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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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If you have Greek questions, I could probably attempt to answer them.

I'm going to take you up on that.

  1. In most instances of "Democratic man" in Book VIII of The Republic, does plato use "andres" or "anthropos"? Is there a difference between the two, or is one the plural of the other?
  2. At the beginning of Book IX, in the sentence, "Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are controlled by the laws and by reason" is reason "logos" or "nous"? I narrowed it down to "logos" in writing the OP, but my old draft sad "nous" and I must have had a reason to think that at the time.

If you're using Perseus, make sure to take advantage of the ability to pull up the text in English down the side. And if you just click on the word in Perseus, you should be able to find the LSJ entry

Thanks!

  1. All the instances I found were forms of ανηρ, or adjectives without a noun (Greek does that more frequently than English). ανδρες is the nominative plural of ανηρ. It's male, specifically. ανθροπος is just generically human, no sex implied.

  2. It's logos.

Thank you!

All the instances I found were forms of ανηρ, or adjectives without a noun

So in the latter case, what is the Romanized form of the adjective? Are you saying Plato literally called them democrats (transliterating into grammatically correct English)?

It would be democratic (greek democraticos/δημοκρατικος). Likewise for oligarchic, and tyrannic, though that last one isn't really a word.

I might render the paragraph starting in 545a, if I were trying to be pretty literal and keeping cognates when possible, something like, "Then after this, we must go through the worse: the lover of victory and lover of honor, according to the established Laconic [Spartan] polity, and again oligarchic, and democratic, and the tyrannic, so that seeing the most unjust, we might set him opposite to the most just, and our examination will be complete."

In book 8, with forms of the word δεμοκρατικος, there's no noun in 545a, 559d, 559e, 560a. In 545c, 557b, and sort of in 562a, there's forms of ανηρ. But I don't imagine there's much of a difference in sense—it's implicit what we're talking about throughout the whole book, I think: the men (andres) who correspond with the various regimes.

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