The Translation of Republic 606A3–B5 and Plato’s Partite Psychology

In this paper I discuss a line in Plato’s description of his ‘greatest accusation’ against imitative poetry: that it corrupts even ‘decent people’ (τοὺς ἐπιεικεῖς). Decent people are those who have largely true ethical beliefs and largely abide by them in their behaviour, but who also, because they have been ‘insufficiently educated in reason and habit’ (606a7–8), fall short of being truly virtuous, in two respects: they only have true ethical beliefs, not ethical knowledge, and at times they can only abide by their beliefs by restraining unruly passions.The line I am going to discuss, 606a3–b5, explains how imitative poetry strengthens these unruly passions until they can no longer be restrained. This line is central to Plato’s account of how poetry corrupts its audience and is one of the Republic’s most complex and interesting applications of his partite psychology, but, unfortunately, it is also not an easy line to understand: it introduces, at least implicitly, a partite analysis of a reflexive attitude—a thought a person has about themselves—that is not only difficult in itself, but further obscured by an ambiguity in the relevant reflexive pronoun, ἑαυτῷ: either ‘itself ’ or ‘himself ’. This is a small word, but one on which the meaning of the sentence pivots, as does, consequently, our understanding of Plato’s accusation against imitative poetry.