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[Expositions 11.1 (2017) 101–117]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 

 

ALAN I. BAILY 

Stephen F. Austin State University 

 

 

Much has been said about Plato’s quarrel with poetry, but it may seem strange to claim that the 

Republic includes a “quarrel” with money as well. After all, money cannot talk. Yet money does 

signify, and in Book I Socrates shows that Cephalus’, Adeimantus’, and Thrasymachus’ 

understandings of justice rely implicitly on logics of “moneymaking” that belong to the sphere of 

market exchange. The invention and spread of coinage facilitated greater autonomy for such 

“transactional” relationships, but Plato sought to circumscribe transactional relationships within 

the civic relationship, the sphere of political justice. 

Thus, there is a parallel between Plato’s treatments of poetry and money in the Republic. 

Broadly the parallel is as follows: Just as Plato’s philosophic critique of mimēsis establishes the 

strictures under which a domesticated version of poetry may be admitted to the Kallipolis, his 

analysis of the market in Books I and II prepares the reader for the proposal that coinage in the 

Kallipolis should be restricted to the “moneymaking” classes, and forbidden to the guardian or 

ruling classes (who are prescribed a communism of goods and families). In both cases a “quarrel,” 

or philosophic interrogation, serves as preamble for the philosopher-legislator’s assignment of 

poetry and money to their “proper” civic offices. 

Like philosophy and unlike poetry, the logic of monetary exchange is abstract and rational. But, 

like poetry, philosophical discourse transpires in language. In the Republic, Plato draws on the 

power of philosophical analysis and poetic language to project a vision of the market domesticated 

by civic morality. Money’s function in the Kallipolis is the subject of two conceptual icons. The 

first is the “myth of the metals”—the noble lie—which is introduced at the end of Book III. This 

is the myth Socrates proposes to replace the authoritative stories told by the poets. The second icon 

is that of the “stinging drone” in Book VIII, whose appearance precipitates the decline from 

oligarchy to democracy, and finally, tyranny. The myth of metals illustrates the proper place of 

moneymaking in the Kallipolis, while the stinging drone associates political decline with an 

improper mixture of the logics of political justice and market exchange.1 The latter part of this 



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 102 

article will address the myth of metals, in particular, but first it will be necessary to consider the 

impact of coinage and literacy, as well as Plato’s general approach to poetry in the Republic. 

 

Technologies of Abstraction and Individuation 

Plato’s treatment of poetry proceeds in two stages. The interrogation and rejection of mimēsis or 

“imitation” is the first stage, but the second stage is a rehabilitation of poetic symbol-making in 

the form of a “noble lie” (pseudos gennaion). Like mimetic poetry, a noble lie is “metaphysically 

false,” but unlike mimetic poetry, such a fiction may be “noble” in the sense of being “‘true to its 

birth,’ the core meaning of gennaios, provided that it leads people to act more or less as they would 

act if they knew the truth.”2 

Students of political thought have grappled with Plato’s advocacy of deception. However, my 

interest lies less in this question than in understanding the forces that compelled Plato to conceive 

the idea of a noble lie in the first place. Whether the medicine is administered or not, the content 

of noble lies implies a diagnosis of the maladies they seek to treat. Broadly, two phenomena 

contributed to the malady that Plato aimed to treat with noble lies. One was alphabetic literacy, the 

other, coined money. For all their differences, both social technologies promoted abstraction and 

individuation. Ultimately they facilitated a broadening of human association and a deepening of 

individual consciousness, but not without producing some dissonance along the way. In many 

respects, what Ong said of writing is true of coinage also: “[technologies] are not mere exterior 

aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the 

word.3 Such transformations can be uplifting […] Alienation from natural milieu can be good for 

us and is in many ways essential for human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only 

proximity but distance.”4 

Platonic political philosophy can be understood (in part) as an effort to make sense of changes 

in society and consciousness wrought by coined money and alphabetic literacy. These technologies 

militated in favor of more abstract, individuated conceptions of social relations than obtained in 

“tribal” culture. The differentiation of social relations and individual consciousness deepened 

human experience but also produced a sense of dislocation. Coined money displaced relations of 

reciprocity and exchange from immediate and interpersonal contexts to the impersonal and abstract 

intermediary of the market. Writing displaced communication from the interpersonal context to 



103 Baily 
 

the intermediary of the text. Platonic philosophical writing involves an effort to reimagine, on 

abstract terms, a “total” social whole that the market and alphabet rent asunder.5  

All thinking is conceptual, but literacy intensifies the capacity for abstraction. Far more than 

oral culture, literate culture militates toward abstract notions of society and self-consciousness. 

