an artifact in terms of four causes: the material, formal, efficient, and final causes (Phys. II.3 and Met. A.2). For example, clay (material cause) is molded into a vase shape (formal cause) by a potter (efficient or moving cause) so that it can contain liquid (final cause). (For discussion of the four causes see the entry on Aristotle's physics.) One can also explain the existence of the city-state in terms of the four causes. It is a kind of community (koinnia), that is, a collection of parts having some functions and interests in common (Pol. II.1.1261a18, III.1.1275b20). Hence, it is made up of parts, which Aristotle describes in various ways in different contexts: as households, or economic classes (e.g., the rich and the poor), or demes (i.e., local political units). But, ultimately, the city-state is composed of individual citizens (see III.1.1274a3841), who, along with natural resources, are the material or equipment out of which the city-state is fashioned (see VII.14.1325b38-41). The formal cause of the city-state is its constitution (politeia). Aristotle defines the constitution as a certain ordering of the inhabitants of the city-state (III.1.1274b32-41). He also speaks of the constitution of a community as the form of the compound and argues that whether the community is the same over time depends on whether it has the same constitution (III.3.1276b111). The constitution is not a written document, but an immanent organizing principle, analogous to the soul of an organism. Hence, the constitution is also the way of life of th e citizens (IV.11.1295a40-b1, VII.8.1328b1-2). Here the citizens are that minority of the resident population who possess full political rights (III.1.1275b17 20). The existence of the city-state also requires an efficient cause, namely, its ruler. On Aristotle's view, a community of any sort can possess order only if it has a ruling element or authority. This ruling principle is defined by the constitution, which sets criteria for political offices, particularly the sovereign office (III.6.1278b810; cf. IV.1.1289a1518). However, on a deeper level, there must be an efficient cause to explain why a city-state acquires its constitution in the first place. Aristotle states

that the person who first established [the city-state] is the cause of very great benefits (I.2.1253a301). This person was evidently the lawgiver (nomothets), someone like Solon of Athens or Lycurgus of Sparta, who founded the constitution. Aristotle compares the lawgiver, or the politician more generally, to a craftsman (dmiourgos) like a weaver or shipbuilder, who fashions material into a finished product (II.12.1273b323, VII.4.1325b401365a5). The notion of final cause dominates Aristotle's Politics from the opening lines: Since we see that every city-state is a sort of community and that every community is established for the sake of some good (for everyone does everything for the sake of what they believe to be good), it is clear that every community aims at some good, and the community which has the most authority of all and includes all the others aims highest, that is, at the good with the most authority. This is what is called the city-state or political community. [I.1.1252a17] Soon after, he states that the city-state comes into being for the sake of life but exists for the sake of the good life (2.1252b2930). The theme that the good life or happiness is the proper end of the city-state recurs throughout the Politics (III.6.1278b17-24, 9.1280b39; VII.2.1325a710). To sum up, the city-state is a hylomorphic (i.e., matter-form) compound of a particular population (i.e., citizen-body) in a given territory (material cause) and a constitution (formal cause). The constitution itself is fashioned by the lawgiver and is governed by politicians, who are like craftsmen (efficient cause), and the constitution defines the aim of the city-state (final cause, IV.1.1289a1718). For a further discussion of this topic, see the following supplementary document: Supplement: Presuppositions of Aristotle's Politics It is in these terms that Aristotle understands the fundamental normative problem of politics: What constitutional form should the lawgiver establish and preserve in what material for the sake of what end?

3. General Theory of Constitutions and Citizenship

Aristotle states that the politician and lawgiver is wholly occupied with the citystate, and the constitution is a certain way of organizing those who inhabit the citystate (III.1.1274b36-8). His general theory of constitutions is set forth in Politics III. He begins with a definition of the citizen (polits), since the citystate is by nature a collective entity, a multitude of citizens. Citizens are distinguished from other inhabitants, such as resident aliens and slaves; and even children and seniors are not unqualified citizens (nor are most ordinary workers).

After further analysis he defines the citizen as a person who has the right ( exousia) to participate in deliberative or judicial office (1275b1821). In Athens, for example, citizens had the right to attend the assembly, the council, and other bodies, or to sit on juries. The Athenian system differed from a modern representative democracy in that the citizens were more directly involved in governing. Although full citizenship tended to be restricted in the Greek city-states (with women, slaves, foreigners, and some others excluded), the citizens were more deeply enfranchised than in modern representative democracies because they were more directly involved in governing. This is reflected in Aristotle's definition of the citizen (without qualification). Further, he defines the city-state (in the unqualified sense) as a multitude of such citizens which is adequate for a self-sufficient life (1275b20-21). Aristotle defines the constitution (politeia) as a way of organizing the offices of the city-state, particularly the sovereign office (III.6.1278b810; cf. IV.1.1289a1518). The constitution thus defines the governing body, which takes different forms: for example, in a democracy it is the people, and in an oligarchy it is a select few (the wealthy or well born). Before attempting to distinguish and evaluate various constitutions Aristotle considers two questions. First, why does a city-state come into being? He recalls the thesis, defended in Politics I.2, that human beings are by nature political animals, who naturally want to live together. For a further discussion of this topic, see the following supplementary document: Supplement: Political Naturalism He then adds that the common advantage also brings them together insofar as they each attain the noble life. This is above all the end for all both in common and separately (III.6.1278b1924). Second, what are the different forms of rule by which one individual or group can rule over another? Aristotle distinguishes several types of rule, based on the nature of the soul of the ruler and of the subject. He first considers despotic rule, which is exemplified in the master-slave relationship. Aristotle thinks that this form of rule is justified in the case of natural slaves who (he asserts without evidence) lack a deliberative faculty and thus need a natural master to direct them (I.13.1260a12; slavery is defended at length inPolitics I.48). Although a natural slave allegedly benefits from having a master, despotic rule is still primarily for the sake of the master and only incidentally for the slave (III.6.1278b327). (Aristotle provides no argument for this: if some persons are congenitally incapable of self-governance, why should they not be ruled primarily for their own sakes?) He next considers paternal and marital rule, which he also views as defensible: the male is by nature more capable of leadership than the female, unless he is constituted in some way contrary to nature, and the elder and perfect [is by nature more capable of leadership] than the younger and imperfect

(I.12.1259a39-b4). Aristotle is persuasive when he argues that children need adult supervision because their rationality is imperfect (ateles) or immature. But he is unconvincing to modern readers when he alleges (without substantiation) that, although women have a deliberative faculty, it is without authority ( akuron), so that females require male supervision (I.13.1260a1314). (Aristotle's arguments about slaves and women appear so weak that some commentators take them to be ironic. However, what is obvious to a modern reader need not have been so to an ancient Greek, so that it is not necessary to suppose that Aristotle's discussion is ironic.) It is noteworthy, however, that paternal and marital rule are properly practiced for the sake of the ruled (for the sake of the child and of the wife respectively), just as arts like medicine or gymnastics are practiced for the sake of the patient (III.6.1278b371279a1). In this respect they resemble political rule, which is the form of rule appropriate when the ruler and the subject have equal and similar rational cacapacities. This is exemplified by naturally equal citizens who take turns at ruling for one another's advantage (1279a813). This sets the stage for the fundamental claim of Aristotle's constitutional theory: constitutions which aim at the common advantage are correct and just without qualification, whereas those which aim only at the advantage of the rulers are deviant and unjust, because they involve despotic rule which is inappropriate for a community of free persons (1279a1721). The distinction between correct and deviant constitutions is combined with the observation that the government may consist of one person, a few, or a multitude. Hence, there are six possible constitutional forms (Politics III.7):
Correct One Ruler Few Rulers Many Rulers Kingship Aristocracy Polity Deviant Tyranny Oligarchy Democracy

This six-fold classification (which is adapted from Plato's Statesman 302c-d) sets the stage for Aristotle's inquiry into the best constitution, although it is modified in various ways throughout the Politics. For example, he observes that the dominant class in oligarchy (literally rule of the oligoi, i.e., few) is typically the wealthy, whereas in democracy (literally rule of the dmos, i.e., people) it is the poor, so that these economic classes should be included in the definition of these forms (see Politics III.8, IV.4, and VI.2 for alternative accounts). Also, polity is later characterized as a kind of mixed constitution typified by rule of the middle group of citizens, a moderately wealthy class between the rich and poor (PoliticsIV.11).

Aristotle's constitutional theory is based on his theory of justice, which is expounded in Nicomachean Ethics book V. Aristotle distinguishes two different but related senses of justice universal and particular both of which play an important role in his constitutional theory. Firstly, in the universal sense justice means lawfuless and is concerned with the common advantage and happiness of the political community (NE V.1.1129b1119, cf. Pol. III.12.1282b1617). The conception of universal justice undergirds the distinction between correct (just) and deviant (unjust) constitutions. But what exactly the common advantage ( koinion sumpheron) entails is a matter of scholarly controversy. Some passages imply that justice involves the advantage of all the citizens; for example, every citizen of the best constitution has a just claim to private property and to an education (Pol. VII.9.1329a234, 13.1332a328). But Aristotle also allows that it might be in a way just to ostracize powerful citizens even when they have not been convicted of any crimes (III.13.1284b1520). Whether Aristotle understands the common advantage as safeguarding the interests of each and every citizen has a bearing on whether he anticipates what moderns would understand as a theory of individual rights. (See Fred Miller and Richard Kraut for differing interpretations.) Secondly, in the particular sense justice means equality or fairness, and this includes distributive justice, according to which different individuals have just claims to shares of some common asset such as property. Aristotle analyzes arguments for and against the different constitutions as different applications of the principle of distributive justice (III.9.1280a722). Everyone agrees, he says, that justice involves treating equal persons equally, and treating unequal persons unequally, but they do not agree on the standard by which individuals are deemed to be equally (or unequally) meritorious or deserving. He assumes his own analysis of distributive justice set forth in Nicomachean Ethics V.3: Justice requires that benefits be distributed to individuals in proportion to their merit or desert. The oligarchs mistakenly think that those who are superior in wealth should also have superior political rights, whereas the democrats hold that those who are equal in free birth should also have equal political rights. Both of these conceptions of political justice are mistaken in Aristotle's view, because they assume a false conception of the ultimate end of the city-state. The city-state is neither a business enterprise to maximize wealth (as the oligarchs suppose) nor an association to promote liberty and equality (as the democrats maintain). Instead, Aristotle argues, the good life is the end of the city-state, that is, a life consisting of noble actions (1280b391281a4). Hence, the correct conception of justice is aristocratic, assigning political rights to those who make a full contribution to the political community, that is, to those with virtue as well as property and freedom (1281a4 8). This is what Aristotle understands by an aristocratic constitution: literally, the rule of the aristoi, i.e., best persons. Aristotle explores the implications of this argument in the remainder of Politics III, considering the rival claims of the rule of

law and the rule of a supremely virtuous individual. Here absolute kingship is a limiting case of aristocracy. Again, in books VII-VIII, Aristotle describes the ideal constitution in which the citizens are fully virtuous.

