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The discussion of the Form of the so-called bed in Book 10 of the Republic has exercised Plato’s commentators. It has raised their eyebrows and lowered their esteem for his logic. Many of the problems in the passage have been concisely summarized in Julia Annas’s excellent An Introduction to Plato’s Republic.¹ Annas discusses not only the logical inadequacies of Plato’s conceptualization of the theory of Forms but also the flaws in his unsuccessful attempt to assimilate poetry to “a debased form of painting.”² Her discussion makes it impossible not to wonder why Plato should have opened himself to such obvious criticism. Why pick an artifact to instantiate the function of Forms, and why this particular artifact?

I think Annas and the tradition of commentary in which she writes give the wrong kind of answer. The focus on Plato’s logic is misplaced for three reasons. First, the bed is not a bed: It is a klinē—a couch, as Paul Shorey and Allan Bloom more accurately translate it. Second, when Socrates introduces this object, he associates it three times with another, trapeza, or table (596b), before singling it our for special attention. One meaning of klinē is a banqueting couch (a triclinium), and one meaning of trapeza is a dining table, and when the two appear together, this set of meanings tends to be privileged. Trapeza appears by itself three times, always in connection with gormandizing. Third, the couch and table have appeared together before, and it’s this prior incidence to which I now turn.

About three-fifths of the way through the second book, Glaucon scornfully dismisses the idyllic peasant frugality Socrates has been depicting with Adeimantus’s approval. Calling this a city of Sows (huōn polin, 372d), he demands instead a setting more appropriate to the tastes and desires of wealthier citizens like himself. The citizens of the city they are founding should be able to “recline on couches and eat from tables and have relishes and desserts just like men have nowadays” (372d–e). Socrates responds by expanding Sow City into a tryphōn city—luxurious, soft, and “feverish” (phlegmainousan)—and the first items he adds are “couches, tables, and other furniture,” followed by what goes on them and what goes on around them, “relishes, perfume, incense, courtesans and cakes” (373a).

This city, Couch City or Klinopolis,³ is insatiable and ever-expanding, and must be “gorged with a bulky mass” of inessential things. First there will be “hunters and imitators,” then “poets and their helpers” who stage plays, then “craftsmen of all sorts of equipment, for feminine adornment as well as other things,” then those who replace and release parents busied by pleasure (“teachers, wet nurses, governesses”), then those who dress bodies and food (“beauticians, barbers, … relish-makers and cooks”). And there will be “swineherds” to tend an animal absent from the earlier city but deemed essential in Klinopolis.

There will also be also be need “of very many other fatted beasts [allōn boskēmatōn pampollōn] if someone will eat them,” and therefore greater need of doctors, and of more land “for feeding the men,” and, finally, of an army to go to war over the defense or seizure of land (373b–e). This army becomes the nucleus of the guardian class, the phylakēs, in the new society that replaces Klinopolis and that Socrates will call Kallipolis (527c). It is to the founding of Kallipolis that Books 2 through 5 are devoted (374a–471c).

Socrates’s rapid sketch of Couch City and its Atlantean growth is by no means an unprejudiced portrait of Athenian democracy. Rather it’s the Athens of the new agathoi—members of rich families but not of the Eupatridai (“well-fathered,” the older aristocratic lineages). The sketch is presented as if to roil up the cankered traditionalist who condemns and contemns it partly because it appeals to the very desire for unlimited gain that caused the downfall of his genos after the period of Solon’s reforms. Kallipolis is to be a purge for, an antidote to, Klinopolis, and it will turn out to be a pharmakon in the ambivalent sense developed by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida. More specifically, it will be a remedy for the pleonexia driving Couch City toward endless expansion.

Much later in the dialogue, at 586bl, the term klinē appears in conjunction with other terms that clearly echo phrases in the account of Couch City. Socrates is describing “those who have no experience of prudence and virtue but are always living with feasts and the like … after the fashion of cattle [boskēmatōn], always looking down and with their heads bent to earth and table [trapezas], they feed [boskontai], fattening themselves and copulating; and for the sake of getting more [pleonexias] of these things, they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of iron, killing each other because they are insatiable” (586a–b). They are always in danger of becoming what they eat.