Plato’s metaphysical idealism and Aristotle’s logical syllogism are exemplary fruits of the 

intellectual changes wrought by literacy, but they are the culmination of a long development that 

began with the introduction of alphabetic script. Indeed, “formal logic is the invention of Greek 

culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part 

of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible.”6 Alternatively, 

“[oral] cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are 

minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld.”7 

Literacy also promotes a deeper sense of interiority. Again the difference from orality is a matter 

of degree, not of kind. “[Everyone] who can say ‘I’ has an acute sense of self. But reflectiveness 

and articulateness about the self take time to grow. Short-term developments show its growth: the 

crises in Euripides’ plays are less crises of social expectations and more crises of interior 

conscience than are the crises in in the plays of the earlier tragedian Aeschylus.”8  

Along with literacy, the spread of coinage and markets pushed consciousness in the direction 

of abstraction and individuation. However, monetization seems more likely to have disturbed 

rather than deepened the “interior conscience.” As Shell has observed, pre-platonic Greek 

literature already displayed signs of  

 

discomfort with the institution of coinage, which, in the sixth and fifth centuries 

B.C., came to pervade Greek economic and intellectual life. For the Greeks coinage 

coincided with such political developments as tyranny and such aesthetic ones as 

tragedy. Some thinkers, moreover, came to recognize interactions between 

economic and intellectual exchange, or money and language. (Seme means “word” 

as well as “coin”).9 

 

Just as writing displaced language from the concrete contexts of oral performance and verbal 

discourse, coinage displaced the exchange of goods from the contexts of gift-exchange and 

centralized (“palatial”) distribution. Coinage—a concrete token of value serving as universal and 



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 104 

abstract intermediary between hitherto incommensurable goods—widened the sphere of 

commercial relationships. In tandem, it encouraged thinking about reciprocity in more calculative 

or “transactional,” rather than personal, terms. This “crisis of reciprocity”10 was most significant 

in relation to ceremonial gift-exchange, in which the personal status of the giver (and receiver) is 

identified with the gift. “The implication of the giver in the thing given is not a metaphor: it 

involves a transfer of soul and of substantial presence. It translates the fact that the bond between 

giver and recipient is personal, exclusive and intense. The community is the global fabric of these 

unique and local relationships.”11  

 Seaford sees Achilles’ dissonance as a reflection of the crisis of reciprocity brought about by 

coinage, and a prefiguration of pre-Socratic philosophy. Achilles’ rejection of the gifts offered by 

Agamemnon,  

 

in combining the logic of money with aristocratic superiority to it, has two unusual 

(for Homer) consequences. Firstly, it induces the expression, in concrete terms, of 

something close to the idea of an unlimited amount of goods. Secondly, it makes 

Achilles separate his own psuchē with its supreme value (timē) from the various 

material manifestations by which it may seem constituted but with which it is in 

fact incommensurable. In thus putting his soul beyond an innumerable amount of 

goods, i.e., beyond all exchange value, he prefigures both the Heraclitean 

unlimitedness of the soul and the sublimating separation by Parmenides and Plato 

of abstract being, exclusive to the isolated mind or psuchē, from the unlimited 

circulation of goods (12B). This prefiguration occurs nowhere else in Homer.12 

 

In gift-exchange the giver’s identity is implied in the thing given. In oral culture the singer and the 

muse are virtually identical because the muse’s authority is manifested in and through the singer’s 

memory. Havelock describes the epic poem itself as a “tribal encyclopedia,” made alive in “a 

performative utterance on an ambitious scale which both describes and enforces the overall habit 

pattern, political and private, of the group […] To become and remain standardized it had to 

achieve preservation outside of the daily whim of men.”13 However, just as the transactional logic 

of commerce subverted the traditional identity between Achilles’ psuchē and “the various material 

manifestations by which it may seem constituted,” the logic of writing subverted the traditional 



105 Baily 
 

identity between the epic singer and the muse, as well as the identity, in tribal culture, between 

nomos (law) and ethos (folk-way). These developments reveal the same processes of abstraction 

and individuation at work.  