4. Study of Specific Constitutions

The purpose of political science is to guide the good lawgiver and the true politician (IV.1.1288b27). Like any complete science or craft, it must study a range of issues concerning its subject matter. For example, gymnastics (physical education) studies what sort of training is best or adapted to the body that is naturally the best, what sort of training is best for most bodies, and what capacity is appropriate for someone who does not want the condition or knowledge appropriate for athletic contests. Political science studies a comparable range of constitutions (1288b2135): first, the constitution which is best without qualification, i.e., most according to our prayers with no external impediment; second, the constitution that is best under the circumstances for it is probably impossible for many persons to attain the best constitution; third, the constitution which serves the aim a given population happens to have, i.e., the one that is best based on a hypothesis: for [the political scientist] ought to be able to study a given constitution, both how it might originally come to be, and, when it has come to be, in what manner it might be preserved for the longest time; I mean, for example, if a particular city happens neither to be governed by the best constitution, nor to be equipped even with necessary things, nor to be the [best] possible under existing circumstances, but to be a baser sort. Hence, Aristotelian political science is not confined to the ideal system, but also investigates the second-best constitution or even inferior political systems, because this may be the closest approximation to full political justice which the lawgiver can attain under the circumstances. Regarding the constitution that is ideal or according to prayer, Aristotle criticizes the views of his predecessors in Politics and then offers a rather sketchy blueprint of his own inPolitics VII and VIII. Although his own political views were influenced by his teacher Plato, Aristotle is highly critical of the ideal constitution set forth in Plato's Republic on the grounds that it overvalues political unity, it embraces a system of communism that is impractical and inimical to human nature, and it neglects the happiness of the individual citizens (Politics II.15). In contrast, in Aristotle's best constitution, each and every citizen will possess moral virtue and the equipment to carry it out in practice, and thereby attain a life of excellence and complete happiness (see VII.13.1332a328). All of the citizens will hold political office and possess private property because one should call the city -state happy not by looking at a part of it but at all the citizens. (VII.9.1329a223). Moreover, there will be a common system of education for all the citizens, because they share the same end (Pol. VIII.1).

If (as is the case with most existing city-states) the population lacks the capacities and resources for complete happiness, however, the lawgiver must be content with fashioning a suitable constitution (Politics IV.11). The second-best system typically takes the form of a polity (in which citizens possess an inferior, more common grade of virtue) or mixed constitution (combining features of democracy, oligarchy, and, where possible, aristocracy, so that no group of citizens is in a position to abuse its rights). Aristotle argues that for city-states that fall short of the ideal, the best constitution is one controlled by a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor. For those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation find it easiest to obey the rule of reason (Politics IV.11.1295b46). They are accordingly less apt than the rich or poor to act unjustly toward their fellow citizens. A constitution based on the middle class is the mean between the extremes of oligarchy (rule by the rich) and democracy (rule by the poor). That the middle [constitution] is best is evident, for it is the freest from faction: where the middle class is numerous, there least occur factions and divisions among citizens (IV.11.1296a79). The middle constitution is therefore both more stable and more just than oligarchy and democracy. Although Aristotle classifies democracy as a deviant constitution (albeit the best of a bad lot), he argues that a case might be made for popular rule in Politics III.11, a discussion which has attracted the attention of modern democratic theorists. The central claim is that the many may turn out to be better than the virtuous few when they come together, even though the many may be inferior when considered individually. For if each individual has a portion of virtue and practical wisdom, they may pool these assets and turn out to be better rulers than even a very wise individual. This argument seems to anticipate modern arguments for the wisdom of the multitude such as Condorcet's jury theorem. In addition, the political scientist must attend to existing constitutions even when they are bad. Aristotle notes that to reform a constitution is no less a task [of politics] than it is to establish one from the beginning, and in this way the politician should also help existing constitutions (IV.1.1289a17). The political scientist should also be cognizant of forces of political change which can undermine an existing regime. Aristotle criticizes his predecessors for excessive utopianism and neglect of the practical duties of a political theorist. However, he is no Machiavellian. The best constitution still serves as a regulative ideal by which to evaluate existing systems. These topics occupy the remainder of the Politics. Books IVVI are concerned with the existing constitutions: that is, the three deviant constitutions, as well as polity or the mixed constitution, the best attainable under most circumstances (IV.2.1289a2638). The whole of book V investigates the causes and prevention of

revolution or political change (metabol). Books VIIVIII are devoted to the ideal constitution. As might be expected, Aristotle's attempt to carry out this program involves many difficulties, and scholars disagree about how the two series of books (IVVI and VIIVIII) are related to each other: for example, which were written first, which were intended to be read first, and whether they are ultimately consistent with each other. For a further discussion of this topic, see the following supplementary document: Supplement: Characteristics and Problems of Aristotle's Politics Aristotle's Politics did not have an immediate impact because it defended the Greek city-state, which was already becoming obsolete in his own lifetime. (As mentioned above, the Greek city-states permanently lost their independence due to the conquest by the kings of Macedon.) For similar reasons much of his discussion of particular political institutions is not directly applicable to modern nation-states (apart from his objectionable defenses of slavery, female subservience, and disenfranchisement of the working classes). Even so, Aristotle'sPolitics has exerted a deep influence on political philosophy until the present day, because it contains deep and thought-provoking discussions of perennial concerns of political philosophy: the role of human nature in politics, the relation of the individual to the state, the place of morality in politics, the theory of political justice, the rule of law, the analysis and evaluation of constitutions, the relevance of ideals to practical politics, the causes and cures of political change and revolution, and the importance of a morally educated citizenry.

Glossary of Aristotelian Terms

action: praxis citizen: polits city-state: polis (also city or state) community: koinnia constitution: politeia (also regime) free: eleutheros good: agathos happiness: eudaimonia happy: eudaimn justice: dikaiosun law: nomos lawgiver: nomothets master: despots nature: phusis noble: kalon (also beautiful or fine) political: politikos (of, or pertaining to, the polis)

political science: politik epistm politician: politikos (also statesman) practical: praktikos practical wisdom: phronsis revolution: metabol (also change) right: exousia (also liberty) ruler: archn self-sufficient: autarks sovereign: kurios virtue: aret (also excellence) without qualification: hapls (also absolute) without authority: akuron

Stadtplanung im antiken Griechenland

Urban Planning: programs pursued in most industrialized countries in an attempt to achieve certain social and economic objectives, in particular to shape and improve the urban environment in which increasing proportions of the world's population spend their lives. Encyclopedia Britannica

The arrangement of private dwellings is considered to be more pleasant and more convenient for other purposes if it is regularly planned, both according to the newer and according to the Hippodamian manner; but for security in war [the arrangement is more useful if it is planned in] the opposite [manner], as it used to be in ancient times. For that [arrangement] is difficult for foreign troops to enter and find their way about when attacking. Aristotle

Plan of Miletus around 470 BC A higher resolution Plan of Miletus A color version and a map of the region around Miletus

The invention of formal city planning was attributed to Hippodamus (or Hippodamos) of Miletus ( ) (c. 498- c. 408 BC). Hippodamus helped to design the new harbor town of Piraeus, which served as a commercial port for Athensfurther inland. Hippodamus' name is frequently associated with other orthogonally planned towns, such as Olynthus, Priene, and Miletus. His direct involvement in these cases remains unproven, but his name remains permanently associated with this type of plan that we call Hippodamian. The catapult played a key role in making urban life in the fourth century B.C. significantly more precarious. During his first five years in power Alexander captured five major cities and many smaller ones. A passage in the Politics of Aristotle (Alexanders tutor) reflects the change. Rational town planning, with straight streets intersecting to form quadrilateral city blocks, had just been popularized in Greece by the architect Hippodamus. Aristotle objected that at least part of every city should preserve the haphazard arrangement of earlier times to make it more difficult for invaders to fight their way in. Moreover, he wrote, the design of walls and their careful maintenance was particularly important at that time, whencatapults and other engines for the siege of cities [have] attained such a high degree of precision.Werner Soedel and Vernard Foley Ancient Catapults Hippodamus arranged the buildings and the streets of Miletus around 450 BC such that the winds from the mountains and the sea close to Miletus could flow optimal through the city and provide a cooling during the hot summer. In De architectura libri decem Vitruvius also mentions that in planning we have to consider the influence of the winds. Hippodamus first applied to his home city the grid plan which he had developed on inspiration from geometrically designed settlements, and that later many cities were laid out according to this plan. Miletus, which is a fine example of the grid plan, comprises houses on blocks created by streets and side streets crossing at right angles, with public buildings in the city centre, This plan retained in the Hellenistic period, however in the Roman period it began to deteriorate gradually and inevitably. The Greeks were the first to use solar architecture They oriented their houses to make use of the sun during winter, while obscuring its rays during summer and entire cities were built this way as early as 400 BC. According to R. Herzog the root of rational urban planning can be found also in the comedy of Aristophanes: The satire as complement to the utopia may confront us with rational management of space, money, work, sexual relationships.

