This chapter contains section titled: Cephalus and Socratic Piety Plato's New Gods Platonic Piety Forms and Gods Gods and Souls.

In response to Howland’s paper, this seeks to place the focal point of the battle of Munichia in the archaeological remains of Piraeus and what is known of the location of the sanctuary of Bendis. It also considers whether the battle that took place around Munichia would have had sufficient verbal and historical resonance to evoke memory by the framing of the Republic.

In this book, author Gene Fendt shows how Plato's Republic provides a liturgical purification for the political and psychic delusions of democratic readers, even as Socrates provides the same for his interlocutors at the festival of Bendis. Each of the several characters is analyzed in accord with Book Eight's 6 geometrically possible kinds of character showing how their answers and failures in the dialogue exhibit the particular kind of movement and blindness predictable for the type.

The absence of any discussion of the virtue of piety in Plato’s Republic has been much remarked, but there are textual clues by which to recognize its importance for Plato’s construction and for the book’s intended effect. This dialogue is Socrates’s repetition, on the day after the first festival of Bendis, of a liturgical action that he undertook—at his own expense, at the “vote” of his “city”—on the previous day. Socrates’s activity in repeating it the next day is an (...) “ethological” mimesis of properly pious liturgy. In the course of that liturgy we find that piety is specifically discussed, but in a mirror, and darkly. The mirror of piety is the laws about stories of the gods. The absence is in the discussion of the best city, that is, one above aristocracy. (shrink)