 

Plato’s Treatment of Poetry 

Plato did not reject poetic or symbolic expression as such. His objections pertained specifically to 

imitative expression (mimēsis). Plato’s rejection of mimēsis is bound up with the philosophical 

critique of oral consciousness. As an articulate representative of literate consciousness, which 

privileges abstraction and “objectivity,” Plato recoiled at the “total loss of objectivity” necessitated 

by practices of “poetic memorization” which were essential in oral culture.14 Per scholars like 

Havelock, and Ong, “Plato’s entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the 

[…] mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture […] Platonic form was form 

conceived of by analogy with visible form. The Platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of 

all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld but utterly above and 

beyond it.”15 

From Havelock’s and Ong’s perspective the literacy-driven evolution from concrete to abstract 

consciousness was a deterministic process and Plato was its amanuensis: “Plato of course was not 

at all fully aware of the unconscious forces at work in his psyche to produce this reaction, or 

overreaction, of the literate person to lingering retardant orality.”16 This determinism helps account 

for the vehemence of Plato’s rejection of poetry, which seems extreme to many modern readers. 

But this perspective plays down the evidence that Plato was consciously aware of the differences 

between orality and literacy and that it informed his philosophical writing. Such evidence is 

available in the Phaedrus and the “Seventh Letter,” among other texts. 

Allen has offered a more sophisticated reading of Plato’s critique of mimēsis, one that draws on 

Havelock’s insight but gives more weight to Plato’s literary and political agency. Instead of 

construing Plato’s project as the creation of a “text-based culture of his own devising” to rival that 

of the poets, Allen sees Plato’s writing as an effort “to change Athenian culture and thereby 

transform Athenian politics”17 by reforming “the Athenian ‘system of value,’ that is, the ethico-

political nexus of concepts that organized Athenian political life.”18 

For a few reasons, Allen’s reading improves on Havelock’s. First, orality and literacy are taken 

up explicitly in some Platonic writings, suggesting that Plato was not wholly unwitting in his 



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 106 

reaction against mimēsis. Second, poetry took both oral and written forms, and although certain 

“features of the oral universe align well with the targets of Platonic philosophical and cultural 

critique […] this is an accidental rather than a necessary alignment.”19 Third, by the time Plato 

wrote, there was a small but significant circle of readers whose literacy had developed beyond 

merely utilitarian functions such as recordkeeping; Plato hoped to leverage the durability of writing 

to influence this audience as well as future audiences. “Plato could imagine a general reader for 

his dialogues, and […] [develop] a mode of philosophical writing that anticipated such readers 

even in advance of their general emergence.”20  

Plato’s writing, then, was not merely a representative literate’s reaction to the oral predecessor 

culture but also a conscious effort to enlist the “surplus power” of language in a text, in service to 

Plato’s overall ethico-political project. Like Havelock, Allen affirms that Plato’s “political” project 

aimed chiefly at Athenian educational culture (paideia). “What is political in the Republic, and the 

rest of the dialogues, is not Plato’s creation of a utopian plan but his effort to refashion Athenian 

political language. The utopian image is a tool used for the latter purpose.”21  

Plato consciously exploited linguistic power, drawing upon the unique possibilities of literacy 

to reform Athens’ existing “system of value” from within. In the Republic, Plato’s linguistic 

pragmatism is manifest in his construction of literary models designed to leverage the efficacy of 

symbols to produce social meanings and influence action. For Allen, this is the essence of Plato’s 

“pharmacology,” and it “entails above all understanding how abstract concepts and their rhetorical 

conveyance […] shift the horizons of understanding and expectation and the normative 

commitments both of the individual and the social group with consequences for lived 

experience.”22 

Although they are poetic models rather than dialectical practices, Platonic noble lies do offer 

an alternative means of conveying philosophical truth. The basic notion is that certain fictions can 

produce the truth-effect of philosophical dialectic in spite of the reader being unaware of 

philosophic truth and the fiction being literally false. The efficacy of such fictions testifies by itself 

to the pragmatic insight that language can have political effects through its power to shape beliefs. 

But only certain types of fiction can have this effect.  

 

There are on the one hand shadows or eidōla, which are what poets produce. 

Socrates repudiates these. But there are also useful and valuable images, which he 



107 Baily 
 

endorses. Socrates refers to the latter with terms like: theoretical models 

(paradiegma logōi, 472c), paradigms (paradeigmata, 361b, 472c), types (tupos, 

443c), images (eikones, 487e, 488a, 588b–c), paintings (zōigraphiai, 472d, 488a, 

501a–b), sculptures (andriantopoioi, 540c, also 420c–d), patterns after the divine 

pattern (paradeigmata en ouranōi, 592b), and diagrams (diagrammata, 529d–e). 