Aristotle Politics concerning political and social ideas of Hippodamus: Hippodamus, the son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, the same who invented the art of planning cities, and who also laid out the Piraeus a strange man, whose fondness for distinction led him into a general eccentricity of life, which made some think him affected (for he would wear flowing hair and expensive ornaments; but these were worn on a cheap but warm garment both in winter and summer); he, besides aspiring to be an adept in the knowledge of nature, was the first person not a statesman who made inquiries about the best form of government. The city of Hippodamus was composed of 10,000 citizens divided into three partsone of artisans, one of husbandmen, and a third of armed defenders of the state. He also divided the land into three parts, one sacred, one public, the third private: the first was set apart to maintain the customary worship of the Gods, the second was to support the warriors, the third was the property of the husbandmen. He also divided laws into three classes, and no more, for he maintained that there are three subjects of lawsuitsinsult, injury, and homicide. He likewise instituted a single final court of appeal, to which all causes seeming to have been improperly decided might be referred; this court he formed of elders chosen for the purpose. He was further of opinion that the decisions of the courts ought not to be given by the use of a voting pebble, but that every one should have a tablet on which he might not only write a simple condemnation, or leave the tablet blank for a simple acquittal; but, if he partly acquitted and partly condemned, he was to distinguish accordingly. To the existing law he objected that it obliged the judges to be guilty of perjury, whichever way they voted. He also enacted that those who discovered anything for the good of the state should be honored; and he provided that the children of citizens who died in battle should be maintained at the public expense, as if such an enactment had never been heard of before, yet it actually exists at Athens and in other places. As to the magistrates, he would have them all elected by the people, that is, by the three classes already mentioned, and those who were elected were to watch over the interests of the public, of strangers, and of orphans. These are the most striking points in the constitution of Hippodamus. There is not much else. The first of these proposals to which objection may be taken is the threefold division of the citizens. The artisans, and the husbandmen, and the warriors, all have a share in the government. But the husbandmen have no arms, and the artisans neither arms nor land, and therefore they become all but slaves of the warrior class. That they should share in all the offices is an impossibility; for generals and guardians of the citizens, and nearly all the principal magistrates, must be taken from the class of those who carry arms. Yet, if the two other classes have no share in the government, how can they

be loyal citizens? It may be said that those who have arms must necessarily be masters of both the other classes, but this is not so easily accomplished unless they are numerous; and if they are, why should the other classes share in the government at all, or have power to appoint magistrates? Further, what use are farmers to the city? Artisans there must be, for these are wanted in every city, and they can live by their craft, as elsewhere; and the husbandmen too, if they really provided the warriors with food, might fairly have a share in the government. But in the republic of Hippodamus they are supposed to have land of their own, which they cultivate for their private benefit. Again, as to this common land out of which the soldiers are maintained, if they are themselves to be the cultivators of it, the warrior class will be identical with the husbandmen, although the legislator intended to make a distinction between them. If, again, there are to be other cultivators distinct both from the husbandmen, who have land of their own, and from the warriors, they will make a fourth class, which has no place in the state and no share in anything. Or, if the same persons are to cultivate their own lands, and those of the public as well, they will have difficulty in supplying the quantity of produce which will maintain two households: and why, in this case, should there be any division, for they might find food themselves and give to the warriors from the same land and the same lots? There is surely a great confusion in all this. Neither is the law to commended which says that the judges, when a simple issue is laid before them, should distinguish in their judgement; for the judge is thus converted into an arbitrator. Now, in an arbitration, although the arbitrators are many, they confer with one another about the decision, and therefore they can distinguish; but in courts of law this is impossible, and, indeed, most legislators take pains to prevent the judges from holding any communication with one another. Again, will there not be confusion if the judge thinks that damages should be given, but not so much as the suitor demands? He asks, say, for twenty minae, and the judge allows him ten minae (or in general the suitor asks for more and the judge allows less), while another judge allows five, another four minae. In this way they will go on splitting up the damages, and some will grant the whole and others nothing: how is the final reckoning to be taken? Again, no one contends that he who votes for a simple acquittal or condemnation perjures himself, if the indictment has been laid in an unqualified form; and this is just, for the judge who acquits does not decide that the defendant owes nothing, but that he does not owe the twenty minae. He only is guilty of perjury who thinks that the defendant ought not to pay twenty minae, and yet condemns him. To honor those who discover anything which is useful to the state is a proposal which has a specious sound, but cannot safely be enacted by law, for it may encourage informers, and perhaps even lead to political commotions. This question involves another. It has been doubted whether it

is or is not expedient to make any changes in the laws of a country, even if another law be better. Now, if an changes are inexpedient, we can hardly assent to the proposal of Hippodamus; for, under pretense of doing a public service, a man may introduce measures which are really destructive to the laws or to the constitution. But, since we have touched upon this subject, perhaps we had better go a little into detail, for, as I was saying, there is a difference of opinion, and it may sometimes seem desirable to make changes. Such changes in the other arts and sciences have certainly been beneficial; medicine, for example, and gymnastic, and every other art and craft have departed from traditional usage. And, if politics be an art, change must be necessary in this as in any other art. That improvement has occurred is shown by the fact that old customs are exceedingly simple and barbarous. For the ancient Hellenes went about armed and bought their brides of each other. In the magnificent and spacious Grecian city of Ephesus an ancient law was made by the ancestors of the inhabitants, hard indeed in its nature, but nevertheless equitable. When an architect was entrusted with the execution of a public work, an estimate thereof being lodged in the hands of a magistrate, his property was held, as security, until the work was finished. If, when finished, the expense did not exceed the estimate, he was complimented with decrees and honors. So when the excess did not amount to more than a fourth part of the original estimate, it was defrayed by the public, and no punishment was inflicted. But when more than one fourth of the estimate was exceeded, he was required to pay the excess out of his own pocket. Vitruvius On Budget Overruns
Except Aristotle's work about Hippodamus there is also Theano of Thurii with her work On Virtue dedicated to Hippodamus.

Another city planner was Deinocrates of Rhodes who worked as an architect for Alexander the Great. He also used a regular grid pattern for the city of Alexandria in Egypt. VITRUVIUS THE SITE OF A CITY 1. For fortified towns the following general principles are to be observed. First comes the choice of a very healthy site. Such a site will be high, neither misty nor frosty, and in a climate neither hot nor cold, but temperate; further, without marshes in the neighbourhood. For when the morning breezes blow toward the town at sunrise, if they bring with them mists from marshes and, mingled with the mist, the poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants, they will make

the site unhealthy. Again, if the town is on the coast with a southern or western exposure, it will not be healthy, because in summer the southern sky grows hot at sunrise and is fiery at noon, while a western exposure grows warm after sunrise, is hot at noon, and at evening all aglow. 2. These variations in heat and the subsequent cooling off are harmful to the people living on such sites. The same conclusion may be reached in the case of inanimate things. For instance, nobody draws the light for covered wine rooms from the south or west, but rather from the north, since that quarter is never subject to change but is always constant and unshifting. So it is with granaries: grain exposed to the suns course soon loses its good quality, and provisions and fruit, unless stored in a place unexposed to the suns course, do not keep long. 3. For heat is a universal solvent, melting out of things their power of resistance, and sucking away and removing their natural strength with its fiery exhalations so that they grow soft, and hence weak, under its glow. We see this in the case of iron which, however hard it may naturally be, yet when heated thoroughly in a furnace fire can be easily worked into any kind of shape, and still, if cooled while it is soft and white hot, it hardens again with a mere dip into cold water and takes on its former quality. 4. We may also recognize the truth of this from the fact that in summer the heat makes everybody weak, not only in unhealthy but even in healthy places, and that in winter even the most unhealthy districts are much healthier because they are given a solidity by the cooling off. Similarly, persons removed from cold countries to hot cannot endure it but waste away; whereas those who pass from hot places to the cold regions of the north, not only do not suffer in health from the change of residence but even gain by it. 5. It appears, then, that in founding towns we must beware of districts from which hot winds can spread abroad over the inhabitants. For while all bodies are composed of the four elements, that is, of heat, moisture, the earthy, and air, yet there are mixtures according to natural temperament which make up the natures of all the different animals of the world, each after its kind. 6. Therefore, if one of these elements, heat, becomes predominant in any body whatsoever, it destroys and dissolves all the others with its violence. This defect may be due to violent heat from certain quarters of the sky, pouring into the open pores in too great proportion to admit of a mixture suited to the natural temperament of the body in question. Again, if too much moisture enters the channels of a body, and thus introduces disproportion, the other elements, adulterated by the liquid, are impaired,

