start to articulate what education is, and what it is not. Socrates’ concern is embedded in the larger discussion of the guardians’ education, but it also goes all the way back to Book 1 where Thrasymachus, in a pitch of frustration with Socrates, assumes the wrong definition of education: ‘And how am I to persuade you, if you aren’t persuaded by what I said just now? What more can I do? Am I to take your argument and pour it into your very soul?’ ‘God forbid! Don’t do that!’ Socrates replies. This passage from Republic 1 humorously illustrates the view of education that Socrates uses the cave allegory to counteract. At 518b-c Socrates finally reveals what the cave allegory has been designed to illustrate: briefly, that ‘education is not what some people declare it to be, namely putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes,’ but rather ‘turning the whole soul’ around. For the purposes of this discussion, therefore, let us consider this the ending of the cave allegory. The passage as a whole falls into two main parts: (1) from 514a through 517a Socrates presents the image, and (2) from 517b through 518d he presents a series of interpretive glosses. References to the cave continue beyond this point, but these continuing references differ in important ways from the interpretive glosses. Socrates explicitly presents interpretive glosses from 517b to 518d as aids to interpreting the image (‘This whole image, Glaucon, must be fitted together with what we said before . . .’, 517a8-b1); Socrates interprets the prisoner’s upward journey as an ascent to the intelligible realm and the Form of the Good. He describes the prisoner’s return to the cave, and then he focuses on the two ways that the eyes can be confused (when they are disoriented by the ascent out of the cave and when they are disoriented by the return back in, which paves the way for his climactic definition of true education). In contrast, the allusions to the cave that continue beyond this point draw out implications that the cave allegory has for the education of the rulers in Socrates’ ideal city.
(517b9-13). These remarks about the Good might count as Socrates’ first interpretive revelation, and it is important to note that they are qualified both by Socrates’ admission that ‘Whether or not it’s true only the god knows’ (517b6-7) and by Glaucon’s guarded agreement to Socrates’ description of the Good: ‘I have the same thought, at least as far as I am able’ (517c5). Socrates’ condensed description of the Good as a cause is also, of course, famously under-elaborated and raises many questions. As a revelation to Glaucon, it is limited, although perhaps promising, and in any case it does not dispel all confusion. From this point forward, Socrates’ narrative is structured as a crescendo. If we divide the sections by topic, they gradually increase in length, culminating in Socrates’ revisionary definition of education. Five lines are devoted to repeating a topic that Socrates has just treated, namely that the prisoner who has escaped from the cave will no longer be interested in human affairs (517c6-d1). The following seven lines turn to a variation of a topic that also repeats what Socrates has previously said, namely that if the escaped prisoner does turn toward the human world, he will behave awkwardly and appear ridiculous (517d3-e1). Here we cannot help but be put in mind of Socrates’ trial by the choice of examples the narrative makes. The prisoner would appear ridiculous ‘if he’s compelled, either in the courts or elsewhere, to contend about the shadows of justice.’ Note that in the previous section Socrates had also alluded to himself (in a breech of realism) when he said that if anyone tried to lead the prisoners upward against their will, they would ‘kill him’ ‘if they could somehow get their hands on him’ (517a5-5-6). Having Socrates so pointedly allude to his own future, so well known to us, is a way that Plato inserts himself into the narrative. Plato and his reader know very well that this is Socrates’ fate, and yet when the character Socrates himself unknowingly makes the allusion, we are strikingly made aware that Plato crafts the narrative from a superior vantage point. The following 11 lines --