Socrates himself produces such images and teaches his interlocutors to do so also. 

But for all his emphasis on visuality, Socrates produces these images with words, 

as the poets do their shadows.23 

 

Plato’s word-images serve to make visible what is invisible.24 They may take the form of 

schemata such as the tripartite division of the soul, or they make take the form of imitation, so long 

as only or virtuous characters and actions are imitated. In other words, the purpose of platonic 

fictions is to body forth invisible principles such as justice and virtue. Literary images and 

theoretical models are two means of conveying concepts; but the latter appeal to our sensuous 

experience and the former, our intellectual senses. Plato’s dialogues include both conveyances.25 

In either case, philosophical writing is more than an “unwitting” reaction against poetry. For Plato 

aimed not only to critique the poets but “to displace [them]. And he expected this displacement to 

have cultural effects and, because cultural effects, political effects.”26 

Allen’s reading of the Republic looks forward to the effects of Plato’s writing. What follows is 

informed by this reading but it looks in the opposite direction. What made Plato’s writings appeal 

to the nascent community of readers? Plato’s writing certainly had an impact on subsequent 

cultural and political discourse, but it was also a response to semantic innovations led by pre-

Socratic philosophers and early historians—especially Herodotus27—who were themselves 

grappling with the consequences of revolutionary changes brought about by literacy and coinage. 

If epic performances and gift-exchanges were indeed “total” social phenomena that sustained the 

community’s identity over time through rituals and relationships involving immediate, personal, 

presence then we might say that literacy and coinage “split the atom” of tribalism by disembodying 

the discursive order and disembedding the distributive order. It seems likely that these two 

developments are deep sources of Achilles’ dissonance. If the Iliad presents Achilles’ symptoms, 

the Republic proposes an implicit diagnosis in the form of a remedy (pharmakon): the noble lie. 

 



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 108 

The Noble Lie: Plato’s Myth of the Metals 

The Republic is replete with literary images, and in a sense the entire dialogue may be an elaborate 

“noble lie.” However, only one fiction is designated in the dialogue as the noble lie (414c)28 and 

that is the “myth of metals.” After purging the city of the old poetry, Socrates entertains the 

possibility of instituting a new myth “to persuade, in the best case, the rulers, but if not them the 

rest of the city” of their duty to “guard over enemies from without and friends from within—so 

that the ones will not do harm and the others will be unable to” (414b–c). 

The content of the myth of metals is as follows:  

 

All of you in the city are certainly brothers […] but the god, in fashioning those of 

you who are competent to rule, mixed gold in at their birth; this is why they are 

most honored; in auxiliaries, silver; and iron and bronze in the farmers and the other 

craftsmen. So, because you’re all related, although for the most part you’ll produce 

offspring like yourselves, it sometimes happens that a silver child will be born from 

a golden parent, a golden child from a silver parent, and similarly all the others 

from each other. Hence, the god commands the rulers first and foremost to be of 

nothing such good guardians and to keep over nothing so careful a watch as the 

children, seeing which of the metals is mixed in their souls. And if a child of theirs 

should be born with an admixture of bronze or iron, by no manner of means are 

they to take pity on it, but shall assign the proper value to its nature and thrust it out 

among the craftsmen or the farmers; and again, if from those men one should 

naturally grow who has an admixture of gold or silver, they will honor such ones 

and lead them up, some to the guardian group, others to the auxiliary, believing that 

there is an oracle that the city will be destroyed when an iron or bronze man is its 

guardian. (415a–d) 

 

The myth of metals plays upon a “language of metals” that was already well established. Hesiod 

had spoken in this dialect of ages and races of men that corresponded to a hierarchy of metals from 

gold to iron. Although it does not rely on abstract concepts, it is fair to call Hesiod’s metaphorical 

system an aristocratic “ideology.” Later, “Herodotus, at least in part, seems to appropriate the 

traditional aristocratic system, appropriating metals and coinage as signifiers within a moral 



109 Baily 
 

discourse based on essentialism. Yet while the text of Herodotus exploits the signifying value of 

the language of metals, the narrator tends to maintain an ironic distance from his characters’ 

metallic forays.”29  

Herodotus’ ironic distancing from Hesiod’s metallic dialect reflects the revolutionary effects of 

both writing and coinage. For, writing introduces a gap between the narrator and the text that 

enables ironic distancing. While Herodotus, through his characters, does imitate the traditional 

system he also occupies a narrative persona, which allows the historian’s “position [to shift] and 