and the virtues of the mixture dissolved. This defect, in turn, may arise from the cooling properties of moist winds and breezes blowing upon the body. In the same way, increase or diminution of the proportion of air or of the earthy which is natural to the body may enfeeble the other elements; the predominance of the earthy being due to overmuch food, that of air to a heavy atmosphere. 7. If one wishes a more accurate understanding of all this, he need only consider and observe the natures of birds, fishes, and land animals, and be will thus come to reflect upon distinctions of temperament. One form of mixture is proper to birds, another to fishes, and a far different form to land animals. Winged creatures have less of the earthy, less moisture, heat in moderation, air in large amount. Being made up, therefore, of the lighter elements, they can more readily soar away into the air. Fish, with their aquatic nature, being moderately supplied with heat and made up in great part of air and the earthy, with as little of moisture as possible, can more easily exist in moisture for the very reason that they have less of it than of the other elements in their bodies; and so, when they are drawn to land, they leave life and water at the same moment. Similarly, the land animals, being moderately supplied with the elements of air and beat, and having less of the earthy and a great deal of moisture, cannot long continue alive in the water, because their portion of moisture is already abundant. 8. Therefore, if all this is as we have explained, our reason showing us that the bodies of animals are made up of the elements, and these bodies, as we believe, giving way and breaking up as a result of excess or deficiency in this or that element, we cannot but believe that we must take great care to select a very temperate climate for the site of our city, since healthfulness is, as we have said, the first requisite. 9. I cannot too strongly insist upon the need of a return to the method of old times. Our ancestors, when about to build a town or an army post, sacrificed some of the cattle that were wont to feed on the site proposed and examined their livers. If the livers of the first victims were dark-coloured or abnormal, they sacrificed others, to see whether the fault was due to disease or their food. They never began to build defensive works in a place until after they had made many such trials and satisfied themselves that good water and food had made the liver sound and firm. If they continued to find it abnormal, they argued from this that the food and water supply found in such a place would be just as unhealthy for man, and so they moved away and changed to another neighbourhood, healthfulness being their chief object. 10. That pasturage and food may indicate the healthful qualities of a site is a fact which can be observed and investigated in the case of certain pastures

in Crete, on each side of the river Pothereus, which separates the two Cretan states of Gnosus and Gortyna. There are cattle at pasture on the right and left banks of that river, but while the cattle that feed near Gnosus have the usual spleen, those on the other side near Gortyna have no perceptible spleen. On investigating the subject, physicians discovered on this side a kind of herb which the cattle chew and thus make their spleen small. The herb is therefore gathered and used as a medicine for the cure of splenetic people. From food and water, then, we may learn whether sites are naturally unhealthy or healthy. 11. If the walled town is built among the marshes themselves, provided they are by the sea, with a northern or north-eastern exposure, and are above the level of the seashore, the site will be reasonable enough. For ditches can be dug to let out the water to the shore, and also in times of storms the sea swells and comes backing up into the marshes, where its bitter blend prevents the reproductions of the usual marsh creatures, while any that swim down from the higher levels to the shore are killed at once by the saltness to which they are unused. An instance of this may be found in the Gallic marshes surrounding Altino, Ravenna, Aquileia, and other towns in places of the kind, close by marshes. They are marvellously healthy, for the reasons which I have given. 12. But marshes that are stagnant and have no outlets either by rivers or ditches, like the Pomptine marshes, merely putrefy as they stand, emitting heavy, unhealthy vapours. A case of a town built in such a spot was Old Salpia in Apulia, founded by Diomede on his way back from Troy, or, according to some writers, by Elpias of Rhodes. Year after year there was sickness, until finally the suffering inhabitants came with a public petition to Marcus Hostilius and got him to agree to seek and find them a proper place to which to remove their city. Without delay he made the most skilful investigations, and at once purchased an estate near the sea in a healthy place, and asked the Senate and Roman people for permission to remove the town. He constructed the walls and laid out the house lots, granting one to each citizen for a mere trifle. This done, he cut an opening from a lake into the sea, and thus made of the lake a harbour for the town. The result is that now the people of Salpia live on a healthy site and at a distance of only four miles from the old town. CHAPTER 5 THE CITY WALLS 1. After insuring on these principles the healthfulness of the future city, and selecting a neighbourhood that can supply plenty of food stuffs to maintain the community, with good roads or else convenient rivers or seaports

affording easy means of transport to the city, the next thing to do is to lay the foundations for the towers and walls. Dig down to solid bottom, if it can be found, and lay them therein, going as deep as the magnitude of the proposed work seems to require. They should be much thicker than the part of the walls that will appear above ground, and their structure should be as solid as it can possibly be laid. 2. The towers must be projected beyond the line of wall, so that an enemy wishing to approach the wall to carry it by assault may be exposed to the fire of missiles on his open flank from the towers on his right and left. Special pains should be taken that there be no easy avenue by which to storm the wall. The roads should be encompassed at steep points, and planned so as to approach the gates, not in a straight line, but from the right to the left; for as a result of this, the right hand side of the assailants, unprotected by their shields, will be next the wall. Towns should be laid out not as an exact square nor with salient angles, but in circular form, to give a view of the enemy from many points. Defense is difficult where there are salient angles, because the angle protects the enemy rather than the inhabitants. 8. The thickness of the wall should, in my opinion, be such that armed men meeting on top of it may pass one another without interference. In the thickness there should be set a very close succession of ties made of charred olive wood, binding the two faces of the wall together like pins, to give it lasting endurance. For that is a material which neither decay, nor the weather, nor time can harm, but even though buried in the earth or set in the water it keeps sound and useful forever. And so not only city walls but substructures in general and all walls that require a thickness like that of a city wall, will be long in falling to decay if tied in this manner. 4. The towers should be set at intervals of not more than a bowshot apart, so that in case of an assault upon any one of them, the enemy may be repulsed with scorpiones and other means of hurling missiles from the towers to the right and left. Opposite the inner side of every tower the wall should be interrupted for a space the width of the tower, and have only a wooden flooring across, leading to the interior of the tower but not firmly nailed. This is to be cut away by the defenders in case the enemy gets possession of any portion of the wall; and if the work is quickly done, the enemy will not be able to make his way to the other towers and the rest of the wall unless he is ready to face a fall. 5. The towers themselves must be either round or polygonal. Square towers are sooner shattered by military engines, for the battering rams pound their angles to pieces; but in the case of round towers they can do no harm, being engaged, as it were, in driving wedges to their centre. The system of

fortification by wall and towers may be made safest by the addition of earthen ramparts, for neither rams, nor mining, nor other engineering devices can do them any harm. 6. The rampart form of defense, however, is not required in all places, but only where outside the wall there is high ground from which an assault on the fortifications may be made over a level space lying between. En places of this kind we must first make very wide, deep ditches; next sink foundations for a wall in the bed of the ditch and build them thick enough to support an earthwork with ease. 7. Then within this substructure lay a second foundation, far enough inside the first to leave ample room for cohorts in line of battle to take position on the broad top of the rampart for its defense. Having laid these two foundations at this distance from one another, build cross walls between them, uniting the outer and inner foundation, in a comb-like arrangement, set like the teeth of a saw. With this form of construction, the enormous burden of earth will be distributed into small bodies, and will not lie with all its weight in one crushing mass so as to thrust out the substructures. 8. With regard to the material of which the actual wall should be constructed or finished, there can be no definite prescription, because we cannot obtain in all places the supplies that we desire. Dimension stone, flint, rubble, burnt or unburnt brick, - use them as you find them. For it is not every neighbourhood or particular locality that can have a wall built of burnt brick like that at Babylon, where there was plenty of asphalt to take the place of lime and sand, and yet possibly each may be provided with materials of equal usefulness so that out of them a faultless wall may be built to last forever. CHAPTER 6 THE DIRECTIONS OF THE STREETS; WITH REMARKS ON THE WINDS 1. The town being fortified, the next step is the apportionment of house lots within the wall and the laying out of streets and alleys with regard to climatic conditions. They will be properly laid out if foresight is employed to exclude the winds from the alleys. Cold winds are disagreeable, hot winds enervating, moist winds unhealthy. We must, therefore, avoid mistakes in this matter and beware of the common experience of many communities. For example, Mytilene in the island of Lesbos is a town built with magnificence and good taste, but its position shows a lack of foresight. In that community when the wind is south, the people fall ill; when it is

northwest, it sets them coughing; with a north wind they do indeed recover but cannot stand about in the alleys and streets, owing to the severe cold. 2. Wind is a flowing wave of air, moving hither and thither indefinitely. It is produced when heat meets moisture, the rush of heat generating a mighty current of air. That this is the fact we may learn from bronze eolipiles, and thus by means of a scientific invention discover a divine truth lurking in the laws of the heavens. Eolipiles are hollow bronze balls, with a very small opening through which water is poured into them. Set before a fire, not a breath issues from them before they get warm; but as soon as they begin to boil, out comes a strong blast due to the fire. Thus from this slight and very short experiment we may understand and judge of the mighty and wonderful laws of the heavens and the nature of winds. 3. By shutting out the winds from our dwellings, therefore, we shall not only make the place healthful for people who are well, but also in the case of diseases due perhaps to unfavourable situations elsewhere, the patients, who in other healthy places might be cured by a different form of treatment, will here be more quickly cured by the mildness that comes from the shutting out of the winds. The diseases which are hard to cure in neighbourhoods such as those to which I have referred above are catarrh, hoarseness, coughs, pleurisy, consumption, spitting of blood, and all others that are cured not by lowering the system but by building it up. They are hard to cure, first, because they are originally due to chills; secondly, because the patients system being already exhausted by disease, the air there, which is in constant agitation owing to winds and therefore deteriorated, takes all the sap of life out of their diseased bodies and leaves them more meagre every day. On the other hand, a mild, thick air, without draughts and not constantly blowing back and forth, builds up their frames by its unwavering steadiness, and so strengthens and restores people who are afflicted with these diseases. 4. Some have held that there are only four winds: Solanus from due east; Auster from the south; Favonius from due west; Septentrio from the north. But more careful investigators tell us that there are eight. Chief among such was Andronicus of Cyrrhus who in proof built the marble octagonal tower in Athens. On the several sides of the octagon he executed reliefs representing the several winds, each facing the point from which it blows; and on top of the tower he set a conical shaped piece of marble and on this a bronze Triton with a rod outstretched in its right band. It was so contrived as to go round with the wind, always stopping to face the breeze and holding its rod as a pointer directly over the representation of the wind that was blowing.

