Socrates Lifestyle In The Just City

Socrates presents a lengthy discussion about the lifestyle of the guardians. Socrates states that females will be raised and taught together with males, receiving the same education and taking on the same political roles. This method will benefit the ideal city. Socrates then deliberates the necessity that all spouses and children be held in common. For guardians, sexual intercourse will only take place during certain fixed times of year, designated as festivals. Males and females will be made husband and wife at these festivals for roughly the duration of sexual intercourse. The pairings will be determined by lot. Some of these people, those who are most admirable and thus whom we most wish to reproduce might have up to four or five spouses

in a single one of these festivals. All the children produced by these mating festivals will be taken from their parents and reared together, so that no one knows which children descend from which adults. At no other time in the year is sex permitted. If guardians have sex at an undesignated time and a child results, the understanding is that this child must be killed. To avoid rampant unintentional incest, guardians must consider every child born between seven and ten months after their copulation as their own. These children, in turn, must consider that same group of adults as their parents, and each other as brothers and sisters. Sexual relations between these groups are forbidden. Socrates explains that these rules of procreation are the only way to ensure a unified city. In most cities the citizens’ loyalty is divided. They care about the good of the whole, but they care even more about their own family. In the just city, everyone is considered as family and treated as such.

There are no divided loyalties. As Socrates puts it, everyone in the city says “mine” about the same things. The city is unified because it shares all its aims and concerns. The final question to be asked is whether this is a plausible requirement—whether anyone can be asked to adhere to this lifestyle, with no family ties, no wealth, and no romantic interludes. We might ask why common families are limited to the guardian class. Given that this arrangement is offered as a guarantee for loyalty, a preemptive strike against divided loyalties, why should it only apply to this class of society? The first thing to point out in relation to this topic is that the restrictions on family life are probably meant to apply to both the guardian and the auxiliary classes. These two classes are, after all, raised and educated together until adolescence when the rulers are chosen out as the best among the group, so chances are that their lifestyles are the same as well. Plato is often chaotic with the term “guardian,” using it to apply sometimes only to the rulers and other times to both rulers and warriors. It is likely that the restriction on personal wealth also applies to

auxiliaries.