[waver] with different anecdotes and narratives.”30 Within that gap, Herodotus plays on the social 

tensions brought about by coinage. In particular, Herodotus’ portrayal of characters illustrates the 

tension between a “hard” aristocratic ethos (associated with gift-exchange) and a “soft” demotic 

ethos (associated with commercial calculation). “The ‘hard’ and uncomplicated Scythians 

maintain the pure affinity between talismanic gold [Hesiodic agalmata] and kingship, while the 

Lydian king Kroisos (at the ‘soft’ end of the spectrum) incongruously links the symbolism of gold 

with the precise calculations of the kapēlos [retailer].”31  

Herodotus’ audience included aristocrats and democrats opposed to one another in a discursive 

conflict over coinage. The gap between narrator and character, and the implied equality of reader 

and author, make space for Herodotus to approach the conflict ironically. Importantly, ironic 

distancing allowed Herodotus to abstract from the conflict between aristocracy and democracy, or 

gift and commerce, to the ultimate conflict over which side may lay claim to the “embedded,” 

long-term transactional order, as opposed to a short term, “disembedded” order. The embedded 

order is positively valued, the disembedded, negatively valued. Traditionally, aristocratic or 

“heroic” gift-exchange was associated with the long-term order, while the innovations of coinage 

and kapēlia belonged to the short-term order. But the rise of the polis intensified the confusion 

between transactional orders and with it the discursive struggle over money’s meaning.  

Traditionally, commerce was associated with the short-term order, but, as nomisma, coinage 

encouraged an association between commerce and the long-term transactional order represented 

by the polis.32 “For every Greek polis that issued its own coin asserted its autonomy and 

independence from every other Greek city, while coinage also functioned as one institution among 

many through which the city constituted itself as the final instance against the claims of an internal 

elite.”33 Thus, as Herodotus shows us, “[both] the aristocratic elite and the polis lay claim to the 

good, ‘embedded’ economy for themselves, and both vilify the other side by representing it not as 



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 110 

an alternate order but as disorder—socially ruinous disembedding perpetrated by selfish economic 

interests.”34  

The myth of metals is Plato’s main intervention in this discursive conflict. What literary device 

does he employ? In the Phaedrus, Socrates lamented the confusion and “madness” that result from 

literacy’s unmooring of the word from its oral context. But rather than attempt to put back together 

what our tools have rent asunder, he suggests that philosophical discourse can reconcile the effects 

“bad carving” through techniques of “good carving.” These discursive techniques are, “[first], the 

comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea […] which whether true or false certainly 

[gives] clearness and consistency to the discourse […] The second principle is that of division into 

species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver 

might” (265d). 

Plato’s myth of metals is understood best as a philosophical exercise in good carving. The myth 

aims to reconcile in discourse three orders of value—commodity, honor, and intelligence—whose 

autonomy was intensified by literacy and coinage. This differentiation sowed confusion, but also 

offered the opportunity to judge more clearly among the orders, in terms of the goods appropriate 

to each and their proper relations to one another. Philosophical discourse does this by gathering 

the “scattered particulars” comprising the city/soul under the comprehensive idea of political 

justice, and assigning to each part (moneymakers, auxiliaries and rulers, in the city) its appropriate 

virtue (prudence, courage and wisdom). The comprehensive idea of justice pertains to the relations 

among these parts and their respective virtues, and the philosophic “constitution painter” takes 

care to arrange each particular “according to its natural formation.” 

As a philosophical text, Plato’s myth illustrates in extremis the ironic and transvaluative power 

of both literature and money. The language of metals on which the myth relies obviously belongs 

to an aristocratic imaginary but Plato’s revisionism turns that dialect on its head. The myth teaches 

that every citizen of the Kallipolis is “earth-born,” affirming the isonomic logic of the polis and 

the market. The hierarchical logic of aristocracy is retained along with the language of metals, but 

more importantly the link between abstract and concrete agalmata is severed.  

Indeed, only the bronze and iron souls—the “moneymakers”—are permitted to acquire actual 

gold and silver.  

 



111 Baily 
 

We’ll tell [the auxiliaries] that gold and silver of a divine sort from the gods they 

have in their soul always and have no further need of the human sort; nor is it holy 

to pollute the possession of the former sort by mixing it with the possession of the 

mortal sort, because many unholy things have been done for the sake of the 

currency of the many, while theirs is untainted. But for them alone in those of the 

city it is not lawful to handle and touch gold and silver, nor to go under the same 

roof with it, nor to hang it from their persons, nor to drink from silver and gold. 

