Plato's Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity

281 Pages·2020·1.762 MB·English

by  Rebecca LeMoine

Plato's Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity
Rebecca LeMoine
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190936983.001.0001
Published: 2020 Online ISBN: 9780190937010 Print ISBN: 9780190936983
FRONT MATTER
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Published: February 2020
Subject: Political Theory, International Relations
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To my mother, Linda
“Jesus God,” said Montag. “Every hour so many damn things in the
sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second
of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve
started and won two atomic wars since 1990! Is it because we’re
having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because
we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care
if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well
fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re
hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long
while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe
the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from
making the same damn insane mistakes!”
 —R ay Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Plato's Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity
Rebecca LeMoine
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190936983.001.0001
Published: 2020 Online ISBN: 9780190937010 Print ISBN: 9780190936983
FRONT MATTER
Acknowledgments 
Published: February 2020
Subject: Political Theory, International Relations
It is di�cult to know where to begin giving an account of all the friends, readers, and audiences who helped
to improve this book by serving, in many di�erent ways, as my gad�ies—a comparison that I realize may
not seem �attering, but is in truth a high compliment, as will become evident in the course of this book. I
have learned more from these interlocutors than I can possibly repay. I hope my apologies and innermost
gratitude will su�ce for anyone I may inadvertently have neglected to mention in these acknowledgments.
This book began as a PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and I am beyond blessed for
the continued support of my alma mater. Not only have my graduate mentors continued to share generously
of their time and support, but I was honored to have my manuscript selected for the 2017 First Book
Manuscript Workshop sponsored by the UW’s Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy. In line with the
Center’s mission of encouraging intellectual diversity, the workshop brought together scholars from a
variety of �elds (including political theory, philosophy, classics, and history) to spend a long, but fruitful
day, discussing an earlier draft of the book. For their tremendously helpful comments on individual
chapters, I thank the following participants: Alex Dressler, Emily Fletcher, Daniel Kapust, Geneviève
Rousselière, Michelle Schwarze, Howard Schweber, Claire Taylor, Brendon Westler, and John Zumbrunnen.

I am especially grateful to Susan Collins for serving as keynote discussant, as her re�ections on the entire
state of the manuscript led me to reframe the book in a way that does more justice to the content within. I
would also be remiss if I did not thank John Sharpless for his encouraging concluding remarks, Jonathan
Schwartz for helping to organize the workshop, and Rachel Jacobs for her diligent notes. Last but certainly
not least, though he only asked me to “pay it forward,” I owe my sincerest thanks to my graduate adviser,
Richard Avramenko. Without him, the workshop would never have happened. I cannot thank him enough
for his continued guidance and support of my career.
I am fortunate to have found a diverse and supportive institution at which to continue my work. For the
opportunity to read Plato’s dialogues with students of countless nationalities, races, socioeconomic
p. x backgrounds, and political and intellectual leanings, I thank Florida Atlantic University. I am also
grateful for the advice and encouragement of my colleagues as I navigated the book publishing process,
especially Aimee Arias, Nicholas Baima, Emily Fenichel, Mehmet Gurses, Dukhong Kim, Orin Kirshner,
Annette LaRocco, Brian McConnell, Angela Nichols, Kelly Shannon, and Kevin Wagner. FAU provided
generous funding and research support for this project through the Scholarly and Creative Accomplishment
Fellowship, the Distinguished Lecture Series Faculty Research Support Award, and numerous awards for
conference travel.
Conversations with audiences and discussants at various other venues helped me re�ne the ideas presented
in this book. In particular, I wish to thank Geo� Bakewell for inviting me to Rhodes College to deliver a talk
for the Search for Values in Light of Western History and Religion. His feedback on the entire project and
assistance with comprehending the complexities of the Greek language proved invaluable, as did my
discussions with students and faculty during my visit. I would also like to recognize David Roochnik, whose
invitation to speak at the Greek Philosophy Workshop at Boston University resulted in signi�cant
improvements to the idea of the “caves” at the core of this book. In addition to David, special thanks to
Charles L. Griswold and Marc Gasser-Wingate for their insightful comments and questions. Individual
chapters also bene�ted from the scrutiny of audiences at meetings of the American Political Science
Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Celtic Conference in Classics, the Midwestern Political
Science Association, and the Southern Political Science Association. For their formal feedback on earlier
chapter drafts, I thank Ethan Alexander-Davey, Andreas Avgousti, Susan Bickford, Stefan Dolgert, Andy R.
