The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck, such that they cannot move nor turn their heads to look around. There is a fire behind them, and between these prisoners and the fire, there is a low wall.
Rather like a shadow puppet play, objects are carried before the fire, from behind the low wall, casting shadows on the wall of the cave for the prisoners to see. Those carrying the objects may be talking, or making noises, or they may be silent. What might the prisoners make of these shadows, of the noises, when they can never turn their heads to see the objects or what is behind them?
Socrates and Glaucon agree that the prisoners would believe the shadows are making the sounds they hear. They imagine the prisoners playing games that include naming and identifying the shadows as objects — such as a book, for instance — when its corresponding shadow flickers against the cave wall.
After suggesting that these prisoners are much like us — like all human beings — the narrative continues. Socrates tells of one prisoner being unshackled and released, turning to see the low wall, the objects that cast the shadows, the source of the noises as well as the fire.
This first stage of freedom is further enhanced as the former prisoner leaves the cave they must be forced, as they do not wish to leave that which they know , initially painfully blinded by the bright light of the sun. The liberated one stumbles around, looking firstly only at reflections of things, such as in the water, then at the flowers and trees themselves, and, eventually, at the sun.
They would feel as though they now have an even better understanding of the world. Yet, if this same person returned to the dimly lit cave, they would struggle to see what they previously took for granted as all that existed. They may no longer be any good at the game of guessing what the shadows were — because they are only pale imitations of actual objects in the world.
The other prisoners may pity them, thinking they have lost rather than gained knowledge. If this free individual tried to tell the other prisoners of what they had seen, would they be believed? Could they ever return to be like the others? The remaining prisoners certainly would not wish to be like the individual who returned, suddenly not knowing anything about the shadows on the cave wall!
Socrates concludes that the prisoners would surely try to kill one who tried to release them, forcing them into the painful, glaring sun, talking of such things that had never been seen or experienced by those in the cave. There are multiple readings of this allegory. The text demonstrates that the Idea of the Good Plato capitalises these concepts in order to elevate their significance and refer to the idea in itself rather than any one particular instantiation of that concept , which we are all seeking, is only grasped with much effort.
Our initial experience is only of the good as reflected in an earthly, embodied manner. He shares this news with his family only to realize that they are concerned with inheritance. It is at this stage that he comes to realize that human existence is a very lonely experience and asks, for the very first time, if he lived his life wrongly, and if so, could he have lived in a different way. Or, very much like Gilgamesh who upon the passing of his friend Enkidu comes yearn for a deeper understanding of life.
There is also a story told to us by Kierkegaard about the man on the death bed who comes to realize after his friends and family leave that he is all alone and only he himself must realize the answers to the philosophical questions. There are countless such stories that bring about this first stage, a life changing event. And, though they speak the same language, they, however, attach different meanings and emotions to the words.
At this juncture he understands why Zeus, for example, took away language, the gift he first bestowed to humanity. It is because Zeus saw that that people are unable to use this communicative tool properly. Language, in the Hindu tradition, is gifted to human beings by the goddess Vac. Vac, enters the human consciousness so that human can utter divine language.
Knowing the he is no longer able to communicate with his community the seeker begins to examine the nature of friendship only to come to the same conclusion of Aristotle. There are only three kinds of friendship: one of Pleasure, one of Utility and one of Nobility or Excellence, which is very rare to find. While in this first category, the seeker begins to examine life and finds very much the Schopenhauerian outlook: Human beings are like mosquitoes that go in circles: they mate, produce and die.
All this absurdity takes place only within a day! In the first picture, Childhood, there is a boy in a boat jumping joyously because he now exists.
In the second picture, Youth, he has a one leg in front and one hand pointing to the sky subtly suggesting that nothing can stop him from reaching his desires. In both of these pictures that waters are calm, but this is not to remain so for long. In the third picture, his hair is long and his face bearded. He is approaching a waterfall in a sea that is no longer calm. In the final picture, all his hair is gone and he is seating in this boat.
Life has beaten him and death is upon him. Perhaps the seeker sees humanity as the absurd hero Sisyphus who was first condemned to have eternal life and was given only one task: to push a rock up a hill and throw it over.
