Plato the Novelist: The Family Saga in Republic 8–9

Abstract

In Republic 8–9, Socrates explains how the kallipolis develops into a series of flawed regimes. Each regime is said to have a corresponding soul type; these souls are described as a lineage of fathers and sons. Socrates, then, narrates not only a political story, but what is in effect a multigenerational family saga: the story of a moral decline and fall over the course of five generations, set amidst political turmoil and revolution, covering roughly a century of narrative ground from its start in tragicomedy to its end in disaster. What are the implications of this choice to convey the change from kallipolis to tyranny through such an emotionally charged narrative? As a hybrid of generic conventions, the family saga suggests Plato’s view that existing cultural models were insufficient for understanding and reacting to constitutional breakdown. I consider two accounts Socrates offers for the relationship between his family and political narratives, discussing the interpretive difficulties raised by each, and proposing that these difficulties oblige the reader to attend closely to the details of character and plot in Socrates’s story. I treat the family saga less as an explanation of constitutional breakdown than as an affective model that attempts to make such a breakdown emotionally vivid—one that is nevertheless consistent with the Republic’s strict limits on imitative poetry. Finally, I consider the kinds of political action that the family saga might motivate in the Republic’s readers, under three sets of assumptions about Plato’s attitudes toward Athenian democracy and the kallipolis.