This brief reminder of Couch City is strategically placed: it prepares the way for the reintroduction of couches and tables. The symbolic importance of couches is certified ten Stephanus pages later when the major example Socrates uses to illustrate the metaphysics of mimēsis is one that darkens the very idea of mimēsis. He situates it in the penumbra of the long shadow thrown by the superficially rejected lifestyle and culture of Klinopolis when he mischievously picks the Form of the Couch (klinē) as if out of the air (596a–598b).

It is partly as a remedy for the pleonexia of Couch City that Socrates guides the brothers through the construction of Kallipolis. In its quasi-Spartan institutions he depicts a military aristocracy like that which dominated the age before the tyrants and the Solonic reforms—a society complete with the ideology necessary to naturalize aristocratic power and legitimize exploitation.

The extremism of this solution measures the degree of self-distrust, of submission to the misanthrope’s paranoia, that had surfaced in the early speeches of Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. The genealogical development of the three cities to some extent dramatizes the motivational dialectic leading to the solution. Sow City reflects and responds to Adeimantus’s pleonectic fears and Couch City to Glaucon’s pleonectic desires, while Kallipolis alternately exercises—and externalizes—both their dispositions.

With the help of Adeimantus Socrates had first sketched an idyll of cooperative farmers and craftworkers happily putting their differences and specializations to common use. Sow City is economic pastoral. Its idealized division of labor excludes competitive and contentious impulses of self-interest. But they are conspicuously excluded, so that their marked absence troubles the placid surface.

This is apparent, for example, in the introduction of the key formula, “doing one’s own,” at 370a. The formula is ambiguous because incomplete (doing one’s own what?). It first appears in an alternative that is rejected: the autarky that finds each farmer “not taking the trouble to share in common with others, but doing his own by himself [auton di’ auton ta autou prattein].” But almost immediately, it is reinstated in the “one man one art” formula explained by the idea that “each of us is naturally not quite like anyone else, but rather differs in his nature; different men are apt for the accomplishment of different jobs” (370a–b).

The privileged sense imposed on “doing one’s own” by “one man one art” will be transformed into the guardian injunction, “doing what you’re told or programmed to do.” This closes off an obvious alternative whose sense is caught in an idiom from the 1960s, “doing your own thing.” The transformation from one version to the other dramatizes the process of conspicuous exclusion—offers a glimpse of the autarkic danger to be dispelled.

In this passage Socrates is still describing the minimal “city of utmost necessity” (anankaiotatē) composed “of four or five men”—the farmer, housebuilder, weaver, and “shoemaker or some other man who cares for what has to do with the body” (369d). He goes on at 370b to transform “our little city … into a throng” by adding toolmakers and pastoralists, merchants and trading networks (which means other cities), a commercial fleet, money, local tradespeople, and manual laborers “called wage earners.”

The minimal city is on the verge of becoming a second Athens, and Socrates describes its expansion in such a way as to stress the tyranny of economic need. His accent falls on the steady erosion of the craftworker’s self-sufficiency and the increasing necessity to depend on the skills and needs of others. He emphasizes the growing power over the kind and quantity of products exercised by the system of exchange, its agents, and its medium.

The autarkic ideal of total independence excluded by the “one man one art” formula is again suggested and excluded at the civic level at 370e. Adeimantus agrees with Socrates’s statement that “to found the city itself in the sort of place where there will be no need of imports is pretty nearly impossible.” This breach in the city’s self-sufficiency entangles the citizens in a network of alien needs so that “they must produce at home not only enough for themselves but also the sort of thing and in the quantity needed by these others [in other cities] of whom they have need” (371a).

The agent of exchange is called diakonos, which means “servant,” “messenger,” or “ministrant.” Socrates often uses this term in the vaguely pejorative sense of one who performs menial services and knows how to flatter those dependent on him. Adeimantus’s comment on such figures expresses his contempt while acknowledging their enterprise and necessary function: “There are men who see this situation and set themselves to this service; in rightly governed cities they are usually those whose bodies are weakest and are useless for doing any other job” (371c–d). When Socrates baptizes this class kapēlos (“tradesman” or “huckster”) and then calls “‘merchants’ [emporous] those who wander among the cities” (371d), the shadow of the sophist flits briefly across Sow City.

In this manner Socrates manages both to sketch out the image of the cooperative city based on need and to insinuate into it some of the dangers that elicit anxiety about pleonexia and failing control. To his question whether the city has “already grown to completeness,” Adeimantus responds a little uncertainly: “Perhaps” (Isōs). And when Socrates asks where “Justice and injustice” would be—what things they came into being with—he replies, “I can’t think … unless it’s somewhere in some need these men have of one another” (37le–372a).