Once close to the top, Sisyphus is completely exhausted which makes the rock weight many times heavier. At this point all that he can do is helplessly watch the rock roll back to its original place. The rock, of course, is nothing but human desires that give man the illusion that once a particular desire has been attained happiness too will be at hand. Once the illusion disappears, however, man sees himself at the bottom of this hill chasing another desire. It is clear how difficult life can become inside the cave when such questions are asked.
It ultimately leads to a profound alienation. Once this takes place, which is the first category, one ultimately finds oneself in the presence of the Greek goddess Chaos. Chaos, of course, does not mean disorder, but simply Empty Space or Void. Interesting to note that Chaos has two children: Night and Darkness who mate and have a child whose name just happens to be Light. In other words, if the semi-liberated can endure this difficult and alienating period, Light or enlightenment will take place.
Once, he has stepped out of the cave, however, there is this feeling that he must share his experience with his friends. Entering the cave or the world once again to share his insight with others he comes to realize that that humanity resembles to that of man with an arrow in his back.
The story in Buddhism has it that there is a man walking and an arrow, a poisonous arrow enters into his back. People rush him to the doctor who wants to pull the arrow out only to realize that the wounded man asks a stupid question such as the color, the length, the width and the make of the arrow.
The doctor is, of course, is the person who has journeyed to the outside of the cave and the man with the arrow could be Ivan Ilych, Gilgamesh, Sisyphus, or humanity itself, that ask foolish questions. Yet, this reading is not only apparently the most natural way to interpret Plato here, it is, in fact, the way that he himself seems to be explicitly recommending. After Socrates describes the Cave, he urges Glaucon to fit the whole image together with what was said before cf b.
This looks as if Socrates is suggesting that the Cave should be understood as complementing the scheme he had just introduced through the image of the Line, which in turn was developed as an extension of the image of the Sun. Plato wants us to see the three images as somehow fitting together into a coherent whole.
The Cave, then, is usually assumed to be restating the same point that was made by the other images, namely, that of distinguishing the various features of our epistemological makeup and the different objects that we may come to know in the world.
To be sure, the Cave adds a new dimension to the discussion because it throws in the mix a claim about our human condition and its relation to our epistemological constitution. The drama of our lives is that we are born in chains, fettered to a world of appearances that condemns us to a situation in which our beliefs will forever be no more than shadows of the truth unless philosophy comes to our aid and helps us escape this wretched sensible world of deception, so that we can contemplate the intelligible Forms that are the real essence of all truth and reality.
But, perhaps not surprisingly, trying to follow this line of approach has proven notoriously difficult. The images seem to defy harmony. It is very hard to see how exactly they are supposed to correspond with and to each other. In particular, it seems impossible to map the Line and the Cave onto one another without ultimately undermining the alleged message each tries to convey on its own. The natural way to fit them together is to suppose that the prisoners are in the state depicted by the lowest level of the Line, that of eikasia imaging.
But when we couple this with the notion that the prisoners are supposed to be representing the natural human condition, the images conflict: eikasia cannot simply be what the Line tells us it is, because literally looking at reflections is something that ordinary human beings seem to spend very little time doing.
Hence, in what appears to be a direct defiance of the Line, eikasia must be understood more broadly in order for it to fit the message of the Cave. To be sure, I am not trying to suggest that this problem is completely insurmountable. As was mentioned, commentators have attempted many ingenious strategies for coping with these and other difficulties.
But it is an unquestionable fact that all such readings take their point of departure from a universally recognized prima facie clash between the images. The task of these readings is precisely to find a way in which to dispel this initial incongruence. In my mind, charity demands that we adopt a default presumption in favor of any interpretation that can circumvent this problem altogether by showing us that the images do not need to clash because there is really no dissonance to begin with: Plato did not intend for us to relate the images in the way that traditional approaches have assumed.
For this reason, I shall not spend time trying to discuss or evaluate the merits and shortcomings of these traditional approaches. My aim here will be to take a few steps back and ask whether the starting assumptions that we usually take for granted, and that unavoidably push us in the direction of trying to find a parallelism between the two images, are really well founded, or whether instead we may have been mistaken about their true import in a way that has blinded us to the fact that, through the allegory of the Cave, Plato does not really want us to focus so much on the epistemological situation of the human being, but on his political situation instead.
