Republic

For there are some, it appears, who will not be contented with this sort of fare or with this way of life; but couches will have to be added thereto and tables and other furniture, yes, and relishes and myrrh and incense and girls and cakes—all sorts of all of them. And the requirements we first mentioned, houses and garments and shoes, will no longer be confined to necessities, but we must set painting to work and embroidery, and procure gold and ivory and similar adornments, must we not? Yes, he said. Then we shall have to enlarge the city again. For that healthy state is no longer sufficient, but we must proceed to swell out its bulk and fill it up with a multitude of things that exceed the requirements of necessity in states, as, for example, the entire class of huntsmen, and the imitators, many of them occupied with figures and colors and many with music—the poets and their assistants, rhapsodists, actors, chorus-dancers, contractors—and the manufacturers of all kinds of articles, especially those that have to do with women’s adornment. And so we shall also want more servitors. Don’t you think that we shall need tutors, nurses wet and dry, beauty-shop ladies, barbers and yet again cooks and chefs? And we shall have need, further, of swineherds; there were none of these creatures in our former city, for we had no need of them, but in this city there will be this further need; and we shall also require other cattle in great numbers if they are to be eaten, shall we not? Yes. Doctors, too, are something whose services we shall be much more likely to require if we live thus than as before? Much. And the territory, I presume, that was then sufficient to feed the then population, from being adequate will become too small. Is that so or not? It is. Then we shall have to cut out a cantle of our neighbor’s land if we are to have enough for pasture and ploughing, and they in turn of ours if they too abandon themselves to the unlimited acquisition of wealth, disregarding the limit set by our necessary wants. Inevitably, Socrates. We shall go to war as the next step, Glaucon—or what will happen? What you say, he said. And we are not yet to speak, said I, of any evil or good effect of war, but only to affirm that we have further discovered the origin of war, namely, from those things from which the greatest disasters, public and private, come to states when they come. Certainly.