This poses the interesting question about where—in what needs—injustice resides, but Socrates leaves it open when he flatters Adeimantus’s vague reply with “Perhaps what you say is fine,” and goes on, “It really must be considered and we mustn’t back away.” Having said that, he immediately backs away, closes the lid on the problems, and concludes with an idyllic—therefore evasive—picture of the community of happy peasants at work and play.

Even here, however, excluded dangers hover over the end of the idyll:

For food they will prepare barley meal and wheat flour; they will cook it and knead it. Setting out noble loaves of barley and wheat on some reeds or clean leaves, they will stretch out [kataklinentes] on rushes strewn with yew and myrtle and feast themselves and their children. Afterwards they will drink wine and, crowned with wreaths, sing of the gods. So they will have sweet intercourse with one another, and not produce children beyond their means, keeping an eye out against poverty and war. (372b)

Julia Annas is right to be troubled by Socrates’s depiction of the city and equally right to insist that a positive reading of it is still plausible. She mentions “the allusions to the Golden Age” as a factor that makes it seem attractive.⁴ But she ignores the particular function of those allusions: they impose an unearned happy ending on an account that increasingly stresses destabilizing elements. Above all, she misses a set of odd textual echoes centered on words belonging to the couch family. In the passage I just quoted, Socrates says the workers “will stretch out”—kataklinentes, whose root is klinē.

This is the second of three occurrences of the term kataklinentes. At 363c Adeimantus complains that the Orphic poets encourage the appearance of justice (rather than justice itself) with their speeches about the afterlife. “In their speech” they lead those reputed just “into Hades and lay them down on couches [kataklinantes]; crowning them, they prepare a symposium of the holy, and they make them go through the rest of time drunk, in the belief that the finest wage of virtue is an eternal drunk.”

Socrates allusively laces words and details from Adeimantus’s complaint into his own picture of the peasant picnic. Later, he echoes both passages in illustrating his protest that Adeimantus has the wrong idea about how to make citizens of the guardian polis happy:

We know how to clothe the farmers in fine robes and hang gold on them and bid them work the earth at their pleasure, and how to make the potters recline [kataklinantes] before the fire, [and drink and feast], and how to make all the others blessed in the same way…. But don’t give us this kind of advice, since, if we were persuaded by you, the farmer won’t be a farmer, nor the potter a potter, nor will anyone else assume any of those roles that go to make up a city. (420e–421a)

This argument is critical for the guardians. They must be denied the wherewithal that will encourage them to live the life of “happy banqueters” who pursue the pleonectic pleasures of the couch. Such “happiness … will turn them into everything but guardians” and will lead them utterly “to destroy an entire city, just as they alone are masters of the occasion to govern it well and make it happy” (420d–e, 421a).

These passages speak to the contradictions in Adeimantus’s desire for a fail-safe solution that will repress or eliminate the dangers of pleonexia without requiring the effort that might make the task too difficult, might render the outcome uncertain. In fact, the idyllic harmony Socrates describes is a damped-down version of precisely the seductive promises Adeimantus had condemned the poets for making—the promises not only of the Orphic poets but also of Hesiod, who said that vice was easy and virtue hard (364d), and other things to this effect.

It isn’t only for Adeimantus’s benefit that Socrates abridges his account of Sow City’s growth and shifts into his idyllic happy ending. The picnic is described in a manner calculated to stir up Glaucon. Such details as mazas gennaias (“noble” or, more ridiculously, “well-born barley-cakes”), kataklinentes not on couches but on rushes (stibadōn), and estephanōmenoi (“crowned” as with a symbol of honor or victory), trigger his demands first for relishes and shortly after for couches.

Socrates obligingly responds to the demand for relishes with a list of the homeliest rustic garnishes, and then offers to fade his feasters out in a Hesiodic haze that’s also a parody of Achilles’s rejected life: “They will live out their lives in peace with health, as is likely, and at last, dying as old men, they will hand down similar lives to their offspring” (372d). Glaucon is appalled. “If you were providing for a city of Sows, Socrates, on what else would you fatten them than this?”

