Essay 10 of Proclus’ commentary focuses on one of the passages in Plato’s Republic that has generated the most scholarly controversy – the argument through which Socrates distinguishes genuine philosophers from pretenders to that title.1 This argument is a key part of Socrates’ response to the third and greatest of the three questions put to him by his friends: the question of how the ideal city-state might come about. Socrates’ famous answer is that philosophers must become rulers or rulers must take up philosophy (473d–e), and this answer, in turn, requires that we distinguish genuine philosophers from those who are simply in love with learning. Proclus characterises this distinction as one between philosophia and philomathia and for him, as for Plato, it is a matter of ontological commitment rather than temperament or motivation. Those who genuinely love wisdom are those who recognise the necessity of forms and are capable of coming to understand them (476a–b).

Essay 7 principally concerns Republic IV 427d–444a in which Socrates and his interlocutors first look for justice and the other virtues within the city they have described and then turn to the question of whether the soul admits of a similar tripartite structure with analogous virtues within the individual.1 Plato’s discussion in Book IV is apparently innocent of the metaphysics and epistemology of the middle books – though of course the ensuing discussions of philosophers and Forms will deepen the understanding of what it is for the reasoning part to rule in the soul.2 Nonetheless, as with the function argument of Book I (352c–53e), Socrates’ reasoning proceeds from admissions that the none-too-philosophical Glaucon and Adeimantus make and does not presuppose the theory of Forms or any idea of the soul as an incorporeal substance that is more akin to the Forms than to the body. The same, of course, is at least superficially true of Aristotle’s function argument in Nicomachean Ethics I, chapter 7.

Essay 13 is a wide-ranging commentary on the short speech of the Muses in Republic VIII 546a1–547a5 and 547b2–c4. Proclus names this essay after the bee, because bees are sacred to the Muses and display a kind of appropriately ruled society.1

Plato has just completed the central books of the Republic (V, VI, and VII), in which he has advocated that women should share the philosophical rule with men and has laid out the three famous analogies of the Sun, Divided Line, and Cave. He now embarks on the decline from the government of the ideal city through to four lesser forms: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. The Muses’ speech explains the reasons behind the decline of the ideal city, stating that it occurs because of strife between the auxiliary and guardian classes after these two classes are no longer able to select the correct time for breeding the new generation.

These two brief essays bridge the gap between the extensive discussion of the nuptial number in Essay 13 and the massive commentary on the Myth of Er that will follow in volume III of this series. Essay 14 contains a kind of appendix in tabular form that summarises the three arguments that the life of the just person is happier. Essay 15 opens with a similar tabular presentation of the main sections of Book X of the Republic.

We can delve no further than the Vatican manuscript (Vat. gr. 2197) into the history of these diagrammatic representations of the contents of the two essays, but it is striking that both appear on the same page (111r). The scholia to the part of the codex that remained in Florence have one somewhat similar tabular presentation of information but this summarises divisions to be found among the kinds of powers in Plato’s Laws. It does not provide a tabular summary of the content of Proclus’ text.1 Part of Essay 13 carries over onto 111r, so it seems integral to the version created by the ninth- or tenth-century copyist.

Since Socrates, in the fifth book of the Republic, wishes to show that political virtue does not belong to men alone, but is also common to women, he says that the education (paideia)32 that is prior to virtue must necessarily be the same for men and women33 – an education through mousikê and through physical training whose extent and character he has defined. Furthermore, even prior to the education, he shows the nature of both kinds (genos) [i.e. men and women] to be the same in form, for unless this point is firmly established, neither the arguments concerning education, nor those concerning virtue would have plausibility. It is, after all, necessary for education to be consequent upon nature, and for virtue to be consequent upon education, since the one perfects nature, while the other is the goal of education.

Essays 8 and 9 are unique within the context of Proclus’ Republic Commentary in being so obviously different treatments of more or less the same subject matter. Accordingly, we will provide one introductory chapter for both essays.