After all, if we were to approach the whole image without presuppositions and follow Socrates's description up to the point prior to his telling us to fit the image with what was said before, I submit that our most obvious reaction would be to take the whole image to be portraying a political drama of some kind. It traffics with what seem to me to be obvious political concepts and themes, such as imprisonment and liberation cf ad ; compulsion and force cf e ; competition, honors, praises, prizes, and power cf ca ; veiled suggestions of revolutionary overthrow that is punishable by death cf a ; perhaps even manipulation, since some people inside the cave seem to be able to roam free and have a direct hand in what the prisoners can see and hear cf b-c ; and so on.
Ferguson will be forever right in remarking that all signs point to the cave being contrived by human hands for human purposes cf 16 ; a point and an insight to which I will return shortly. If we ever take our eyes off the political dimension of the whole drama, and turn them in the direction of some alleged epistemological predicament of the human condition as such, it is only because we take Socrates's injunction to fit the image with what said before to mean an explicit instruction to find a one-to-one correspondence with the Line.
Of course, there are other assumptions that militate in favor of reading the aforementioned injunction in this way, and that may seem quite natural for commentators to make in response to other things Socrates says when describing the Cave. Two in particular are especially important in this regard: the first, is that the prisoners represent the general and natural condition of human beings; and the second, is that the cave itself represents the world of ordinary experience, while the world outside of the cave corresponds to the intelligible realm of the Forms.
Both claims support and complement each other, but ultimately, in my view, they are not really well founded. Let me begin with the first claim. Why do commentators readily assume that the prisoners represent ordinary human beings?
I take it they do so because it seems the most natural way of interpreting Socrates's statement that the prisoners are "like us" cf a. But notice that the statement itself is very ambiguous in this respect. In its most literal reading, the statement would compel us to only say for certain that the prisoners are like Socrates and Glaucon, and perhaps the other interlocutors who have been following the conversation thus far.
What is much less certain, and takes us beyond the immediate sense of the claim, is that the respect in which Socrates takes the prisoners to be like him, and perhaps like the others present at the conversation, is that of representing his and their humanity broadly construed.
After all, if that had been Socrates's intention why did he not simply say that the prisoners are "like all human beings" or that they are "like all of us"? If -as is only natural- they are seen as also representing human beings in some way, then it becomes obvious that, at best, the prisoners must be symbolizing a majority of people, and doing so in some special respect. This concession, however, is enough to realize that the claim that the prisoners represent ordinary human beings cannot be accepted without qualification: there is something extra-ordinary about their situation.
We must, therefore, ask a new the question of whom the prisoners are supposed to be representing. Since the only thing that Socrates says for certain is that they are like him and Glaucon, and perhaps his other interlocutors, the proper question to ask is what is it that those people have in common?
The answer, I think, is that they are all philosophically minded people who are inquiring about justice and the good life. This fits very nicely with the only comment Socrates makes about the content of the shadows that the prisoners are seeing on the wall, namely, that they are shadows of justice cf d. It appears that the prisoners, like Socrates and his interlocutors, are also interested in justice and in the good life. Of course, there is a difference between them: though the prisoners can talk among themselves and, indeed, as Socrates at some point tells us, can honor, praise, and give prizes to one another for being the sharpest at identifying the shadows and remembering and predicting their order of appearance cf.
Socrates and his interlocutors, on the other hand, are consciously trying to lay hold of justice itself, and, at this point in the dialogue, they certainly know that theirs is an elusive prey.
However, this difference aside, the important thing is that the prisoners share a common interest with Socrates and his interlocutors: they want to know about virtue and the good life. If the prisoners are like philosophically minded people, a pressing question now emerges: why are they in shackles? And who are the people that are carrying the objects whose shadows they are seeing? It is clear from the way the image is constructed that they are in some way responsible for the bondage of the prisoners, or at the very least for their upbringing and education concerning the ethical matters treated by the shadows.
