that he is passing lightly over the subject.

(2) The tentative manner in which here, as in the second book, he proceeds
with the construction of the State.

(3) The description of the State sometimes as a reality, and then again as
a work of imagination only; these are the arts by which he sustains the
reader's interest.

(4) Connecting links, or the preparation for the entire expulsion of the
poets in Book X.

(5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the
valetudinarian, the satirical jest about the maxim of Phocylides, the
manner in which the image of the gold and silver citizens is taken up into
the subject, and the argument from the practice of Asclepius, should not
escape notice.

BOOK IV. Adeimantus said: 'Suppose a person to argue, Socrates, that you
make your citizens miserable, and this by their own free-will; they are the
lords of the city, and yet instead of having, like other men, lands and
houses and money of their own, they live as mercenaries and are always
mounting guard.' You may add, I replied, that they receive no pay but only
their food, and have no money to spend on a journey or a mistress. 'Well,
and what answer do you give?' My answer is, that our guardians may or may
not be the happiest of men,--I should not be surprised to find in the long-
run that they were,--but this is not the aim of our constitution, which was
designed for the good of the whole and not of any one part. If I went to a
sculptor and blamed him for having painted the eye, which is the noblest
feature of the face, not purple but black, he would reply: 'The eye must