German, Michael Gibbons, Edward Gimbel, Robert G. Howard, Helen Kinsella, Jimmy Casas Klausen, Nalin
Ranasinghe, Katherine Robiadek, Joel Schlosser, John Wallach, and Shawn Welnak. For taking the time to
meet with me to discuss the project as a whole at various stages in its development, I owe my gratitude to Jill
Frank, John von Heyking, Melissa Lane, Steve Salkever, Shalini Satkunanandan, Arlene Saxonhouse, Adriel
Trott, and Catherine Zuckert. Many others contributed either by sharing their thoughts during informal
conversations at conferences and workshops or by answering my email queries, including Thomas Bunting,
Kirk Fitzpatrick, Sam Flores, Marcus Folch, Michelle Kundmueller, Elizabeth Markovits, Debra Nails,
Cynthia Patterson, Zdravko Planinc, Nathan Sawatzky, Brandon Turner, David Williams, Brianne Wolf, Se-
p. xi Hyoung Yi, and Mark Zelcer. For their excellent feedback on my book prospectus, I thank (among others
already mentioned) Jack Edelson, Thornton Lockwood, and Lee Trepanier, whose encouragement and
publishing advice has been indispensable. Samantha Vortherms deserves singular recognition for her
willingness to be my go-to person for a second opinion on abstracts, tables, and the other odds and ends
that go into making a book. Finally, it was truly a blessing to work with my phenomenal editor, Angela
Chnapko, and her entire team at Oxford University Press. As a �rst-time book author, they made the process
surprisingly easy and worry-free. The manuscript has been much improved thanks to their diligent work, as
well as the insightful comments of two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press.
I took my �rst political philosophy course on a whim during my �rst semester of college, after being wait-
listed for a journalism course and needing another course to �ll my schedule. The description in the course
catalog called me to Eduardo Velásquez’s class and, after reading Plato’s Republic under the guidance of this
truly remarkable soul, I was in love with the philosophic way of life. Over the years, he has become family to
me. Of course, I owe my biological family my life and much more, beyond what words can express. My
parents, Samuel LeMoine and Linda Chapman Henson, encouraged me from an early age to develop my
writing talents, and have been a constant source of unconditional love, support, and joy. I am proud to be
their daughter. I dedicate this book to my mother, who somehow scraped together the money to send me on
my �rst trip abroad because she wanted her daughter to live out a dream she had always had for herself.
I cannot thank my husband, Matthew Taylor, enough. He has read nearly everything I have written (in many
cases, multiple drafts) and saved me from myself on countless occasions. Though too humble ever to admit
it, he is brilliant and, in another life, could have been a political theorist. I am grateful, though, that he chose
to be a scientist—not only because this made it easier for us both to �nd jobs in the same place, but also
because he incessantly broadens my horizons and challenges me to think in a di�erent way. Thank you,
Matthew, for discussing Plato with me all these years. Your boundless love for me is always felt, and I could
not have completed this book without it.
The cover image is the work of the talented Kate Connolly, who helped to bring my image of the “caves” to
life. I also thank Jonathan Owen May, Zack Orsborn, and the design team at Oxford University Press for their
creative input. Sections of chapter 3 �rst appeared in Rebecca LeMoine, “ ‘We Are the Champions’: Mousikē
p. xii and Cultural Chauvinism in Plato’s Republic,” Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 11, no.
1 (2017): 157–75. Reprinted by permission of the Villanova Center for Liberal Education. Material in chapters
4 and 7 draws heavily on Rebecca LeMoine, “Foreigners as Liberators: Education and Cultural Diversity in
Plato’s Menexenus,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 471–83. Copyright © 2017 by
Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission.