If we attend to the way Socrates describes the whole scene we will immediately notice several things: first, the prisoners are seeing imitations, some of which we know are imitations of justice; second, the people who are walking along the wall are not carrying real objects but simulations of natural objects; third, the relation of the prisoners to those people is like that of an audience to actors in a theater: the carriers are described as puppeteers who are putting on a show for the prisoners cf b.
The artistic quality of this set up is what I think stands out most from Socrates's description: the prisoners are watching a performance that seems to be primarily about virtue and human relations; precisely the kind of performance familiar to the type of Greeks Socrates is addressing, who were accustomed to have tragedies and comedies as part and parcel of their cultural milieu.
This is why we are explicitly told that the puppets themselves represent whether exclusively or primarily people and other animals cf b ; that is, the sorts of characters that would be needed to produce plays and dramas with moral content.
In fact, as Asli Gocer has argued, it is likely that Plato meant for this whole theatrical setup inside of the cave to not only evoke popular entertainment at large, but more specifically, to bring to mind the entire culture of comedy and, in particular, Aristophanic theatre cf Gocer This aspect of the Cave therefore foreshadows some things Socrates will say later in Book X about poets, playwrights, and other artists.
Notoriously, Socrates is there preoccupied with the nefarious effects of these arts on the philosophical spirit and on the ideal city. He tells us that, "all poetic imitators, beginning with Homer, imitate images of virtue and all the other things they write about and have no grasp of the truth" e, emphasis added ; and adds later on, that it is precisely because they do not know the truth, and they so easily influence the irrational side of the soul, that these imitators and their imitations are for the most part "able to corrupt even decent people" c.
The talk about corruption is significant here because we should recall that the Cave is, by Socrates's own account, concerned with education and its effect on the soul, which means that it is presumably also concerned with the effects of bad education.
The message Socrates seems to be trying to convey to his interlocutors here is that there is a kind of upbringing that keeps the philosophically inclined person imprisoned. As we find out later, such bad education is partly the result of the effects of poetic imitation on the soul, and in that respect, as I have said, the Cave points us forward to the last part of The Republic. Recall that Socrates urges Glaucon to fit the whole image with what was said before cf.
This is the place to comment a little more on this very ambiguous statement. For "what was said before" can be anything from the prior two images that had been discussed just a moment ago by Socrates and Glaucon, to the opening claims that were made at the very beginning of the whole dialogue. The phrase itself does not point us in any particular direction. Of course, the sentence that immediately follows this statement seems to settle the matter in a definitive direction, for it instructs us to liken the visible realm to the prison dwelling, and the fire burning inside of it to the power of the sun ibd.
This seems to be a clear reference to the Sun and the Line, with the added explicit instruction that we think of the inside of the cave the prison dwelling as standing for the visible realm, and hence for the two lower segments of the Line. I will discuss my disagreement with this implication later when I examine the second assumption that was mentioned above, namely, that the cave corresponds to the visible realm while the world outside the cave stands for the realm of the Forms.
For now, I want to draw attention to the fact that the injunction to fit the image with what was said before seems to have been worded in an intentionally ambiguous manner. It is, after all, a little suspicious that after having established a clear link between the prior two images, that of the Sun and the Line, by suggesting that the latter constitutes a more detailed examination of the former cf a , Socrates now gives us a very open-ended instruction to fit the image of the Cave with what was said before.
He could have spared his interlocutors this ambiguity by explicitly suggesting to Glaucon that he fit the Cave image with the prior two images. That he does not could be construed as an indication that he wants the attentive listener or reader to ask himself whether the strange drama of the Cave, that has just been described, might not be related to something else the group had been discussing earlier.
Indeed, in Book VI, not long before they started considering the images of the Sun and the Line, Socrates and his interlocutors had been debating the demerits of sophistic education. Especially, that education afforded by the greatest sophist of them all: the many. In that prior conversation, Socrates attacked the sophists and the many for corrupting the young and for educating them through compulsion cf ee.
The link between that prior discussion and the Cave is clearly discernible in the fact that both conversations are framed around the problem of education, which by Socrates's own admission is the central topic of the Cave cf a. Socrates's emphasis on the coercive nature of the sophistic education resonates strongly with his description of the Cave.
