Daniel asked:

I was reading in the Oxford Illustrated History of Christianityand came across the following statement:
"Four centuries earlier Socrates at Athens observed that a really righteous person would be so
unacceptable to human society that he would be subjected to every humiliation and crucified.|
Unfortunately, the statement is not footnoted. If it had appeared in a less prestigious publication than
Oxford University Press I might not have thought much about it. But, I cannot for the life of me
remember reading in any of Plato's writings, or any disciple of Socrates, any such statement. Can
anyone point me to the text that this statement is referring to?

============

Yes:

"The just man, as we have pictured him, will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned, his eyes will be
put out, and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified..."[Republic361e5, voice of Glaucon,
translation Desmond Lee].

This passage, which has seemed prophetic to some Christian readers, has a specific philosophical
purpose for Plato, and even if it is prophetic, it isn't offered as prophecy in the way that Nostradamus
offers prophecy. Plato doesn't think of himself as looking in to a crystal ball. Conceivably, there is the
question of whether Jesus could have read or otherwise encountered the Republic, but I'll leave the
currently popular debate about Jesus's role in bringing about his own fate exactly where I found it.
Those who do trouble over the prophetic qualities of this passage in the Republicmake much of
translation issues, and whether the greek text best justifies "crucified", or whether "impaled" and so
on. But in my view, that's entirely besides Plato's point.

What Plato is up to in the surrounding context is setting up a 'thought experiment', as we empirically
minded anglo-saxons like to call useful flights of the imagination. The question he wants to answer is:
is it better to be just or unjust? In the passage, Glaucon is helping Socrates clarify the meaning of this
question. Plato's thought is that if we want to see whether the enviable life is the life of the just, or
instead the life of the unjust, then we have to arrange for these things to be pictured in their extremes.
Thus: "We must strip him of everything except his justice". Imagine a man reviled, accused, tortured,
who still withal remains a just man (albeit one who cries out in pain). Should we praise and attempt to
imitate that kind of man? Over the course of the RepublicPlato argues that the answer to this
question is 'yes', and this is another point of confluence (or influence) between Plato and the Christian
tradition. The most unhappy and pitiable man, Plato thinks, is an unjust, tyrannical man who has
come into power (managed to get away with it). This belief is much doubted, but Plato has his
reasons to do with mental health and the perception of reality (reasons compared by Iris Murdoch to
Buddhist thought) and I, for my part, after reading and re-reading the Republic, agree with him.
Perhaps I agree with him with waning intensity when I have particularly bad pain in the ear and grow
impatient with some unhelpful doctor, but this, I suppose, is only to say what is patently obvious, that
in certain situations it becomes harder and harder to think at all.

David Robjant

In responding to this, David Robjant refers to Desmond Lee's translation of the
Republic,which reads in part, "...and after enduring every humiliation he will
be crucified..."

The actual Greek, which you can find at,

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0167:section=362a

doesn't refer to crucifixion, but to impaling. (A search for the Greek equivalent of 'crucifixion' in
standard Greek-English lexica returned nothing.) I suspect that Desmond Lee is either using a more
familiar way to express the horror of the truly just person's fate, or is siding with those who would like
to 'Christianize' this great pagan philosopher. A more recent, widely-used translation is that of G. M.
A. Grube, as revised by David Reeve [Hackett, 1992]:

"They'll say that a just person in such circumstances will be whipped, stretched on a rack, chained,
blinded with fire, and...at the end, he'll be impaled..."

Crucifixion seems to have been a Roman invention.

Robert Paul

Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Emeritus

Reed College

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