On the basis of the reference to swineherds at 373c Leo Strauss dismisses this remark (no doubt playfully) as a mistake because “the healthy city is literally without Sows.”⁵ Nevertheless, it deserves more attention. Apart from revealing the aristocrat’s sense of amenities and scorn of peasant customs—a sign of factional differences—it implies that Socrates is fattening up his city of docile vegetarians for slaughter by warlike outsiders who, like Glaucon, eat meat (cf. 404b–c, 411c).

The sexual, dietary, and occupational restrictions required to keep Sow City internally peaceful make it all the more vulnerable to plunder. Glaucon’s mention in Book 10 of Homer’s companion, Creophylos (600b), supplies a deferred identification: Marauders of the Meat Tribe would descend on Sow City in search of a readymade lower class, a servile population of dēmiourgoi to satisfy their necessary as well as unnecessary desires, some of which call for swineherds and swine.

Strauss’s commentary on this section is excellent. “Glaucon is characterized by the fact that he cannot distinguish between his desire for dinner and his desire for virtue.” His rebellion against Sow City “was prompted by his desire for luxury, for ‘having more,’ for the thrills of war and destruction (cf. 47lb6–cl).” With the onset of the guardian proposals he is “compelled by Socrates to accept the complete divorce of the profession of arms from all luxury and gain.”⁶

I connect these statements to Strauss’s observation that Sow City decays into Couch City: “Its decay is brought about by the emancipation of the desire for unnecessary things.”⁷ This implies the extent to which Sow City is the product of the subversive repressions and exclusions (mentioned above) that conform to Adeimantus’s fears but not to Glaucon’s desires. The impractical economic fantasy developed for Adeimantus measures the stringency with which features of an actual polis were purged to pacify his fears.

This puckered utopian impulse is then shown to release the dystopian fantasy of Klinopolis like a coiled spring as a reaction to Sow City. All that was excluded or repressed pours back into the vision of a polis in which humans are slaves to their appetites and can’t be trusted to purge or order themselves. Anyone who looks to Sow City as the true or ideal form of polity is thus in spirit both a willing and unwilling citizen of Couch City, a participant in excesses that lead him to demand the harshest as well as the most devious reforms to bring it back into order.

The dialectic of foundation unfolds in an oscillatory pattern of violent reversals. As Klinopolis is an extreme reaction to Sow City, so the guardian polis is an extreme reaction to Klinopolis. Kallipolis is an effort to reestablish at a higher level the primitive equilibrium of the “hidden hand.”

Socrates’s brief account of Sow and Couch Cities leads to one of the most significant road-forks in the long roundabout path of the Republic. Though he lays out the guardian proposals with the bland idyllicism of someone conducting a seminar on urban planning, their relation to Couch City places them and all the other proposals that fill the Republic on the most dubious ethical basis. Consider the genetic argument implicit in that relation: Since the urge to consume more pleasure, property, and food leads either to faction or to war, the guardian class and polis must be brought into existence (if only in speech) in order to avoid the possibility of faction and implement that of war.

This argument conspicuously excludes an alternative remedy: the elenctic method of self-examination and self-refutation practiced by Socrates. War and guardianship are mystified as honorable responses to the city’s decision to gratify rather than restrain pleonexia by expanding beyond its boundaries. Guardianship and war as a way of life constitute an escape from elenchus as a way of life.

To move from Klinopolis to the purged guardian state is to institute Kallipolis as an ambiguous remedy for the ills of Couch City. It is ambiguous in being both a repressive defense against its excesses and a way to maintain them through war. In this context, the force and fear of an oriental pleonexia necessitates repressive measures parodically modeled on Spartan training.

The motivational structure externalized in Couch City reappears periodically throughout the dialogue in different forms. Pleonectic desire for the All is shown to generate not only Klinopolis and its guardian antidote but also the philosopher king and his dark double, the tyrannic soul. Therefore when couches and tables are reintroduced in Book 10, the lengthening shadow of Klinopolis, the city of pleonexia, falls across the idea or eidos of the couch. Is the eidos of the couch the eidos of injustice?

These implications emerge more clearly at 601c when Socrates floats the idea that it is the user rather than the maker of any object who knows what it is for, and therefore how it should be made. He illustrates this point with the example of the flute player who knows about the goodness and badness of flutes, and to whom the maker should be compelled to listen. Rosamond Kent Sprague finds this suggestion “somewhat startling” because, on the analogy of the bed, whose Form was said to be produced by a god, this makes “the flute player or his equivalent … a kind of god.”

