The Correctness of Laws and the Role of Natural History in Plato’s Republic 5

Abstract This article argues that in book 5 of the Republic , Socrates argues for the feasibility – and hence for the correctness – of the legislative proposals concerning the sharing of women and children, marriages, and lawfare among the guardians by using natural historical evidence familiar to his aristocratic interlocutors from their own experiences with breeding, raising, and hunting animals. The laws thus established are not merely ‘ontologically possible,’ but they also reflect the teleological order of nature, as they promote the natural capacities and goods of the guardians governed by them and ultimately the formation of a kind of organic, telic unity in Kallipolis itself.