1
 Introduction
So firm and sound, mark you, is the nobility and freedom of our city,
and by nature barbarian- hating, because we are purely Greeks, being
unmixed with barbarians.1
—P lato’s Menexenus, 245c– d
And when people sing of race, showing how noble someone is because
he has seven wealthy ancestors, altogether dim and slight of seeing he
[the philosopher] deems this praise; by lack of education they cannot al-
ways see the whole nor calculate that each has had countless thousands
of ancestors and progenitors, among whom have been in any instance
rich and beggarly, kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks.
—P lato’s Theaetetus, 174e–1 75a
Months before the 2016 US presidential election, universities across the
country began reporting a strange sight on campus bulletin boards: the
flyers of white nationalists. Sponsored by such groups as Identity Evropa,
these flyers featured slogans such as “let’s become great again” and “protect

your heritage,” superimposed on images of white marble statues of figures
from the classical world, including the Greek god Apollo and the demi-
god Hercules. At subsequent protests, including the Unite the Right rally
protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in
Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, numerous white supremacists
showed up sporting Spartan helmets and shields and carrying flags embla-
zoned with Greek mottos. Judging from their blog and social media postings,
groups like Identity Evropa see themselves as manly defenders of a way of life
centered on blood- based community and traditional Western values. They
oppose cultural diversity, and the heroes they quote in support of their anti-
immigration views are Plato and other classical thinkers. The appropriation
of the classics by white supremacists is, of course, nothing new; the Nazis
also drew on the art and philosophy of classical antiquity to support their
1 All translations of the ancient Greek in this book are mine unless otherwise noted.
Plato’s Caves. Rebecca LeMoine, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190936983.001.0001
2 Plato’s Caves
racist agenda.2 In part for this reason, students at various universities have
protested the teaching of canonical texts such as Plato’s Republic, agreeing
with white supremacists that such works promote hostility toward diversity.3
Far from irrelevant, the world of the ancient Greeks is thus deeply implicated
in a heated contemporary debate about identity and diversity.4
2 On the Nazi’s uses of Plato, see Melissa Lane, Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still
Captivate the Modern Mind (London: Duckworth, 2001), 121– 28, 152n43; and Simona Forti, “The
Biopolitics of Souls: Racism, Nazism, and Plato,” Political Theory 34, no. 1 (2006): 9–3 2.
3 For example, “Humanities 110:  Introduction to Humanities:  Greece and the Ancient
Mediterranean,” a required course at Reed College, has come under intense scrutiny for com-
memorating “Western” thinkers like Plato and Aristotle and largely excluding thinkers from other
civilizations, such as Asia or Africa. Colleen Flaherty, “Reed College Course Lectures Canceled
after Student Protestors Interrupt Class to Protest Eurocentricism,” Inside Higher Ed, September 11,
2017, https://w ww.insidehighered.com/ news/2 017/ 09/ 11/r eed- college-c ourse- lectures- canceled-
after- student- protesters-i nterrupt- class?width=775&height=500&iframe=true. At the University
of Texas at Austin, protestors went so far as to vandalize fraternity houses. In an anonymous state-
ment, the vandals wrote, “It is no accident that we attacked Greek life. The Greco-R oman legacy
has inspired so much of the march of European civilization against the ‘uncivilized.’ ” The statement
specifically implicated the “Socratic tradition” and “the Greek conception of the polis” in the persist-
ence of racism. Anonymous Contributor, “University of Texas, Austin: Frat Vandals Issue Statement,”
It’s Going Down, April 21, 2017, https:// itsgoingdown.org/ university-t exas- statement-f rom- frat-
vandals/ .
