The education of the guardians

The new city needs soldiers, and soldiers — Socrates says — are dangerous. They are bred for war; without careful training, they turn that ferocity inward against their own people. The guardians must therefore be educated to be like good guard-dogs: fierce to strangers, gentle to those they know. The whole question of education in the Republic begins from this practical problem.

Education, in early Greece, meant two things: mousike (the arts — poetry, song, dance, story) and gymnastics. Socrates spends most of Book Three on the first. The stories the young guardians grow up on shape what they will love, what they will fear, what they will reach for in a crisis. Homer, as he stands, will not do. Gods who lie to mortals; heroes who weep over their dead in the underworld; warriors who flinch at death — all of these train the wrong reflexes. The stories must be censored. The poets must say only that gods are good and the underworld is not to be feared. Socrates is unapologetic about this. The guardians will become what they hear about.

Gymnastics gets briefer treatment but the same logic. Diet, discipline, the body trained for service rather than display. By the end of the book Socrates introduces the "noble lie": the foundational myth they will tell the citizens of the new city. They will say that all citizens were born from the earth itself — brothers — but that the gods mixed gold into the souls of those born to rule, silver into the auxiliaries, and bronze into the producers. It is a story they know to be false, and they will tell it anyway because the city needs it. Plato is unembarrassed; the philosopher has read the world too clearly to pretend otherwise.