5. Thus Eurus is placed to the southeast between Solanus and Auster: Africus to the southwest between Auster and Favonius; Caurus, or, as many call it, Corus, between Favonius and Septentrio; and Aquilo between Septentrio and Solanus. Such, then, appears to have been his device, including the numbers and names of the wind and indicating the directions from which particular winds blow. These facts being thus determined, to find the directions and quarters of the winds your method of procedure should be as follows. 6. In the middle of the city place a marble amussium, laying it true by the level, or else let the spot be made so true by means of rule and level that no amussium is necessary. In the very centre of that spot set up a bronze gnomon or "shadow tracker". At about the fifth hour in the morning, take the end of the shadow cast by this gnomon, and mark it with a point. Then, opening your compasses to this point which marks the length of the gnomons shadow, describe a circle from the centre. In the afternoon watch the shadow of your gnomon as it lengthens, and when it once more touches the circumference of this circle and the shadow in the afternoon is equal in length to that of the morning, mark it with a point. 7. From these two points describe with your compasses intersecting arcs, and through their intersection and the centre let a line be drawn to the circumference of the circle to give us the quarters of south and north. Then, using a sixteenth part of the entire circumference of the circle as a diameter, describe a circle with its centre on the line to the south, at the point where it crosses the circumference, and put points to the right and left on the circumference on the south side, repeating the process on the north side. From the four points thus obtained draw lines intersecting the centre from one side of the circumference to the other. Thus we shall have an eighth part of the circumference set out for Auster and another for Septentrio. The rest of the entire circumference is then to be divided into three equal parts on each side, and thus we have designed a figure equally apportioned among the eight winds. Then let the directions of your streets and alleys be laid down on the lines of division between the quarters of two winds. 8. On this principle of arrangement the disagreeable force of the winds will be shut out from dwellings and lines of houses. For if the streets run full in the face of the winds, their constant blasts rushing in from the open country, and then confined by narrow alleys, will sweep through them with great violence. The lines of houses must therefore be directed away from the quarters from which the winds blow, so that as they come in they may strike against the angles of the blocks and their force thus be broken and dispersed.

9. Those who know names for very many winds will perhaps be surprised at our setting forth that there are only eight. Remembering, however, that Eratosthenes of Cyrene, employing mathematical theories and geometrical methods, discovered from the course of the sun, the shadows cast by an equinoctial gnomon, and the inclination of the heaven that the circumference of the earth is two hundred and fifty-two thousand stadia, that is, thirty-one million five hundred thousand paces, and observing that an eighth part of this, occupied by a wind, is three million nine hundred and thirty-seven thousand five hundred paces, they should not be surprised to find that a single wind, ranging over so wide a field, is subject to shifts this way and that, leading to a variety of breezes. 10. So we often have Leuconotus and Altanus blowing respectively to the right and left of Auster; Libonotus and Subvesperus to the right and left of Africus; Argestes, and at certain periods the Etesiae, on either side of Favonius; Circias and Corus on the sides of Caurus; Thracias and Gallicus on either side of Septentrio; Supernas and Caecias to the right and left of Aquilo; Carbas, and at a certain period the Ornithiae, on either side of Solanus; while Eurocircias and Volturnus blow on the flanks of Eurus which is between them. There are also many other names for winds derived from localities or from the squalls which sweep from rivers or down mountains. 11. Then, too, there are the breezes of early morning; for the sun on emerging from beneath the earth strikes humid air as he returns, and as he goes climbing up the sky he spreads it out before him, extracting breezes from the vapour that was there before the dawn. Those that still blow on after sunrise are classed with Eurus, and hence appears to come the Greek name for the child of the breezes, and the word for "to-morrow," named from the early morning breezes. Some people do indeed I say that Eratosthenes could not have inferred the true measure of the earth. Whether true or untrue, it cannot affect the truth of what I have written on the fixing of the quarters from which the different winds blow. 12. If he was wrong, the only result will be that the individual winds may blow, not with the scope expected from his measurement, but with powers either more or less widely extended. For the readier understanding of these topics, since I have treated them with brevity, it has seemed best to me to give two figures, at the end of this book: one designed to show the precise quarters from which the winds arise; the other, how by turning the directions of the rows of houses and the streets away from their full force, we may avoid unhealthy blasts. Let A be the centre of a plane surface, and B the point to which the shadow of the gnomon reaches in the morning. Taking A as the centre, open the compasses to the point B, which marks the shadow, and describe a circle. Put the gnomon back where it was before and

wait for the shadow to lessen and grow again until in the afternoon it is equal to its length in the morning, touching the circumference at the point C. Then from the points B and C describe with the compasses two arcs intersecting at D. Next draw a line from the point of intersection D through the centre of the circle to the circumference and call it E F. This line will show where the south and north lie. 18. Then find with the compasses a sixteenth part of the entire circumference; then centre the compasses on the point E where the line to the south touches the circumference, and set off the points G and H to the right and left of E. Likewise on the north side, centre the compasses on the circumference at the point F on the line to the north, and set off the points I and K to the right and left; then draw lines through the centre from G to K and from H to I. Thus the space from G to H will belong to Auster and the south, and the space from I to K will be that of Septentrio. The rest of the circumference is to be divided equally into three parts on the right and three on the left, those to the east at the points L and M, those to the west at the points N and 0. Finally, intersecting lines are to be drawn from M to 0 and from L to N. Thus we shall have the circumference divided into eight equal spaces for the winds. The figure being finished, we shall have at the eight different divisions, beginning at the south, the letter G between Eurus and Auster, H between Auster and Africus, N between Africus and Favonius, 0 between Favonius and Caurus, K between Caurus and Septentrio, I between Septentrio and Aquilo, L between Aquilo and Solanus, and M between Solanus and Eurus. This done, apply a gnomon to these eight divisions and thus fix the directions of the different alleys. CHAPTER 7 THE SITES FOR PUBLIC BUILDINGS 1. Having laid out the alleys and determined the streets, we have next to treat of the choice of building sites for temples, the forum, and all other public places, with a view to general convenience and utility. If the city is on the sea, we should choose ground close to the harbor as the place where the forum is to be built; but if inland, in the middle of the town. For the temples, the sites for those of the gods under whose particular protection the state is thought to rest and for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, should be on the very highest point commanding a view of the greater part of the city. Mercury should be in the forum, or, like Isis and Serapis, in the emporium: Apollo and Father Bacchus near the theatre: Hercules at the circus in communities which have no gymnasia nor amphitheatres; Mars outside the city but at the training ground, and so Venus, but at the harbor. It is

moreover shown by the Etruscan diviners in treatises on their science that the fanes of Venus, Vulcan, and Mars should be situated outside the walls, in order that the young men and married women may not become habituated in the city to the temptations incident to the worship of Venus, and that buildings may be free from the terror of fires through the religious rites and sacrifices which call the power of Vulcan beyond the walls. As for Mars, when that divinity is enshrined outside the walls, the citizens will never take up arms against each other, and he will defend the city from its enemies and save it from danger in war. 2. Ceres also should be outside the city in a place to which people need never go except for the purpose of sacrifice. That place should be under the protection of religion, purity, and good morals. Proper sites should be set apart for the precincts of the other gods according to the nature of the sacrifices offered to them. The principle governing the actual construction of temples and their symmetry I shall explain in my third and fourth books. In the second I have thought it best to give an account of the materials used in buildings with their good qualities and advantages, and then in the succeeding books to describe and explain the proportions of buildings, their arrangements, and the different forms of symmetry. Excerpt from Book 5 Chapter 10 COLONNADES AND WALKS 5. The space in the middle, between the colonnades and open to the sky, ought to be embellished with green things; for walking in the open air is very healthy, particularly for the eyes, since the refined and rarefied air that comes from green things, finding its way in because of the physical exercise, gives a clean-cut image, and, by clearing away the gross humours from the eyes, leaves the sight keen and the image distinct. Besides, as the body gets warm with exercise in walking, this air, by sucking out the bumours from the frame, diminishes their superabundance, and disperses and thus reduces that superfluity which is more than the body can bear. 6. That this is so may be seen from the fact that misty vapours never arise from springs of water which are under cover, nor even from watery marshes which are underground; but in uncovered places which are open to the sky, when the rising sun begins to act upon the world with its heat, it brings out the vapour from damp and watery spots, and rolls it in masses upwards. Therefore, if it appears that in places open to the sky the more noxious humours are sucked out of the body by the air, as they obviously are from the earth in the form of mists, I think there is no doubt that cities should be

provided with the roomiest and most ornamented walks, laid out under the free and open sky. 7. That they may be always dry and not muddy, the following is to be done. Let them be dug down and cleared out to the lowest possible depth. At the right and left construct covered drains, and in their walls, which are directed towards the walks, lay earthen pipes with their lower ends inclined into the drains. Having finished these, fill up the place with charcoal, and then strew sand over the walks and level them off. Hence, on account of the porous nature of the charcoal and the insertion of the pipes into the drains, quantities of water will be conducted away, and the walks will thus be rendered perfectly dry and without moisture. 8. Furthermore, our ancestors in establishing these works provided cities with storehouses for an indispensable material. The fact is that in sieges everything else is easier to procure than is wood. Salt can easily be brought in beforehand; corn can be got together quickly by the State or by individuals, and if it gives out, the defence may be maintained on cabbage, meat, or beans; water can be had by digging wells, or when there are sudden falls of rain, by collecting it from the tiles. But a stock of wood, which is absolutely necessary for cooking food, is a difficult and troublesome thing to provide; for it is slow to gather and a good deal is consumed. 9. On such occasions, therefore, these walks are thrown open, and a definite allowance granted to each inhabitant according to tribes. Thus these uncovered walks insure two excellent things: first, health in time of peace; secondly, safety in time of war. Hence, walks that are developed on these principles, and built not only behind the "scaena" of theatres, but also at the temples of all the gods, will be capable of being of great use to cities. Excerpt from Book 5 Chapter 11 THE PALAESTRA 4. This kind of colonnade is called among the Greeks xystus because athletes during the winter season exercise in covered running tracks. Next to this xystus and to the double colonnade should be laid out the uncovered walks into which, in fair weather during the winter, the athletes come out from the xystus for exercise. The xysta ought to be so constructed that there may be plantations between the two colonnades, or groves of plane trees, with walks laid out in them among the trees and resting places there, made of "opus signinum." Behind the xystus a stadium, so designed that great numbers of people may have plenty of room to look on at the contests between the athletes.