4 Besides members of groups like Identity Evropa, those in the “alt-r ight”— a far- right movement
that rejects multiculturalism and embraces white nationalism—“ love the classics” and are “utterly
convinced that classical antiquity is relevant to the world we live in today.” Donna Zuckerberg,
“How to Be a Good Classicist under a Bad Emperor,” Eidolon, November 21, 2016, https://e idolon.
pub/ how-t o- be-a - good- classicist-u nder- a-b ad- emperor- 6b848df6e54a. For further discussion,
see Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). The revival of interest in the classics has even reached the
White House. According to a report on Breitbart News—d escribed by founder Stephen Bannon as
“the platform for the alt- right”— several members of the Trump administration are “enthusiasts”
of History of the Peloponnesian War by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Rebecca Mansour,
“Report: Trump White House Turns to Ancient Greek Historian for Insights on U.S.-C hina
Relations,” Breitbart News, June 21, 2017, http://w ww.breitbart.com/ national-s ecurity/ 2017/ 06/2 1/
report- trump- white- house- turns- to- ancient- greek- historian- for- insights- on- u- s- china- relations/
. Few scholars of the classics are taking comfort in the revival of interest in their field, however. In
direct response to Identity Evropa’s propaganda, classics professor Sarah Bond published an on-
line essay explaining that modern technology has conclusively shown that statues from the Western
world were painted in various colors, and thus white marble was “considered a canvas, not the fin-
ished product for sculpture.” Sarah E. Bond, “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in
Color,” Hyperallergic, June 7, 2017, https:// hyperallergic.com/ 383776/w hy- we-n eed- to- start-s eeing-
the- classical- world- in- color/ . Bond’s article elicited a perhaps unprecedented response for an ar-
ticle about ancient statues: death threats. Another classicist, Mary Beard, was verbally harassed for
correcting an alt- right commentator who criticized a BBC video on Roman Britain for its allegedly
inaccurate depiction of a Roman soldier as black. Mary Beard, “Roman Britain in Black and White,”
Times Literary Supplement, August 3, 2017, https:// www.the- tls.co.uk/r oman- britain-b lack- white/ .
Writing on these events, classics scholar Rebecca Futo Kennedy avers, “People seem less bothered by
the notion that the ancient Athenians were racist. In fact, that is one of the appeals. Some people get
very upset, however, when scholars point out the variety of ways they weren’t racist and were, instead,
open to diversity.” Rebecca Futo Kennedy, “The Ancient Mediterranean Was Diverse. Why Do Some
People Get So Upset When We Talk About It?,” Classics at the Intersections: Random Thoughts of a
Classicist on Classical Culture and Contemporary America (blog), August 8, 2017, https:// rfkclassics.
blogspot.com/ 2017/0 8/ the-a ncient- mediterranean- was-d iverse.html.
Introduction 3
The traditional scholarly narrative on the attitudes toward cultural diver-
sity in classical Greek political thought often reinforces the perception that
the ancient thinkers were xenophobic.5 This is particularly the case with
interpretations of Plato. Although scholars who study Plato reject the whole-
sale dismissal of his work, the vast majority tend to admit that his portrayal
of foreigners is unsettling, to say the least. The conclusion that Platonic po-
litical thought is xenophobic gained traction with the publication of Karl
Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Writing against the backdrop of
World War II and the Nazi appropriation of Plato, Popper accused Plato of
being a totalitarian whose “anti- humanitarian exclusiveness” is evident in
the Republic’s advocacy of a system of eugenics and insistence on the nat-
ural enmity of Greeks and barbarians.6 Many scholars have since challenged
Popper’s portrayal of Plato as a totalitarian and are showing the philosopher
to be friendlier to democracy than is traditionally believed.7 Nevertheless,
Plato’s antipathy to cultural diversity is still generally assumed. Bonnie
Honig, for example, proclaims on the first page of her book Democracy and
the Foreigner, “In classical political thought, foreignness is generally taken
to signify a threat of corruption that must be kept out or contained for the
sake of the stability and identity of the regime”— a claim she supports by ref-
erencing a line from Plato’s Laws.8 Judith Butler similarly decries the “xeno-
phobic exclusion” on which Platonic discourse depends.9 Julia Annas writes
that Plato’s “obvious hostility to democracy so conceived illustrates the depth

of his opposition to any form of pluralism.”10 Ryan Balot contends that Plato’s
5 As we will see, scholars are increasingly challenging this narrative. An online platform has
been created “where classical scholars, and the public more broadly, can learn about and respond
to appropriations of Greco-R oman antiquity by hate groups online.” Pharos: Doing Justice to the
Classics, http:// pages.vassar.edu/ pharos/ , is supported by the Vassar College Department of Greek
and Roman Studies and the Vassar College Office of Communications.