Sprague’s way of making this less startling is to argue that to be a god merely means to have the “knowledge of function that controls making.”⁸ But I think we redeem its startle-value when we realize that the various Greek terms translated into “goodness” and “badness,” and applied to flutes and other artifacts, have all been previously charged with ethical meaning. Then their restricted reference in this passage to technical standards becomes both noticeable and questionable.

The technical orientation of the question, “Who uses the flute?” is thus misleading, and it clearly obscures other questions: Why use the flute? Not, what is the flute for, but what is flute-playing for? Who uses the fluteplayer? To whom is he compelled to listen? And the same questions can be asked of the couch. Who uses the couch, and why? Isn’t the couch-user the one who uses and compels not only the makers of couches but also those of flutes, flute music, and all other Klinopolitan objects and practices, as well as their imitations?

The couch-user, then, is the one who best knows the idea of the couch. He knows what it is for—what its aretē or function is—and what kind of eidos will most effectively actualize its aretē. Since he is the god who created the eidos, he can both provide the craftsman with building instructions (along with a paradeigma or model) and command him to build. But this divine user and maker of couches is not an individual recumbent, not even a whole class or genos of aristocratic recumbents.

As an idea, the couch is the goal and product of erōs in its hybristic form, which is pleonexia. It symbolizes desire for the honor, money, power, and pleasure that make it worth one’s while to neglect justice and the rest of virtue. And it symbolizes the arguments that rationalize the desire.

The Form of the Couch thus transcendentalizes the culture of Klinopolis. It idealizes the way of life opposed to the striving for to agathos, the softer way identified with the symposial house of Agathon. Whoever denies responsibility for the difficult quest of what is good or just, and who knows how to rationalize that denial, is a user, worshiper, and creator of the “Form” of the Couch.

This “whoever” is not limited to actual users. For there is a discourse of the Couch, a set of well-articulated logoi disseminated throughout the pleonectic society by poets, seers, sophists, natural philosophers, and nomothetes. All these voices are complicit with the users in composing the Form of the Couch, in prescribing its function, in preserving and enhancing its power.

The discourse of the Couch is the one Glaucon and Adeimantus had objected to in Book 2 when they pleaded with Socrates to refute it and develop a persuasive alternative in defense of justice. But during the remainder of the dialogue Socrates as narrator registers their persistent acquiescence to that discourse, their positive responses to the series of pleonectic constructions he presents as solutions to their dilemma.

The return of the couch in Book 10 is thus like the return of the repressed. It is the eidos of the Klinopolitan culture putatively left behind in the founding of Kallipolis. It is the “Being” instantiated or imitated in many instances of interlocutory Becoming. The Form of the Couch is imitated in the fear and difficulty of elenctic self-confrontation, in the evasion of responsibility, in the willingness to let Socrates do the hard work, and in the desire to displace the care of justice from the sphere of ethical consciousness to technical and institutional mechanisms. These manifestations of the reclining state infiltrate the attempts of Glaucon and Adeimantus to combat—with Socrates’s help—the discourse of the Couch they find inscribed in the world they live in and the traditions that dominate it.

The final stages of discussion in the Republic return to and reanimate the terms of Kephalos’s Simonidean logos. At 608b, Socrates secures Glaucon’s assent to the proposition that justice is to be desired for its own sake. He goes on to describe the just and unjust conditions of the immortal soul (608d–612b). Then he asks Glaucon to give back what he and Adeimantus had borrowed from him in Book 2.

They had borrowed—that is, he had conceded to them—“the just man’s seeming to be unjust and the unjust man just … so that justice itself could be judged as compared with injustice itself.” He now asks them to give back the argument that true justice pays. They wholeheartedly agree to what is conspicuously, suspiciously, an idyllic dream of the just soul’s rewards (612b–614a).

The Simonidean metaphor of exchange in this passage is confusing. First, the brothers are to give back the cynical argument in the sense of cancelling it. Then they are to give back the idyllic argument in the sense of letting Socrates use it.

The confusion vanishes as soon as we realize that both arguments reflect a single desire: the desire that justice be rewarded and that this desire originate with the brothers, not with Socrates. He is in effect saying that it was Glaucon and Adeimantus, not himself, who really want justice to pay. Their effort has been to persuade Socrates to prove to them, and for them, what they would like to believe but can’t prove for themselves—not because they are cynical but because they live in a climate in which easy pieties like those of Kephalos are targets of sophistical disenchantment.