I have now described all that seemed necessary for the proper arrangement of things within the city walls [Note this includes most aspects of the 'built environment', because cities had to be fortified]

2. Archaic Greece and the beginning of city planning The Greek city of the classical age did not develop in isolation. The Aegean world of the Bronze-Age Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations had a highly sophisticated architecture, known to us both from accounts that have come down to us, filtered through the folk memory of the Homeric poems, and from its excavated remains at Knossos, Mycenae, and elsewhere. Further afield there were the ancient civilizations of the Near East, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, to both of which BronzeAge and classical Greece alike owed a great deal. Of the two, the Aegean Bronze Age-though in its later phases the work of a people who were ancestral to the historical Greeks-has only a very limited bearing upon the urban forms current in the classical age. For one thing the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations were essentially aristocratic in their organization. In marked contrast to classical Greece, the outstanding monuments are the palaces and the country residences of the ruling classes, and it was these that attracted the ingenuity and skills which a later age was to lavish on public architecture and planning. For anything comparable to the water supply and drainage systems of Knossos we have to turn to classical Etruria and later still to Rome. By comparison with the palace, the ordinary domestic and artisan quarters of a small Late-Minoan town such as Gournia, in eastern Crete are mere agglomerations of rooms and courtyards ranged haphazardly along the winding alleyways that encircle the central residence, like a small medieval town clingin to the skirts of some baronial castle. (At Karphi, also in eastern Crete, one sees how this same tradition disintegrated when deprived of the central unifying element which the palace afforded.) Furthermore, the thread of continuity from the Bronze-Age past was everywhere tenuous. Agammemnon's Mycenae and Nestor's Pylos lay sacked and derelict, while the last and most destructive wave of Greek-speaking invaders, the Dorians, were slowly re-evolving the basis of a comparable but in detail very different civilization. Athens, where the palace of a Mycenaean ruler developed without any appreciable break into the nucleus of the later Greek city, was exceptional in this respect. There may have been some elements of architectural continuity. The close resemblance between the earliest known Greek temples and the Mycenaean megaron can hardly be accidental, and the classical stoa too may have Minoan precedents. But these were individual building types. Of the urban settings(such as they were) of an earlier age little or nothing seems to have survived across the intervening darkness. The one possible exception is in the Greek colonies of Ionia, along the western fringes of Asia Minor. These were established in the tenth century B.C. by Ionian Greek refugees from the mainland, fleeing before the Dorians. From their old homes the Ionian settlers carried with them whatever still survived of Mycenaean civilization. It was in Ionia that the tales of the heroic past took shape as the Homeric epic, and here if anywhere one day hope to find tangible evidence of the sort of architectural continuity hinted at by the forms of the earliest Greek temples.

There were also new factors at work. In their new homes the Greek settlers found themselves once more in contact with the rich civilizations of the ancient East, at first through the native kingdoms of Asia Minor and later through direct commerce with Cyprus, Egypt and the Levant. At first sight the cities of the ancient East might seem to have had little to inspire the urban planner. Most of them were the product of centuries of unplanned, accreted growth, within which any element of monumentality and formal planning was reserved for the palaces and temples that were ruthlessly inserted into or on top of the existing urban framework. No Greek ever saw the Egyptian workmen's villages at Kahun and at Tell el-Amarna, with their rows of uniform blocks and parallel streets framed within rigidly rectangular enclosures. But across the centuries these find their counterpart in the orderly cantonments of the Roman quarry workers at Simitthu in North Africa, and they illustrate vividly the fund of practical planning experience that was already in circulation in Egypt, awaiting concrete expression whenever an appropriate occasion presented itself. Further afield, in Mesopotamia, the Assyrians were great builders of new cities, and these too were ordered, though not rigidly orthogonal, creations; one recalls Herodotus' description of Babylon as "intersected by straight streets, some parallel and some at right angles to the river." Ideas of orderly planning were in the air, and the Greeks would everywhere have found themselves exposed to the stimulus of notions which they could then develop in their own particular way. Already in the eighth century B.C., Oriental contacts and imports were everywhere shaping the emergence of the nascent classical civilizationmetalwork, painting, sculpture, fabrics, handicrafts of every sort. The "Aeolic" capitals of the earliest Greek architecture in stone echoed a type that was widespread in Phoenicia and Palestine, while more generally the whole Greek architectural system of column, capital, and entablature represents the impact of masonry architecture of the ancient East, and in particular of Egypt, upon the primitive timber and mud-brick construction of Aegean Greece. Patterns of urban life tend to be more conservative than fashions in building, but when the time did come for change, the see was already sown. The Greeks themselves attributed the formal schemes of orthogonal town planning with which they were familiar to Hippodamos of Miletus, who lived and worked in the fifth century B.C.; but as we shall see later, this can only be true of certain aspects of Hippodamos' work. Already in the early seventh century B.C. Smyrna had been rebuilt, after a disastrous fire, upon a plan of which the controlling feature was a series of parallel streets running north and south. At one point an open space was reserved for the agora, and near it, on a low eminence, stood a temple. The scheme is a simple one, but by contrast with what had gone before on the same site it unquestionably represents the deliberate adoption of a measure of the sort of formal planning which we shall meet again, a few years later, at Megara Hyblaea in Siciliy. In the long-established cities of Ionia, as of the mainland, such opportunities for radical reconstruction were not common. But these same cities were amont the first

to send out the colonies which were to play such an important part in carrying the Greek model of urban civilization to large areas of the Mediterranean world, from the Black Sea to the Straits of Gibraltar. The product of population pressures on a people with a genius for seafaring and commerce, the colonies were linked to their mother cities by ties of religion, interest and sentiment; but in all other respects they were autonomous city-states, and although some may have been founded on the sites of earlier, informal trading posts, most were for all practical purposes new foundations. Most of the remains that have come down to us are inevitably those of the later, more substantial stages of their architectural history, and it is only occasionally that circumstance offers us a glimpse of one of these colonies as it was at the moment of settlement. Such glimpses do, however, support the commonsensitcal belief that here was the natural proving ground for whatever ideas of formal planning were available at the time of their foundation. It was, then, renewed contact with the civilizations of the ancient East that furnished the Greeks with a fund of stimulating fresh ideas-in this as in so many other fields-and it was the requirements of the colonies overseas that gave these ideas substance and shpaed their early development on Greek soil. The latter is a subject to which we shall be returning in a later chapter. But first a general word about the political and social institutions for which the Greek polis was expected to make provision. Foremost among these was the agora . This combined the functions of the marketplace, a place of assembly, and a setting for ceremonies and spectacles-the natural center for any form of civic life for which there was no other specific provision. In origin it was little more than an open space conveniently situated somewhere near the center of the town, but in course of time there grew up around it such buildings as the meeting place of the city council(bouleuterion), the offices of the individual magistrates, temples and altars, fountain houses, law courts, and covered halls(stoai ) for the use of citizens and merchants. Some of the activities so represented might eventually move to more convenient homes elsewhere in the city, as for example at Athens to the Theater of Dionysus or to the meeting place of the assembly on the Phyx. But the agora remained the heart of the city and the focus of civic activity. In this respect the agora took the pace which at a more primitive stage had been occupied by the acropolis and the palace of the king. This again is well illustrated at Athens, where, since Mycenaean times, the Acropolis had been the residence of the ruler, the seat of the palace cult, and a place of refuge in times of trouble. The cult remained there throughout antiquity, dominating the city. But at a very early date the center of gravity, including the artisan and residential quarters, began to creep westwards and northwards, over the slopes of the Areopagus and along the network of winding roads that led out into the open countryside. As late as the seventh century B.C. the basin of lower ground to the northwest of the Acropolis was still potters' quarter-the Kerameikos-and still in active use as a cemetery. Then

, at the very end of the century, a nucleus of public buildings began to take shape along the western side of the basin, facing eastwardss across the very ancient road that skirted the foot of the low hill of Kolonos. By the end of the sixth century the open ground to the east of the road had been drained and water supplied to a large public fountain; and during the following centuries the whole area gradually took architectural shape by the addition of buildings along the remaining three sides. Between them these added buildings, and in particular the great stoas came in time to give the whole a certain monumental unity. But this unity was the product of piecemeal growth over the years, not of prior planning. Architectural congruity was achieved only by the extraordinary conservatism of Greek taste in such matters as the use of materials and of such architectural stereotypes as the classical orders and the pedimental facade, a conservatism that was coupled with a rare sensitivity in matters of scale and siting. The same conservatism was evident also in the choice of certain established building types to satisfy certain specific requirements. The following are a few of those which were to become essential part of vocabularly of any Greek city planner. The Greek temple is a type too familiar to call for further comment. Another very familiar type is the theater, with its rising circular tiers of seats and exiguous stage building. Its positioning within the city was very largely determined by the terrain, since it was not until Roman times that the seating began to be built up on massive substructures. The council building(bouleuterion) may conveniently be described as a theaterlike place of assembly in which the seating had been enclosed within the four walls of the gabled rectangular hall. As life became more sophisticated, many of the other civic activities which had formerly taken place in the open air were given similar shelter. One of the most characteristic of all Greek building types, the stoa, was in essence no more than a roofed extension of the agora, in the form of a colonnaded portico. Simple timber porticoes of this type are attested as early as the seventh century at Larisa-on-the-Hermos, and the following centuries saw their steady development both in materials and in design, through the introduction of such features as inner colonnades, projecting wings, rows of shops, and, by Hellenistic times, upper stories. The restored Stoa of Attalos in the Agora at Athens gives an excellent idea of Greek urban architecture at its most grandiose. Of the essential institution of the Greek polis only the gymnasium, the educational and cultural as well as the athletic center of the city, was a latecomer to urban planning. The three philosophical schools at Athens(from which we inherit the words, "academy," "cynic," and the French "lyce") took their names from the suburbs in which they were located: Plato's academy in Akademe, Aristotle and the Peripatetics at Lykeion, Antisthenes and the Cynics at Kynosarges. Not unitl the fourth century(Priene, Alexandria, Megalopolos) did the gymnasium begin to take formal shape as a fully urban institution.

