1G0xxeB

Happy City, Happy Citizens? The Common Good and the Private Good in Plato’s Republic2 0 9to the happiness of the parts, but this evidence is not decisive, and the relationbetween private happiness and public happiness is left obscure. We do notknow exactly what it means for a city to be “happy as a whole,” except that itrequires citizens being “the best possible craftsmen at their jobs,” which rulesout lives devoted to luxurious self-gratification and pleonexia. 18 We do not yetknow enough about the character of private happiness or the human good todraw a firm conclusion. 19III.The second passage in which the happiness of the city is discussed (465d–466c)does not resolve the issue, even though it might seem to. It comes after therevelation of the equality of the sexes among the guardians (451c–457b) andthe communalization of women and children among them (457b–466d).Having laid out this last institution, Socrates praises its benefits to Glaucon.Through the community of pleasure and pain that comes from abolishingthe private family, there will be a community of interests among the auxiliaries,thereby drying up the sources of faction among them and securing theirfriendship with the producers and with each other (461e–465c). In particular,the auxiliaries, as one big family, will enjoy a kind of fraternal solidaritywith one another that will greatly reduce quarrels among them and virtuallyeliminate lawsuits (464e–465b). Further, because they do not need to providefor private households, they are spared the many indignities and evils thatso often attend providing for a household: the need to make money to payallowances, the need to flatter the rich in order to get money, and so forth(465b–c).Socrates then asserts that, given all these various advantages, the auxiliaryguardians will “live a life more blessed than that most blessed one theOlympic victors live” (465d), forsurely the Olympic victors are considered happy for a small part ofwhat belongs to these men. Their victory is not only fairer but the publicsupport is more complete. The victory they win is the preservationof the whole city, and they are crowned with support and everythingelse necessary to life—both they themselves and their children as well;18See 433e–434a; contrast with 343d–344c. Pleonektein (to have more, to get the better) and pleonexiaare words used in the Republic and commonly associated with injustice. See K. J. Dover, Greek PopularMorality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 193, formore on pleonexia.19See Strauss, City and Man, 104.