Essay 10 of Proclus’ commentary focuses on one of the passages in Plato’s Republic that has generated the most scholarly controversy – the argument through which Socrates distinguishes genuine philosophers from pretenders to that title.1 This argument is a key part of Socrates’ response to the third and greatest of the three questions put to him by his friends: the question of how the ideal city-state might come about. Socrates’ famous answer is that philosophers must become rulers or rulers must take up philosophy (473d–e), and this answer, in turn, requires that we distinguish genuine philosophers from those who are simply in love with learning. Proclus characterises this distinction as one between philosophia and philomathia and for him, as for Plato, it is a matter of ontological commitment rather than temperament or motivation. Those who genuinely love wisdom are those who recognise the necessity of forms and are capable of coming to understand them (476a–b).

Essay 7 principally concerns Republic IV 427d–444a in which Socrates and his interlocutors first look for justice and the other virtues within the city they have described and then turn to the question of whether the soul admits of a similar tripartite structure with analogous virtues within the individual.1 Plato’s discussion in Book IV is apparently innocent of the metaphysics and epistemology of the middle books – though of course the ensuing discussions of philosophers and Forms will deepen the understanding of what it is for the reasoning part to rule in the soul.2 Nonetheless, as with the function argument of Book I (352c–53e), Socrates’ reasoning proceeds from admissions that the none-too-philosophical Glaucon and Adeimantus make and does not presuppose the theory of Forms or any idea of the soul as an incorporeal substance that is more akin to the Forms than to the body. The same, of course, is at least superficially true of Aristotle’s function argument in Nicomachean Ethics I, chapter 7.

Essay 13 is a wide-ranging commentary on the short speech of the Muses in Republic VIII 546a1–547a5 and 547b2–c4. Proclus names this essay after the bee, because bees are sacred to the Muses and display a kind of appropriately ruled society.1

Plato has just completed the central books of the Republic (V, VI, and VII), in which he has advocated that women should share the philosophical rule with men and has laid out the three famous analogies of the Sun, Divided Line, and Cave. He now embarks on the decline from the government of the ideal city through to four lesser forms: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. The Muses’ speech explains the reasons behind the decline of the ideal city, stating that it occurs because of strife between the auxiliary and guardian classes after these two classes are no longer able to select the correct time for breeding the new generation.

These two brief essays bridge the gap between the extensive discussion of the nuptial number in Essay 13 and the massive commentary on the Myth of Er that will follow in volume III of this series. Essay 14 contains a kind of appendix in tabular form that summarises the three arguments that the life of the just person is happier. Essay 15 opens with a similar tabular presentation of the main sections of Book X of the Republic.

We can delve no further than the Vatican manuscript (Vat. gr. 2197) into the history of these diagrammatic representations of the contents of the two essays, but it is striking that both appear on the same page (111r). The scholia to the part of the codex that remained in Florence have one somewhat similar tabular presentation of information but this summarises divisions to be found among the kinds of powers in Plato’s Laws. It does not provide a tabular summary of the content of Proclus’ text.1 Part of Essay 13 carries over onto 111r, so it seems integral to the version created by the ninth- or tenth-century copyist.

Since Socrates, in the fifth book of the Republic, wishes to show that political virtue does not belong to men alone, but is also common to women, he says that the education (paideia)32 that is prior to virtue must necessarily be the same for men and women33 – an education through mousikê and through physical training whose extent and character he has defined. Furthermore, even prior to the education, he shows the nature of both kinds (genos) [i.e. men and women] to be the same in form, for unless this point is firmly established, neither the arguments concerning education, nor those concerning virtue would have plausibility. It is, after all, necessary for education to be consequent upon nature, and for virtue to be consequent upon education, since the one perfects nature, while the other is the goal of education.

Essays 8 and 9 are unique within the context of Proclus’ Republic Commentary in being so obviously different treatments of more or less the same subject matter. Accordingly, we will provide one introductory chapter for both essays.

They say that the bee is sacred to the Muses, a teacher for human beings concerning the royal and political life. Therefore, if it pleases you to give the name ‘the bee’ to the summary of the opinions of the ancients concerning the speech of the Muses by Plato 17 and of the exposition of it that I am furnishing, the Muses will not blame you for using that name nor will Plato, the mouthpiece of the Muses as I think, who is treating the change of constitutions in this speech that he dedicated to the Muses.

He seems to me to be responding to those who lay claim to political knowledge that the change of constitutions from the higher to the next lowest does not come about by necessity.

There are three arguments in the ninth book of the Republic showing the happiness (eudaimonia) of the most just life and the wretchedness of the unjust. The first is made by analogy of ways of life with constitutions, the second from the means of judging, by which [types of individual] are judged more or less than one another,8 the third on the basis of the perfection in their activities, whether it is unmixed in any way with the opposite, or whether it is mixed. Since for some people the goal (telos) is pleasure, but for others it is intelligence (phronêsis), if it should be shown that the just man is superior in each individually and in both together, he would with good reason win the prize for victory, even if [his goodness] should escape the notice of both gods and human beings. This then was the challenge lying before Socrates.

When Socrates has established as rulers of the best political order those who are legitimately lovers of learning and who are not counterfeit philosophers, and when he has declared them worthy to be spectators of the universals – and the affairs which are governed by them will come to resemble those universals – he postulates that most of all they will understand this very last object of learning. Since his companions have asked for a discussion from him as to what this means, and what the final one of all the objects of learning hints at,18 he says that they have already heard this many times before, namely that this is the Good, which all things desire. And it is not possible to say where one should turn one’s thinking (dianoia),19 if one should neglect this axiom. He announces that he will show what exactly the good is.

Despite the title of Essay 12 (‘On the Cave in the Seventh Book of the Republic’), the text which survives deals not only, and in fact not primarily, with the famous image of the Cave, but also with the image which precedes it in the Republic, the Divided Line. Due to a lacuna in our essay, of uncertain length but of at least one entire folio, a large part of Proclus’ discussion of the Cave is lost to us. Proportionately, therefore, we have more remaining to us of the discussion of the Divided Line. By the nature of the passages which Proclus analyses here, there is some overlap with Essay 11 (in relation to the Good), and Essay 10 (in relation to the ascent through the distinct ontological levels).

The Tenth Book is divided into three principal topics. The first of these is directed towards a critique of poetry on the grounds that it is mimetic, but not educative of souls. The second establishes the immortality of the soul and reveals its kinship with the divine. The third provides the myth itself, which exhibits providence as a whole, both daemonic and divine, which governs souls both descending into becoming and transcending becoming, and the multi-form ways of each. These being the three subjects, it is clear that the first proposes to separate us from material images (eidôlon) and to lead us up from the illusions (phantasia) of false learning, because these draw us down to the very last of existent things, which are in fact partial (merikos) and imitative of existent things, but do not truly exist themselves, and [to lead us up] from what is simply and entirely a fictive life.