This article argues against readings that tend to overlook, dismiss or reduce the profound role of poetry and myth in Plato’s Republic. It discusses and rejects the distinction between myth and poetry that we find in such readings. Then it makes the case for the irreducibility of poetry. Crucially, poetry determines both the state and the frame of mind of the dialogue’s interlocutors, and we can expect it to do the same for the Kallipoleans. The attraction of the irrational part (...) of the soul to imitative poetry entails that imitation is both beneficial and pleasant. In the last section of the article it is argued that myths, understood as false stories, play a significant role in early education. This education constitutes a critical juncture and sets up a path dependency in the lives it affects. Myths shape one’s motivational dispositions, preserve true opinions, and facilitate communicative understanding. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the role the household ( oikos) plays in Isocrates through an exegesis of the author's letters to his erstwhile student and current monarch of Salamis of Cyprus, Nicocles. The monarch's household has a threefold role in the relationship between the elite ruler and his subjects. First, as the locus of his ancestors and their achievements, it offers competitors to Nicocles to be surpassed and a known standard for his subjects to judge their ruler. Second, as (...) the source of the monarch's public outlay, the household is a means by which Nicocles can appear magnificent; at the same time, however, he should be wary lest his subjects judge him ostentatious. Third, Nicocles invites his subjects to judge his conjugal behavior, offering it as evidence of his moderation. I conclude my argument with a challenge to an interpretation of the relationship between the few and the many as a contract; rather, this relationship is better characterized through the metaphor of service ( therapeia) drawn from the household. Isocratean political thought treats private and public domains as continuous with one another, regarding participation in political institutions as neither necessary nor sufficient to achieving good political judgment. (shrink)