And thus they would save themselves as well as save the city. (416e–417b) 

 

As the final sentence indicates, Plato’s myth retains the traditional association between coinage 

and the short-term transactional order; however, the market is subordinated to the long term order 

circumscribed by the comprehensive virtue of political justice. The hierarchical relation among the 

Kallipolis’ constituent parts reflects their division “into species according to the natural formation, 

where the joint is.” 

The strikingly unworkable suggestion that children born to parents of differing “metals” should 

be reassigned to the appropriate class indicates the limits of philosophical myth-making. In terms 

of the myth the policy makes sense, and it reinforces the association between isonomia and social 

mobility. Still, to carve the classes of the city/soul along the appropriate metaphysical “joints” 

without interfering with the articulation of the whole body is much more easily accomplished in 

speech than in deed. The same goes for the radical proposal that auxiliaries and rulers should live 

communally, sharing property, wives and children, and never touching earthly silver or gold. When 

Adeimantus suggests that “you’re hardly making these men happy” (419a), Socrates reminds him 

that in “founding the city” in speech “we are not looking to the exceptional happiness of any one 

group among us, but as far as possible, that of the city as a whole” (420b).  

The Kallipolis is a speculative “tyranny of the good” in which each subject’s happiness is 

sacrificed to the whole city’s happiness, as prescribed by the ruling philosophical logos. Because 

of this, the “social mobility” allowed within the Kallipolis is for the city’s benefit not the subject’s. 

Plato proffers the “noble lie” as the sort of “strong medicine” needed to facilitate such a tyranny. 

But it is unlikely that Plato aimed to institute this regime in practice; it is more plausible to read 

the myth as a literary paradigm of political justice whose “vividness” lies chiefly in its diagnostic 

and therapeutic usefulness.35  



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 112 

Within the broader context of the Republic the myth serves to clarify the confusions over 

“justice” raised earlier in the dialogue. In Book I, the relations of justice were confused with more 

narrow relations characteristic of commercial partnerships (by Cephalus) and martial alliances (by 

Polemarchus). These confusions culminate in Thraymachus’ exasperated rejection of the idea of 

political justice and his claim that “justice” is merely a rhetorical means of legitimating predation 

upon the weak by the strong. If the Republic’s first book portrays the dissonance resulting from 

differentiations in social relationships that were intensified by literacy and coinage, then the myth 

of metals is an imaginative reconstitution of the social whole, on the ideal plane. 

 

Conclusion 

One measure of an institution’s claim to embody the long-term good is its ability to compel 

sacrifices. The myth of metals portrays the Kallipolis as free and happy precisely because its 

members are enslaved to the good. In other words, the myth envisages the whole array of sacrifices 

that a radical tyranny of the good would require. But the myth is only one vision, and it comes at 

the end of a series of representations of sacrifice.  

The first representation of sacrifice comes out in Socrates’ interrogation of Cephalus. Socrates 

asks about the value of wealth. Cephalus, an old man, replies that wealth is most valuable for 

settling debts with gods and men: “To the man who is conscious in himself of no unjust deed, 

sweet and good hope is ever beside him—a nurse of his old age, as Pindar puts it […] The 

possession of money contributes a great deal to not cheating or lying to any man against one’s will, 

and, moreover, to not departing for that other place frightened because one owes some sacrifices 

to a god or money to a human being” (330e–331b). 

Cephalus’ reply to Socrates demonstrates the relationship between human morality, which 

compels sacrifice, and the “imperceptible goods” that legitimately merit sacrifice. Allen glosses 

this passage:  

 

Stories of the after-life […] provide the first example of cognizable conceptions 

about imperceptible things; such conceptions have a controlling influence on 

human morality […] Socrates jumps on [Cephalus’] connection between the fear 

of death and a desire to meet obligations and claims that the issue at stake is whether 

Cephalus understands justice rightly. Socrates thus draws out a subtle point. When 



113 Baily 
 

human beings begin to wonder whether stories about what happens at or after death 

are true, their minds also turn to questions of justice and injustice. The question of 

life after death raises the prospect of punishment after death. In the face of 

epistemological uncertainty about any afterlife, human beings lose hold of 

whatever peace of mind they may have achieved, the dialogue suggests. Cephalus 

clearly has only one resource to help him contemplate what happens at death: 

poetry[.]36 

 

This is a powerful insight. Yet Allen overlooks that Cephalus has one other means to the peace of 

mind he seeks: coin. In its mute signification of value, coinage supplied the peace of mind that 

poetic invocations of afterlife spurred Cephalus to seek. For Cephalus, then, poetry and coinage 

close the moral-metaphysical circle that inscribes mortal life without the intervention of 

philosophical discourse. As soon as Socrates abstracts from Cephalus’ remarks the assertion that 

justice is “speaking the truth and giving back what one takes,” Cephalus himself departs “to look 

after the sacrifices” rather than remain for the dialogue, as if he has no need for the discussion and 

the mythmaking that follows.  

