The Beginning of Justice: Socrates Speaks With Cephalus (1)

You can read my brief piece on the opening of The Republic here for context.

When Socrates arrives at Polemarchus’ house with the rest of the men, he sees Cephalus, Polemarchus’ father, “seated on a sort of cushioned stool and was crowned with a wreath, for he had just performed a sacrifice in the courtyard.” He also notices Cephalus looks old, older than he expected. They haven’t seen each other for some time. So, when we meet Cephalus, we see him seated almost as a king, crowned from pious ritual, his nobility denoted by his age.

And this befits him. Cephalus, as we shall see, represents a commitment to piety and a moral position inherited from traditionally regarded Wise Men. Cephalus’ the first standard-bearer of conventional wisdom whose positions Socrates overturns with his prodding. The action of their dialogue moves in three parts.

1. Old-Age and the Appetites

Socrates is happy to see Cephalus and excited to speak to him. Cephalus, due to his advanced years, has scouted out what lies ahead on the road of life. Socrates wants to learn from him “what sort of road it is — whether it is rough and hard or easy and smooth.”

When Cephalus speaks to other old men, they mostly complain. He reports that they “lament” and long for “the pleasures of youth and reminisce about sex, about drinking bouts and feasts” and the rest of it. “[T]hey take it hard as though they were deprived of something very important and had then lived well but are now not even alive.” And, lastly, they complain that no one visits them anymore. Little has changed in the intervening millennia, it seems.

But Cephalus takes a different view, one he shares with the playwright Sophocles. He recounts a story wherein someone asked Sophocles, now an old man, if he could still have sex with a woman. Sophocles snapped back, “Silence, man. Most joyfully did I escape it, as though I had run away from a sort of frenzied and savage master.” Cephalus says he’s similarly taken delight in being freed from the “many mad masters” of the appetites.

So far, all of this makes sense. After all, when they greeted each other, Cephalus mentioned that as the enticements of sensual delight have withered with his body, his craving for thoughtful conversation has replaced them. Thus far, his account fits what we know of his character. But, in addressing his whiny cohort’s last concern — family visitation — he moves into new territory.

Cephalus argues there can only be one reason they live in such estrangement from relatives: their character. “If they are orderly and content with themselves, even old age is only moderately troublesome; if they are not, then both age, Socrates, and youth alike turn out to be hard for that sort.” At this moment, the conversation has moved from a discussion of the pleasures and pains of life to a question of ethics. Cephalus smuggles an assumption that will become one of the issues around which the rest of the dialogue turns: that it is better to live a good (just) life than a bad (unjust) life — his argument being that life at any stage is easier if you’re a man of good character.

But what could that mean? Tune in next week for more.

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