3. Hippodamos and the Classical Greek City Hippodamos whome the later Greeks credited with the invention of the formal city planning with which they were familiar, was born in Miletus, probably in the closing years of the sixth century. From Aristotle, our fullest source, we learn that "he invented the divisions of the cities by classes"; also that he was eccentric in his appearance and habits and that he was a political theorist who wrote a treatise on the ideal constitution. Although his only specifically attested work as a planner is the laying out of Peiraeus-the harbor town of Athens-at some date during the second quarter of the fifth century, he is known to have taken part in the foundation of the colony of Thurii in southern Italy in 444-3 B.C., and it is a reasonable assumption that he played a leading part in the planning of it. It is likely, though unproven, that as a young man he participated in the refoundation of Miletus after the defeat of the Persians in 479 B.C. On the other hand Strabo's statement that he was responsible for the plan of Rhodes, founded in 408-7 B.C., must be mistaken, although it is good evidence of his later reputation and of the essentially "Hippodamian" character of the new foundation. It will be seen that, for all his later fame, Hippodamos is an elusive figure. Inventor or codifier? Practical planner or theoretician? Before trying to answer these questions, let us look briefly at a few of the best-attested examples of classical Greek planning. One starts almost inevitably with Miletus. Excavation has revealed a rigidly orthogonal plan, based on two distinct, but seemingly contemporary, grids of uniform housing blocks, separated from each other by an irregular zone of public buildings. The principle of the layout, a repeated pattern of identical units, is childishly simple. Its subtleties lay almost exclusively in the application of this simple scheme of terrain. Ample space was left for the developement of the city's mercantile, civic, and religious institutions-each in clear, functional relationship to the harbors, to the domestic quarters, and to the city's landward communications. The very modest provision for temples is partly explained by the fact that the Milesians great sanctuary, the Didymaion, lay some miles outside the city, to the south. A feature that distinguishes this from most Greek plans is the very limited use of wider, arterial avenues-only one in the north quarter and two in the south. The fact that the fifth-century defenses enclosed, but werenot organically related to, the inhabited area is, on the other hand, characteristic of Greek planning at all periods. This was an amibitious plan, and many generations were to pass before it could be fully taken up. But as the city prospered and grew, so its various parts were able to develop freely and easily within the framework that hab been prepared for them. This first area to be developed architecturally was the North Agora. Figure 9(I'll get the figures later) shows this as it appeared at the end of the forth century. A long stoa, with offices and magazines opening off it, fronted on to the harbor. Attached

to it in the rear was a square colonnaded court, and behind this a large public building, perhaps the prytaneion(for public hospitality). A short projecting wing at the west end of the stoa balanced the enclosure of the shrine of Apollo Delphinos. The South Agora did not take shape unitl the following century, in this case as a vast near symmetrical, rectangular open space framed by stoas. To the north of it lay the council chamber(blouleuterion), added between 175 and 164 B.C.; the open space linking the two agoras was given architectural shape by a southward extension of the North Agora buildings and the addition, opposite it, of a gymnasium. In all of this one can detect two complementary tendencies. One (which reached full fruition only in the Roman period) was towards the development of significant architectural relationships between the individual public buildings, which initially had been treated as virtually independent units, well-sited for convenience of use but with little or nos sense of any broader visual unities. The other was the emergence of a certain feeling for symmetry, notably in the development of the U-shaped stoas so characteristic of later Hellenistic planning; but the symmetry is never forced, and there is a studied avoidance of axial monumentality. This sort of layout was the natural, almost inevitable, result of adapting such familiar building types as the stoa to teh framework established by the initial orthogonal plan. It was functional, effective, at times rather dull, but with the saving virtue of good manners, thanks to the consistent use of traditional materials within a broadly conservative architectural tradition. For a picture of the domestic quarter of one of these planned Greek cities we have to turn to Olynthus or Priene. At OIynthus, an ancient hilltop city of typically irregular plan in northern Greece, a spacious new quarter was laid out about 432 B.C., with several broad avenues running north and south, intersected at regular intervals by numerous smaller cross streets running east and west. The individual blocks meastured 120 by 300 Attic feet, and contained ten houses of equal size, laid out, five and five, with a narrow alleyway between. Although no two houses are exactly alike, all conform to a recognizable type, with the main rooms facing south across a courtyard. At Priene the blocks measured 120 by 160 feet, and the individual houses, initially planned as four to a block, were far more varied. The overall plan, though based on the same principles, could hardly have been more different in its effect. Built about the middle of the fourth century on the steep lower slopes of Mount Micale, it illustrated how ingeniously and attractively orthogonal "gridiorn" planning could be applied to a highly improbably site. Many of the cross streets were steep flights of steps, but there was excellent east-to-west communication along the slopes, the principle streets being wider than the rest. (There are many analogies here with sixteenth-century Valleta.) The agora occupied a central terraced area, overlooking the gymnasium (for which space was reserved outside the formal layout, just inside the walls), and it was itself overlooked at the splendidly sited Temple of Athena and by the theater. Behind these again the acropolis, towering 1,000 feet above, formed a magnificent backdrop. As a Miletus, the defenses were quite independent of the street plan.

Rhodes and Knidos tow other well-attested examples of classical Greek planning. Rhodes, founded in 408-7 B.C., is another instance of an ambitious orthogonal layout based on broad avenues(in one case 16 meters wise) which intersect to form 600-foot squares, which in turn were subdivided by narrower streets into smaller, rectangular blocks. The site chosen, ringed with hills and shelving down towards the harbors, embraced more than two kilometers of formal layout in either direction, with the city blocks terraced up the slopes like the seats of a theater. An elaborate system of street drainange, if original, is the earliest attested example of its type in the Greek world. Knidos, just across the water from Rhodes and perhaps half a century later, is in plan a bigger and better Priene, with the sea thrown in for good measure. Between them Rhodes and Knidos exemplify the best of "Hippodamian" planning, making full use of the visual possibilities of a varied terrain but as yet unaffected by the more flexible schemes discussed in the next chapter, of which Pergamon is the outstanding surviving representative. And where does Hippodamos himself stand in all this? The main lines of the planning formula which antiquity associated with his name are clear enough, as exemplified at Olynthus, Priene, Knidos, and Rhodes(but not, ironically, at Miletus, the almost-square, checkerboard scheme of which is uncharacteristic of Greek planning). He certainly did not invent it, but he may well have rationalized and codified it. Nor must one overlook the evidence of Aristotle, cited above. A constitutional theorist who, in the best tradition of Ionian speculative science and philosophy, "invented the divisions of the cities by classes" was surely quite as much concerned with the physical expression of political and social needs as with geometry and landscaping. His one certainly attested work, the laying out of Peraeus, the port of Athens, after the Persian Wars, does not in fact appear to have been primarily a work of zoning. The area is overlaid with modern building, but by a large number of official boundary stones (horoi). The first and epigraphically earlier series delimits the several areas reserved for public use: the commercial port(emporion), the military port, and such other public utilities as the agora and religious sanctuaries. This is followed by a series representative of the individual buildings which in due course were erected within these areas. The colony of Thurii, in the foundation of which Hippodamos participated, was unusual in being drawn from many parts of Greece, rather than from a single city, and it is a reasonable guess that the element of idealism and its resulting problems appealed to Hippodamos, who must surely have taken an active part in the initial planning. The establishment of the colony is described in some detail by Diodorus(XII, 10): the ritual consultation of the oracle (religion); the location of a spring(water suplly); the building around it of a wall (defense); the laying out of a grid of broad avenues (plateiai)-four in one direction and three in the others at right angles to them(primary zoning); and finally the development of this scheme by the building of houses, served by lesser streets(stenopoi). Nothing is said specifically of the reservation of public land within the city nor-except by implication in the terms of the oracle-of the divisions of the lands outside it, but otherwise this is a

remarkably explicit statement of the priorities and procedures of the building of a new Greek city. What legislation was there to order and to maintain such a city? From a very early date every city must have had laws regulating such matters as public and private property, but (such being the Greek termperament) no two were exactly alike. Nevertheless, just as the fifth century saw the emergence of a widely accepted norm of "Hippodamian" planning practice, to be applied as local circumstance dictated, so works of Plato and Aristotle reflect at a theoretical level the emergence in contemporary usage of certain widely accepted principles and practices. Among these we find a basic distinction between public and private property(often including a right of expropriation when in the public interest); the nomination of magistrates (usually called astynomoi) to supervise the public domain, including such vital services as streets, water supply and drainage; other magistrates (agoranomoi) to supervise the markets and other commercial activities; sometimes an architect to maintain public buildings (as distinct from the erection of new buildings, which were usuaully the object of special legislation); and a mass of detailed provisions regulating the uses and abuses of private property. Among the surviving texts there is one that sets out in extraordinary detail the functions of the astynomoi of Hellenistic Pergamon. Another records the procedures for a formal enlargement of the city of Colophon in Ionia in the late forth century B.C.; the nomination of a supervisory commission, the performance of religious rites, the preparation of plans for the new walls, the choice of an architect to build them and to lay out the new street plan, the raising of funds, the reservation of "a site for the agora, for the workshops, and for all necessary public land," and provision for the sale of the remainder. So much of our knowledge come inevitably from the study of the monuments that it is all the more precious when the curtain lifts briefly to reveal something of the attitudes and preoccupations of the men who built them.

