Did Socrates Really Recommend Infanticide?

I love a good shock. I love a splash of cold water first thing in the morning, sour candy, hot peppers, and hearing hot takes. In the first place, it is just plain fun, but some of these things may even make us live longer (or at least “age healthier”). But what if a shock is a necessary part of gaining wisdom? I would look past even the hormonal and cardiovascular benefits, as important as those are, for the great good of gaining wisdom, because gaining wisdom increases my capacity for happiness.

In our Great Books: Ancient Greece class, our students get a few opportunities for a good shock, especially when we get to the deep middle of Plato’s Republic. There as Socrates and company construct The City in Speech, and all of the strange policies are proposed, some are easier ideas to entertain than others, e.g., eugenics: no monogamy allowed, and the rulers of the state dictate who gets to produce children with whom (Republic, 459d–461e).

This leads to an even more shocking idea. In the ideal city, the state will not only dictate all marital matches of men and women, prohibiting the free choice of a mate by the citizens, but any children unlawfully conceived must be aborted, or exposed in the wild like Oedipus (461). Many students come to class the next day expecting to talk about it, with good reason. A lot is riding on that conversation: will you still trust Socrates to be your teacher after this, or will you leave him behind? If it is going to be the latter, you have to assume a pose of moral superiority to the man that the Delphic Oracle called the wisest in the world. In other words, just when you were starting to think that you could be a good student to one of the great teachers of all time — someone who can help you become a wiser, better version of yourself — instead you have to judge him to be inferior, an unworthy teacher! On the other hand, if you are still going to learn from him and be formed by him, you have to find a way to reconcile yourself to this shocking proposal.

Is Socrates really recommending infanticide here? Maybe. The ideal city that they were constructing in speech would certainly not be the only Greek city that practiced eugenically-motivated, state-sponsored murder of children. Sparta is only the most well-known example (as we read in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, Chapter 16). The Didache implies that abortion and infanticide were common enough by explicitly prohibiting them (Chapter 2). And these are just the texts that you have already heard of. So it is certainly not outside the realm of possibility to believe that Plato was really making Socrates recommend exactly what he seems to be recommending.^[1] This would be a literal reading: the most obvious meaning of the text as it is written.

But this would be a mistake. The whole purpose of constructing The City in Speech was to discover the nature of justice in the individual person. At this point in the dialogue, Socrates has already reminded the others of this fact two times. Most recently, he said, “…we thought that if we should attempt to see justice first in some bigger thing that possessed it, we would more easily catch sight of what it’s like in one man” (434d).^[2] There he was reminding them of what he had said a few pages before: “in founding the city…we supposed we would find justice most in such a city, and injustice, in its turn, in the worst-governed one, and taking a careful look at them, we would judge what we’ve been seeking for so long” (420c). By “what we’ve been seeking for so long,” he means, of course, what justice is. Both of these reminders recall the beginning of the construction of The City in Speech. As they pursued the question, “What is justice?” they found it too hard to see what it looks like in a person. They decided that it would be easier to see in a city: “Yes, it is bigger. — So then, perhaps there would be more justice in the bigger and it would be easier to observe closely. If you want, first we’ll investigate what justice is like in the cities. Then, we’ll also go on to consider it in individuals” (368e). If we keep these three passages in mind as we read the first half of the Republic, we will constantly be asking ourselves what part of our own soul corresponds to each part of the city.

What are some examples? The three classes of the city are the rulers, the guardians, and the skilled tradesmen. Each of these classes satisfies a kind of need for the city. The tradesmen satisfy the most basic needs for food and clothing and “relishes” (372c), the guardians fight the wars, and the philosopher-kings make all the plans for ordering the whole. Later we find out that these three classes within the city correspond to three parts of the soul: 1.) the most basic appetites, which move us toward the most obvious goods, 2.) the spirit, i.e., what we might call the heart, the part of us that swells within us in the moment when we are called to suffer for a higher good, the part that gets excited when we have something to get excited about, and 3.) the rational faculty, the part that can order our perceptions, figure out their consequences or implications, and judge the ideas that we and others form from them. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis calls these 1.) “the animal organism”, 2.) “the emotions” and 3.) “the intellect”.^[3] After explicitly crediting Plato with this idea, he offers the oft-quoted formula: “the head rules the belly through the chest.” The people, then, in this city, are metaphors for the parts of the soul with all its movements.

What happens when they produce offspring? If we understand the desires for food and drink as two citizens in The City in Speech, then their offspring might be a new movement toward the immediate satisfaction of those desires. The person might choose to eat and drink what is most obviously best (i.e., what is easiest) rather than what is truly best (e.g., something healthier that is harder to get). But there is a lot more at stake here than the mere choice between a hot dog with fake nacho cheese and an organic grilled chicken salad. When we start to consider the wrong kind of pairings of, say, a.) intellect and appetites, or b.) emotions and intellect, or c.) emotions and appetites, more serious crimes start to appear to our mind’s eye. For example: a.) conspiracy to commit fraud, b.) plagiarism, or c.) domestic violence.

Could one of these be what Socrates means when he talks about the “unauthorized and unconsecrated child” (461) in the passage that we began by considering? And if so, what are we to make of what he says after that? He says that they should be told “to be especially careful never to let even a single foetus see the light of day, if one should be conceived, and, if one should force its way, to deal with it on the understanding that there’s to be no rearing for such a child.” Quite a shock, if we’ve been permitting the mind to drift as we read. But if we remember where we started, our reason for constructing The City in Speech, we will never linger too long on the idea of these “citizens” as real people. We will quickly see that “the illicit offspring” of my reason and my emotions just might be a thought that should never see the light of day. In the end, Socrates’ recommendations of abortions and exposures start to look a lot like another great teacher’s recommendations of eye-gougings and hand-amputations (Mt 18:8–9). Great teachers know that the student sometimes has to unlearn before he can learn.

Socrates works on us like a defibrillator. He delivers a shock that stops the heart for a second, so that it can get on the right track. And that is something to get excited about.

Image: Socrates discharges the Family Venice,
Museo Correr (inv. Cl. XXVI, nos. 31 and 26), in storage

^[1] Certainly Aristotle seems to have taken the Republic this way, as he critiques it (extensively in Book 2 of the Politics) as if it were a practical proposal for a constitution of a real city.

^[2] Although I link to the public-domain resources on Perseus, for English quotations I am using the excellent translation of Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato. Basic Books: New York, 1968.

^[3] C.S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man. Touchstone: New York, 1996: 35.

By Lionel Yaceczko