Take for instance, the passage in c where Socrates tells us that one of the distinctive marks of the many, is the use of public gatherings to comment on the various things that are said and done in a very loud manner, "so that the very rocks and surroundings echo the din of their praise or blame and double it" b-c. Later, in the image of the Cave, Socrates speaks of the voices of the carriers as also echoing in the rocky walls of the cave cf b. Indeed, this compulsion is so great that, should their words fail to influence, the many "punish anyone who isn't persuaded, with disenfranchisement, fines, or death" d.
The alternatives for the philosophically inclined seem plain: either be a slave or a prisoner of the sophists and educators whether the many, or individual sophists like Thrasymachus, who is present at the conversation , or be vanquished by them. To be sure, it cannot be said with certainty that these sophists have a malevolent intent in their teaching; this is especially true of the many, which at ec are described as a kind of mindless mob and a beast that is simply viscerally responding to its appetites, so that the pedagogical influence it exerts through its praise and blame seems to be instinctually driven.
Both private sophists and the sophistic multitude could be simply victims of their own ignorance. The emphasis is on the coercive nature of those methods not on whether there is an actual malicious aim behind them. The distinctive feature of those methods, at least in this first discussion on the effects of bad education, seems to be the practice of pandering to the appetitive side of the soul both of individuals and of the city at large through praise and blame, which is a feature that seems to echo the Cave's talk of honors, praises, and prizes among the prisoners.
Additionally, it should be observed that in this earlier discussion it is suggested that poets and craftsmen in general would be compelled to produce the things that the multitude praise cf d , which means that their artistic products only cater to the pleasures of the many and not to the truth. I have argued that the admonition to link the Cave with what was said before could be read as an invitation to recall Socrates's first pedagogical discussion in Book VI concerning the bad effects of sophistic education.
This discussion itself is conducted against the background of a prior argument in Books II and III regarding the correct education for the guardians in the ideal city, which, significantly, revolved around the bad influence of art on the young, and the urgency of finding an austere form of artistic education and storytelling that could better serve the real needs of the guardians and the citizens at large cf eb.
All this anticipates the more detailed discussion and criticism against art in Book X that I mentioned already. The Cave appears to be the central axis upon which all these different strands, coming from both the beginning and the end of The Republic, converge and are woven together into a strange drama that is predicated on the pernicious influence of current educators on the philosophically inclined soul, and on the necessity of instituting a genuine philosophical upbringing that can reform the city and liberate us from such bad cultural influences.
But following these connections between the Cave and Plato's ironic contention against the theatrical culture and the corrupting educational system of his time, leads us to another very notable place that clearly seems connected to this famous allegory, and that is likely meant to be part of the things that we are supposed to recall when Socrates urges us to link the Cave to what was said before.
It is a place that in its treatment of the topics of heroic liberation, of death and rebirth, and of Socrates's trial and execution, also confirms the supreme importance of political themes for the image of the Cave, an image that, as I have claimed, seems to be the real heart of the book as a whole and of all the discussions that precede and succeed it. Let me begin with the theme of liberation and Plato's portrayal of Socrates as a kind of heroic and revolutionary emancipator who is meant to enact the kind of reform needed to cleanse the city of its corrupt politics.
As commentators have noted, The Republic opens with a metaphor of descent and return that sets the stage for everything else that is to follow. Socrates begins the narrative with the words "I went down kateben to the Piraeus yesterday" a. The sentence appears to deliberatively echo Odysseus's remarks to his wife towards the end of Homer's Odyssey: "I went down kateben inside the house of Hades, seeking to learn about homecoming, for myself and for my companions" XXIII But, of course, the important point to emphasize here is that talk of descent into Hades brings to mind, the released prisoner's return by way of descent into the cave.
This is no mere circumstantial association, for the Cave's connection to these themes is clearly established, among other things, by the direct quotation of the dead Achilles's words to Odysseus in Hades, that Socrates employs while insisting to Glaucon that the released prisoner would "feel, with Homer, that he'd much prefer to 'work the earth as a serf to another one without possessions', and go through any sufferings rather than share their opinions and lives as they do" d.