4. The Cities of Hellenistic Asia Minor and Syria The meteoric career of Alexander the Great left an indelible mark on every aspect of the political, social, and economic life of his time. The familiar world of the selfcontained city-state was dead. Men were faced with vast new horizons, new commercial opportunities and markets, new social and religious problems and preoccupations. Prominent among the latter was the mutual influence of Greek though and ways and those of the time-old cultures of the ancient East. Nothing could ever be quite the same again. Town planning was no exception. Within the resulting development one can distinguish two broadly contrasting currents. One, rooted in the long-standing Hellenistic traditions of Asia Minor and outstandingly exemplified by Attalid Pergamon, was an ultimate monumentalization of the old, freely developing Greek city, with or without benefit of the currently fashionable "Hippodamian" practices. The other, represented in the new Greek cities that were everywhere established in the freshly conquered lands of Egypt, Syria, and beyond, embodied the accumulated experience of centuries of colonization among alien peoples. Inevitably the two currents were to meet and mingle, and at the level of their individual component elements they already had a great deal in common, but in terms of the total resulting effect they are poles apart. Pergamon is one of the most extraordinary success stories of antiquity. Out of the political turmoil following Alexander's death in 323 B.C. it emerged during the third century as the capital of a powerful kingdom and, notably under Eumenes II (197-159 B.C.), was one of the major artistic centers of the Hellenistic world. The site is a magnificent one-a detached, elongated eminence, defended on three sides by plunging slopes and only on the fourth side shelving more gently down from the citadel at the north end towards the plain of the river Kaikos, some 900 feet below. The Hellenistic town occupied the crest and southern slopes. A single main street wound its way from the main south gate up to the citadel. Freely grouped along it there was, on the lower slopes, a monumental, terraced quarter comprising an agora, gymnasia, and a grandiose sanctuary of Demeter; on the open middle slopes a residential quarter still largely excavated; and along the summit, facing out westwards across the theater, the second group of monumental, terraced structures which constitutes the upper city. A glance at the plan of the upper city will suffice to show that, although it was not the product of a predisposed plan but of a process of progressive creation over a period of about a century(indeed the last comer, the Temple of Trajan, was added nearly 300 years later), these buildings managed to achieve a remarkable unity of architectural intent. The successive terraces grew naturally out of the landscape; the theater, the focal point of the finished design, fits, like the pivot of a fan, into a

shallow natural reentrant that might have been designed for it; and-a master strokethe long horizontal of the theater portico, with its massive buttresses, gives a solid basis and a point of reference to the steady buildup of the terraces above. Greek architects had long been masters at siting individual buildings, often on dominating platforms; the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the Parthenon are outstanding examples. But the monumental organization of a whole complex of terraced buildings, the individual elements of which were deliberately played down so as to accentuate the organic unity of the whole-this was something quite new. The details confirm the deliberate inention of its creators: for example, the linking of the successive levels of the terraced terrain by means of porticoes of two or even three stories opening off the different levels; or again, the choice of the functional sobriety of the Doric order for all but the details of the temples and of secondary orders. This was a consciously landscaped architecture, all the more remarkable for being the creation, not of a single genius, but of a succession of anonymous working architects. That these builders of Attalid Pergamon were the creators of such a tradition of monumentally conceived, landscaped grouping we may reasonably doubt. Perhaps it was Rhodes which first turned men's thoughts in this direction. Though laid out on strict Hippodamian lines, with a much-admired grid of fine avenues and streets, its adaptation to a site which Diodorus(XIX,45) likens a theater must inevitably have involved a lot of terraced landscaping. From this it was only a step-though a vital step-to a more freely articulated sort of urbanistic landscaping, in which streets and buildings were designed to exploit and to enhance the natural movement of the terrain; and it may well be that, as Martin has suggested, this step was taken in another new city, Halikarnassos, a neighbor of Rhodes, on the mainland barely a hundred miles to the northwest. Here Maussolos, the native dynast of Karia, established his new capital in the second quarter of the fourth century B.C. The ancient buildings, alas, are gone; but one can still admire the site-a peninsular and rocky point enclosing a sheltered, semicircular bay-and we have Vitruvius' appreciative description of the skill with which Maussolos developed its natural advantages. "Like a theater," he remarks (II,8,42), with teh agora at the foot, beside the harbor; crowning the right-hand point a temple of Aphrodite and Hermes, and on the promontory opposite, where now stands the splendid crusader castle, the palace of Maussolos; on the summit of the acropolis a sanctuary and a colossal statue of Ares and, halfway up the slopes, unifying the whole, a broad, curving avenue, dominated centrally by the towering bulk of the Mausoleum. There seem to have been two distinct novelties about this creation: the one a selfconscious rationalization and extension of the innate Greek sensibility for the siting individuals buildings within a landscape; the other incorporation within such a setting of a dominating, artificially sited countermotif-the Mausoleum. It is probably no accident that this was the work of a Hellenized "barbarian," the representative of a monarch in the far-off East, where there was a time-old tradition of such man-made architectural "wonders." Be that as it may, the history of fourth

century and later planning in Asia Minor is very largely one of the contrapuntal development of these two themes, alongside and interwoven with that of Hippodamian planning. Aigai, Assos, Priene, Alinda, Labranda, Pisidian Antioch, Sagalassos, Termessos, Kremna, Attaleia(Antalya)-the mixture varies, but right down to and into Roman times these were lively, influential forces within the urban scene. In Syria and in Egypt Alexander and his successors were faced with a very different problem. Their task was to establish centers of Greek military and political authority in lands with a long but totally urban civilization. Since to a Greek the city was the only thinkable Hellenic component of the creative dialogue between East and West which it was Alexander's dream to create, in almost every case the only practical solution was to establish new cities (Alexander himself is credited by Plutarch(Alex. I,5) with foundting no less than seventy, among them Alexandria itself), and almost inevitably the models followed were those of orthodox Greek colonial planning. They did their work well. Many of these cities have been continuously occupied every since, and we should known little of their original layout were it not that, once established, their streets plans proved remarkably tenacious and can still be determined in considerable detail by the study of their later classical or modern successors. Of the cities founded in Syria and Mesopotamia by Seleucus Nicator(312-280 B.C.), Seleucia, joint capital and successor to Babylon, still awaits exploration; but enough is known of Antioch itself, Damascus, Laodiceia(Latakieh), Apamea and Beroea(Aleppo) to show that they conformed to a very simple standard type, consisting essentially of a network of uniform city blocks, each roughly twice as broad as long and set at rights angles to the main axis of an orthogonal grid of streets. Open spaces were reserved for the agora and certain public buildings (at Damascus, for example, the great temple), and the whole was loosely enclosed wtihin a circuit of walls, the siting of which was normally quite independent of the street plan. One or more of the longitudinal(and on occasion of the transverse) streets were usually wider than the rest. Such were the axial avenue of Antioch(subsequently colonnaded by Herod the Great) and "the Street called Straight" of St. Paul's Damascus(Acts of the Apostles, IX, 11). For a fuller picture of one of these Seleucid cities we can fortunately turn to the remains of Dura-Europos, a fortress and commerical entrept on the banks of the Euphrates, midway between Seleucia and Antioch. Founded about 300 B.C. and destroyed shortly after A.D. 250, the city occupied a broad promontory of level group which commanded both the river and the caravan route up the south bank. The initial plan was of an extreme simplicity-a grid of nine longitudinal and twelve transverse streets enclosing between sixty and seventy city blocks, each measuring 100 by 200 feet. The streets were all 18 feet wide except for one longitudinal avenue(36 feet) and the fourth and eighth transverse streets(24 feet), between which, at the center of the town, an area of eight blocks were reserved for the agora

and its associated buildings. Any other public buildings were to be housed within the individual city blocks. The fortress occupied an independent bluff overlooking the river, and the city walls zigzagged along the cliffs of two steep side valleys. Only across the flat landward side did they follow an arbitrary line, and even here they were allowed to diverge slightly from the alignment of the adjoining street. The total area enclosed was about 150 acres, and except at the single landward gate the walls and the street plan were distinct, uncoordinated entities. The sudden destruction of Dura in antiquity, and its systematic excavation in modern times, afford a rare glimpse of the efficacy of the original planning. On the whole it comes well out of the test. As one would expect, the fortress and walls were promptly completed and efficiently maintained through the successive stages of Seleucid Greek, Parthian, and, for the last seventy years, Roman rule, when it housed the commander of the Euphrates river frontier and a garrison. On the civil side the dream of Hellenizing the Orient had faded rapidly. Few of the projected Greek-style public buildings were completed, and even the city center, as finally built, was a compromise, occupying barely half the space originally allotted. The temples of the last three centuries were all traditionally Eastern buildings dedicated to Oriental divinities, including for good measure a synagogue and a church; and by A.D. 250 the monumental buildings of the agora had been engulfed by the warrenlike structures of an Oriental bazaar. Except for thin top-dressing of Roman buildings(barracks, baths, a small open market squar) the East had claimed its own. On the other hand the street plan had proved as effective as it was simple, and it was in full use right down to the end. Individual city blocks were remodeled as needed and others were pushed out into the open ground, but the overall plan was respected. This may not have been in detail the city the founders envisaged, but it still worked.