Perhaps this is because, for Cephalus, money also puts gods and mortals on a curiously equal 

footing, since debts to both gods and men may be discharged in coin. Here we glimpse the radically 

leveling implications of market rationality. Yet as the dialogue progresses an opposing implication 

emerges: that the wealthy are to the poor as gods are to mortals. For the wealthy can afford 

“sacrifices” or can pay others to sacrifice on their behalf, while the poor face poetically-heightened 

anxieties of mortality without any such consolation. 

Book I presents a series of incommensurable understandings of justice, beginning with the 

moneymaker’s justice, proceeding through the warrior’s justice, and concluding with the sophist’s 

denial or rejection of justice as a comprehensive idea. The flawed definitions of justice in Book I 

expose the fault lines created (or at least, considerably deepened) by coinage and literacy. 

Thrasymachus finally articulates a predatory vision of human association: whether the power 

backing it is physical or intellectual, he claims, “[justice] and the just are really someone else’s 

good, the advantage of the man who is stronger and rules, and a personal harm to the man who 

obeys and serves. Injustice is the opposite, and it rules the truly simple and just; and those who are 

ruled […] make him whom they serve happy but themselves not at all” (343c–d). 



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 114 

Thrasymachus’ sophistic argument suggests a paradigm of social relations where intellectual, 

physical, and economic predation is the metaphysical norm. In this paradigm rulers are “wolves” 

rather than “sheepdogs.” But, as Socrates exposes, this is to deny any distinction between justice 

and the art of gain. Thrasymachus’ tangled argument is structurally similar to the dissonance of 

Achilles. Like an intellectual Achilles, Thrasymachus’ position “[combines] the logic of money 

with aristocratic superiority to it.” When Socrates exposes his confusion Thrasymachus is enraged, 

just like Achilles. 

In the Iliad, Achilles’ dissonance “[combines] […] the logic of money with aristocratic 

superiority to it.” In a different way, so does the unbridled sophism of Thrasymachus in the 

Republic. For, Thrasymachus’ claim that “justice is the good of the stronger” combines the logic 

of the polis with the intellectual’s superiority to it. Unlike the aristocratic Achilles, Thrasymachus 

is a new man and a sophist, comfortable in the “human” world of the polis, but apt to put himself 

outside the community on account of his superior cleverness. If Achilles’ alienation from the 

human community reflects his sense of semi-divine superiority, Thrasymachus is alienated for the 

opposite reason: too clever to accept the claim of political justice, he likens the mass of men to 

sheep, while clever men are like wolves that prey upon them in the guise of protecting them. 

The myth of metals completes Socrates’ answer to Thrasymachus. Practically, its utopian 

“tyranny of the good” is no more workable (and barely more desirable) than Thrasymachus’ 

dystopian tyranny of predation. But it is not a practical plan; it is a hypothetical paradigm. 

Hypothetically, the myth saves [the guardians] as well as the city by persuading each class to make 

the sacrifices necessary for the whole to be just and happy. “Surely the most terrible and shameful 

thing at all is for shepherds to rear dogs as auxiliaries for the flocks in such a way that due to 

licentiousness, hunger or some other bad habit, they themselves undertake to do harm to the sheep, 

and instead of dogs, become like wolves” (416a).  

 

 

Notes 

1. At the extreme this mixture terminates in tyranny, which erases the boundary between 
wealth and political authority. 

2. Allen 21. 



115 Baily 
 

3. Etymology attests to the similarity between money and language; for example, logos is 
translated as “account” and even today modern Greeks call an invoice “to logoriasmo.” 

4. Ong 81. 

5. To emphasize the simulative role played by material culture does not necessarily imply 
cultural materialism. Rather, it can shed light on some peculiar and defining features of 
Plato’s moral and intellectual project. Among these are Plato’s interrogations of money as 
a measure of all value and of poetry as the chief vehicle of Greek paideia. 