Even though there are many different tales of mortals dying and later becoming gods in Greek literature, likely this latter reference is an explicit allusion to the story of Heracles for, as Eva Brann has noted, there are many signs in The Republic that point to the fact that the figure of Socrates is in different ways metaphorically playing the role of Heracles and reenacting his famous Labors cf.
Brann When he is finally able to interrupt the dialogue to interpose his own opinion, Thrasymachus roars and pounces upon Socrates like a wild beast cf. And at one point Socrates insinuates that quarreling with Thrasymachus is as crazy as shaving a lion cf. The metaphorical connection between Socrates and Heracles is significant because we should recall that the final and most important Labor of Heracles is his descent into Hades.
In the course of performing this task, he also releases Theseus who has been chained down in the underworld. In fact, Heracles seems to have a knack for releasing chained prisoners since he is also responsible for liberating Prometheus, who was bound to a rock as punishment for having shared the secret of fire with humanity. The allegory of the Cave, with its fire burning behind the wall and its clear reference to the shades of the underworld, seems to have been crafted so as to deliberately recollect these myths of liberation, thereby emphasizing the very political theme of Socrates's role as a revolutionary figure that threatens the traditional order by attempting to emancipate the nobly inclined souls that have been corrupted by the political and cultural dynamics governing the democratic city a role, of course, for which he was judged and executed.
As we will shortly see, the Cave is also linked to these judicial and political themes. In fact, it is difficult not to hear in the Cave's imagery and descriptions an ironic jab at Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, in which Prometheus tells us that, before he came to their aid, men "lived like swarming ants in holes in the ground, in the sunless caves of the earth" Prometheus Of course, Aeschylean tragedy is not the only target of Plato's biting pen here.
As mentioned earlier, the image of the Cave seems to be also in direct dialogue with Aristophanic comedy. Indeed, Nickolas Pappas has argued that a case can be made that Plato constructed his dialogues as philosophical modifications of Aristophanes's plays, which, as far as we can tell from the works that have survived, appear to have dealt often with metaphors of death, regeneration, and rebirth cf In The Republic, Plato ironically reverses many of Aristophanes's comedic and satiric invectives, most notably by presenting to us a Socrates that does not, as the comedian would have it, imprison his students inside a sun-deprived thinking-shop that resembles the cave of Trophonius, in order to turn them into pale intellectual bums cf Aristophanes , , Instead, Plato has his Socrates act as a midwife that helps release his students out of their dark existence into the sunlight.
In this connection, it is worth mentioning that Plato's description of Socratic education as an act of midwifery is meant to contrast with the description he gives in Book i of the sophist Thrasymachus's preferred pedagogical approach, which consists in having a wet nurse forcefully feed knowledge into a child or a person cf. This is, thus, another way in which the conversation in Book i is meant to prepare the ground for the Cave allegory with its instruction to fit the image with "what was said before", while at the same time highlighting the Cave's connection to the very political theme of the clash between an emancipatory educational system that could reform the city so as to turn into a birthing ground for justice and the good life, and the coercive pedagogy that actually rules in current cities, plunging them into the deadly underworld of corruption and injustice.
Additionally, we should note that these themes also link the Cave once again with Book X, through a route other than the one already mentioned above viz.
For the myth of Er that is told at the end of The Republic also traffics with themes of descent, death, and rebirth. The myth tells the story of Er, a man who descended into Hades, and was able to journey though the underworld to return to the world above; in other words, the very myth Socrates has just finished enacting himself by descending into the Piraeus and journeying through the whole dialogue which he is now recollecting on the next day recall that Socrates begins his dialogue by telling us that his descent to the Piraeus happened "yesterday" cf Sallis The Cave seems to be the center point around which the whole work revolves and through which it is funneled back on itself, a circle that appears to symbolize a seemingly infinite loop or eternal recurrence of death and rebirth.
There are other indications that the Cave is meant to mirror in special ways the opening scenes of The Republic and to make us recollect them in the course of reflecting about the prisoner's drama.