Socrates, then, pretends to take back from the brothers what they owe him: the argument that justice pays; the argument they didn’t let him use. But he actually gives back to them what they want to hear. The metaphor of repayment signifies his dissociation from the argument he makes in their behalf. Yet if it is always wrong to do harm, and if in giving or taking back what is owed Socrates does harm to the cause of justice, isn’t he participating in an unjust exchange? And doesn’t he do this by following the dictates of the discredited logos of Simonides and Kephalos?

The facility with which he redistributes “prizes, wages, and gifts” from the unjust to the just man and sends pains and punishments in opposing directions (612e–613e) suggests that he isn’t so much participating in the exchange as dramatizing it. The bouquet of rewards he encourages the brothers to savor is so smoothly and extravagantly described as to prevent the reader from sharing their enthusiasm.

Our skepticism about the results of the inquiry into justice is not diminished by the comment with which Socrates approaches the myth of Er. He says that the rewards for justice conferred during life “are nothing in multitude or magnitude [plēthei oude megethei] compared to those that await each when dead. And those things should be heard so that in the hearing each of these men will have gotten back the full measure of what the argument owed him” (614a).

In Socratic procedure, the reference to quantity and size is always a signal that his argument responds to the inclination of his auditors to measure good and evil in terms of units of pleasure and pain. He promises to make magnified mythic restitution to “each of these men”—the just and the unjust—for the Thrasymachean slander he borrowed in the brothers’ name, but the terms of this payment tend to blend with those of the apodosis the brothers owe him: a fantasy of the perfect distribution of pleasure to the just and pain to the unjust.

Despite this promise, the myth of Er does not give equal weight to the two destinies. Rather its emphasis echoes that of Kephalos’s remarks on the tales told about Hades. Socrates dwells longer on the details of punishment than on those of reward. Since the sufferings recounted by the unjust and the delights recounted by those returning from heaven would take a long time to tell, Socrates will restrict his account to “the sum” (615a). “Sum” translates kephalaion, which momentarily lights up the long-vanished ghost of Kephalos.

The sum includes a brief undetailed reference to the rewards of the just and holy, much quantified information about the penalties for injustice, and a longer, more fully visualized, narrative about the tyrant and parricide, Ardiaeus. When Socrates later describes the choosing of life-patterns, the tyrant is conflated with a suspiciously Kephalean figure. The melodramatic references to the parricide Ardiaeus and to the eating of sons, with its Hesiodic overtones, suggest exaggerated mythic transcriptions of the subtler dangers of generational warfare most fully treated in Book 8 but introduced in the discourse of Kephalos.

One way to approach this passage is to read it in light of Socrates’s remarks about the tyrannical soul. At the beginning of the ninth book, he comments on the “terrible, savage, and lawless form of desires … in every man, even in some of us who seem to be ever so measured [metriois]. And surely this becomes plain in dreams” (572b). Even the most epieikēs man has potentially tyrannical desires. The price of the virtue derived from conformity with nomos is the diminution of self-awareness. Socrates says that the man best able to discern and judge the tyrant adequately is the one “able with his thought to creep into a man’s disposition and see through it,” the man who “has lived together with the tyrant in the same place” (577a) and confronted the potential tyrant within himself.

Glaucon and Adeimantus are brought closer to this self-perception than Kephalos. Kephalos distinguishes the unjust man who has bad dreams from the man conscious of no unjust deed. But in aligning himself with the latter he so much as acknowledges in the existence of the former those whose tyrannical impulses he has cause to fear: those who envy his wealth and those enslaved by the savage despoteia of desire. If his wealth has helped him control or escape safely from the mad masters within, he has still to defend against the pleonexia of the young and the many, of oikeioi as well as allotrioi.

The burden of his logos is that he has tried to do this by paying back what he owes. He tries to do it now by means of the exemplary moral sentiments he addresses to Socrates in the hearing of “these young men,” who might well profit by being reminded of the pains of hellfire. His final long speech contains the seeds of the myth of Er. When Socrates tells the myth, he puts Kephalos in his place by revealing the contradictions and evasions in his epieikeis logoi. Nevertheless, the myth as a whole reflects those logoi. It is a Kephalean rather than Socratic fantasy. Socrates ironically reinstates Kephalos’s morality at the end of the dialogue as the goal toward which the commitments and desires of the two brothers tend.