The City of Pigs: A key passage in Plato's Republic

Abstract

The passage in Book II of the Republic describing what Glaucon, one of Socrates'main interlocutors, dismisses as a city fit only for pigs is in fact centralfor Plato's strategy in the dialogue as a whole. Plato's Socrates actually calls this city the 'true' and 'healthy' city, and so, the essay argues, it is, for Plato as well as for Socrates. The 'beautiful city', Callipolis, that Socrates goes on to construct in much of the rest of the Republic is, by implication, less than a 'true' city, and the accounts of the soul and of justice that come to be based on it (i.e., in Book IV) are, equally, not accounts of the soul, or of justice, as they truly are. In its true and essential nature neither city nor soul is divided into parts, whether conflicting or cooperating, and neither therefore can justice ultimately be defined, i.e., in its true nature, in terms of cooperation between parts of a divided soul. As we look back from Book X, the final book of the Republic, all of these points can be seen to be prefigured in the description of the 'city of pigs' and its immediate sequel.