I already mentioned the contrast it establishes between Thrasymachus's pedagogical preferences and those favored by the released prisoner i. But Thrasymachus's quarrel with Socrates in Book i has other elements that anticipate the description of the prisoner's situation. In his initial intervention Thrasymachus accuses Socrates and Polemarchus of simply asking questions and refuting answers only to satisfy their own competitiveness and love of honor cf c.
Yet he himself seems to be preoccupied with these things, for, as the argument advances, he demands that Socrates pay a fine in order to hear his answer about justice cf d , a gesture that could be interpreted as a demand for the sort of prize Socrates says the prisoners might give each other for being better at deciphering the shadows on the wall cf c.
After suggesting that Thrasymachus wants to win the admiration of the others i. We should also notice that among the people present at the conversation in Book i and thereafter there are some who remain silent throughout the whole dialogue.
In this they resemble the puppeteers some of whom, we are explicitly told, are speaking while others are quiet cf ca. Thus, the opinions Socrates and his interlocutors voice at the beginning of the dialogue are grounded in and produced by the cultural heritage of the Greeks. Socrates applies the scalpel to these cultural opinions regarding justice and the good life that have been preserved in the work of artists like Sophocles and Homer, or in the memory of other authoritative figures, and that are taken at face value by those present at the conversation, since they have been indoctrinated from childhood to believe what those authorities say.
This early exchange, then, anticipates again the setup of the Cave, in which the prisoners are examining culturally sanctioned opinions of justice, symbolized by the drama of shadows produced by puppeteers with the help of puppets and other artifacts, and projected onto the back wall of the cave with the help of the burning fire that stands behind them i.
These links between the Cave and Book i that I have been discussing are important for my argument because, as has been observed, the action in Book I is also teeming with veiled and ironic allusions to the very political theme of Socrates's trial and execution cf Bloom ; Sallis ff. The city of Athens compelled Socrates to defend himself and win his acquittal against charges of impiety and of corrupting the youth. In the same way, at the beginning of The Republic, Socrates is thwarted from returning to Athens by Polemarchus and his men, who jokingly "compel" him to stay through threat of force, and it is Socrates himself who proposes that he win his own release through persuasion cf.
We are also told that Socrates has descended into the Piraeus to pray to the new Thracian moon goddess, Bendis, whose cult had been recently introduced into Athens's harbor partly in order to sediment the alliance with Thrace, thereby ensuring a steady supply of timber for the city's war fleet cf. Since the charge of impiety included the accusation that Socrates had introduced new deities into the city, this is Plato's ironic way of suggesting that it is Athens itself that is really guilty of introducing new gods, and of doing so for venal reasons.
The parody of Socrates's trial in Book i culminates in the exchange with Thrasymachus, who in his initial intervention accuses Socrates of shielding himself behind his "usual irony" cf. In a manner reminiscent of Plato's account in the Apology, Socrates is also asked to propose his own punishment in case Thrasymachus is able to give a better answer regarding justice cf. The allegory of the Cave incorporates the political theme of Socrates's trial in the description of the response of the prisoners to the return of the released prisoner to the cave.
These prisoners, we are told, would kill the returning escapee for attempting to reveal to them the truth and the extent of their ignorance cf a ; in other words, for doing precisely what Socrates's "usual irony" aimed to do for his fellow Athenians, and for which they forced him to drink the hemlock.
Socrates also suggests at d that the prisoners are like people in courts who contend about shadows of justice or the statues of which they are the shadows, which not only reinforces the allegory's connection to the judicial themes we have been discussing, but also brings back to mind Socrates's suggestion in Book i that, in investigating the question of justice by seeking agreement with each other, he and Glaucon can be both jury and advocates at once cf b ; thereby seemingly reaffirming the suspicion that when Socrates says that the prisoners are "like us", he really means no more than like Glaucon and himself, and perhaps just a few of the others present at the conversation, and not humankind as a whole as has been traditionally assumed.
With all this in mind we can now turn to the second main point of contention I wish to raise about the traditional interpretation. This involves the supposition that, in the words of Julia Annas, "clearly the cave and fire correspond to the visible world, and the world outside the cave to the realm of thought"
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