6. Ong 51. 

7. Ong 48. 

8. Ong 174. Beyond alphabetic literacy, the introduction of print in the early modern era and, 
today, digital computing has intensified further the sense of subjectivity, even as it has knit 
humanity together through ties of institutional interdependence and instantaneous 
communication. Still, in the sweep of humanity’s existence on earth, the most radical 
change in consciousness was wrought by alphabetic writing. 

9. Shell continues:  

Heraclitus, for example, described the monetary exchange of commodities 
in a complex simile and series of metaphors whose logical exchanges of 
meaning define the unique form of simultaneous purchase and sale of wares 
that obtains in monetary transfer. And Plato criticized the Sophists and pre-
Socratics as merchants of the mind […] because they were producers of a 
discourse whose internal exchanges of meaning were identical to the 
exchanges of commodities in monetary transactions. Plato feared the 
political tendency of their moneyed words, and represented their discourses 
in his dialogues as the audible symptom of an invisible invasion into 
language of a tyrannical form destructive of wisdom. Plato’s critique 
extended to the ideal Form itself: Was not even Socratic dialectic, he 
wondered, pervaded by the monetary form of exchange? Was not dialectical 
division a kind of money changing, and dialectical hypothesizing a kind of 
hypothecation, or mortgaging? The upsetting confrontation of thought with 
its own internalization of economic form motivated thought to become the 
self-critical discourse of philosophy. (2)  

10. Seaford 34. 

11. Henaff 127. 

12. Seaford 302. 

13. Havelock 42. 

14. Havelock 45. 

15. Ong 79. 



Diagnosing the Dissonance of Achilles 116 

16. Ibid. 

17. Allen 4. 

18. Allen 162. This is not to deny the influence of literacy. “In an oral culture, Havelock argues, 
one can remember say, an epic poem only by ‘learning the lines’ as an actor does; in 
Havelock’s view, Plato saw this feature of an oral culture as giving oral poets excessive 
power to shape the souls of their fellows.” 

19. Allen 172. 

20. Allen 5. 

21. Allen 18. 

22. Allen 21. 

23. Allen 29. 

24. Allen 35, 57–59, 73–76. 

25. Allen 74–77. 

26. Allen 77. 

27. According to Kurke,  

Herodotus preserves oral tradition of approximately one hundred years 
preceding his researches (so, 550–450?) on both sides of the struggle [over 
the meaning of coinage]. Furthermore, Herodotus offers us a text that is 
uniquely capacious in content as well as in sources: thus he explicitly 
discusses many of the topics central to our inquiry for the first time. This 
can be demonstrated in miniature simply by a list of relevant words that 
occur for the first time in Herodotus’ text: in addition to nomisma, 
Herodotus gives us our earliest extant instances of banausiē (together with 
Sophocles’ Ajax), dokimos, hetaira used for a courtesan, and 
kapēlos/kapēleuō (aside from a single occurrence in Hipponax)” (31). 

28. Allan Bloom translates the relevant phrase (ti hen pseudomenous) as “some one noble lie.” 
All quotes from the Republic are from Bloom’s translation. 

29. Kurke 60. 

30. Kurke 60–64. 

31. Kurke 63–64. 

32. “[Whether] we etymologize it […] as ‘process or result of lawful distribution’ or […] as 
‘convention,’ the term nomisma points to the political function of coinage, either as a 
means of effecting retributive justice or as an institution of consensus. This political 



117 Baily 
 

function […] is what crucially distinguishes coinage from other forms of wealth (both of 
which are designated indiscriminately by chrēmata)” (Kurke 41). 

33. Kurke 13. 

34. Kurke 32. 

35. This is not to suggest that the myth offers a “yardstick,” if a yardstick is an absolute 
standard or template for measuring justice. It is more like a paradigm or heuristic to aid in 
understanding various socio-political relations.  

36. Allen concludes: “The opening scene of the Republic thus presents poetry as dwelling in 
the cognitive space where human psychology and epistemology combine to generate 
metaphysical conclusions that sustain particular notions of justice” (33–34). 

 

 

Works Cited 

Allen, Danielle. Why Plato Wrote. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 

Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. 

Hénaff, Marcel. The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy, trans. Jean-Louis Morhange. 
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. 

Kurke, Leslie. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982; repr. London: Routledge, 2002. 
Kindle edition. 

Plato. Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett. In The Works of Plato, ed. Irwin Edman. New York: 
Modern Library, 1956. 379–449. 

Plato. Republic, trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991. 

Seaford, Richard. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2004. 

Shell, Marc. Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the 
Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 