6 Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), 239.
7 See, e.g., Diskin Clay, “Reading the Republic,” in Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings, ed.
Charles L. Griswold Jr. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 19–3 3; J. Peter
Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Gerald M. Mara, Socrates’ Discursive Democracy: Logos
and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); S.
Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); John R. Wallach, The Platonic Political Art: A
Study of Critical Reason and Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2001); Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006); and Jill Frank, Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s “Republic” (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2018).
8 Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1.
9 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge,
1993), 48.
10 Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s “Republic” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),
300– 301.
4 Plato’s Caves
bifurcation of reality into the intelligible world and the sensible world “was
an attempt to justify preexisting and hitherto unexplained bifurcations in
social practice— commonplace Greek distinctions between Greek and bar-
barian, reason and appetite, and so on.”11 Susan Lape cites a line from the
Laws when observing that “in Athenian political discourse and in Greek
political thought more generally, ethnic diversity within a polis is seen as
pushing against political unity and as diminishing military strength.”12
Arlene Saxonhouse, while recognizing that Plato exhibits “less a fear of diver-
sity and more an ambiguous pursuit of unity,” also sees little appreciation for
cultural diversity in Plato’s thought.13 Moreover, many historical studies of
the Greek– barbarian distinction cite Plato as one of the main propagators of
this classification.14 Myriad other examples exist of scholarly interpretations
that support the perception that Platonic political thought is xenophobic.15
This book challenges the popular and scholarly narrative that Plato was
hostile to cultural diversity. I argue that when Plato’s dialogues are read in
their dramatic context, far from exhibiting hostility toward foreigners,
they reveal that foreigners play a role similar to that of Socrates: the role of
gadfly. Socrates explicitly presents himself in these terms in Plato’s Apology,
claiming that he is like a “gadfly set upon the city by the god as if upon a
11 Ryan K. Balot, Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001), 245–4 6.

12 Susan Lape, Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 253.
13 Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 91.
14 For instance, to support the notion that Greeks “would have been appalled . . . at the idea of
society as a ‘melting pot,’ ” John E. Coleman draws on Plato’s Laws and Republic. John E. Coleman,
“Ancient Greek Ethnocentrism,” in Greeks and Barbarians: Essays on the Interactions between Greeks
and Non- Greeks in Antiquity and the Consequences for Eurocentrism, ed. John E. Coleman and Clark
A. Walz (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1997), 191–9 3.
15 See, e.g., Paul Shorey, introduction to Plato: The Republic, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1953), xxviii; R. F. Stalley, An Introduction to Plato’s Laws (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1983); Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong, “Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology,” in Reclaiming
Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford (Pittsburgh, PA: University
of Pittsburg Press, 1995), 9–2 4; Leon Harold Craig, The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s “Republic”
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 17; Paris Arnopoulos, Exopolitics: Polis- Ethnos-C osmos,
Classical Theories and Praxis of Foreign Affairs (Commack, NY: Nova Science, 1999); Benjamin Isaac,
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004),
509; and Stanley Rosen, Plato’s “Republic”: A Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005),
196– 97. On Plato as a reluctant advocate of war with barbarians, see Michael S. Kochin, “War, Class,
and Justice in Plato’s ‘Republic,’” Review of Metaphysics 53, no. 2 (1999): 421– 22. For his part, Eric
Voegelin acknowledges that Plato had a comparatively open consciousness in that he recognized
the intellectual accomplishments of foreign cultures and the impossibility of achieving a perfect so-
ciety, but insists that he nonetheless saw the Greeks as ahead of others. Eric Voegelin, Order and
History, vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 17, ed. Dante Germino
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 286–8 7.
Introduction 5
great and well- born horse, who because of his great size is sluggish and needs
to be awakened.” Socrates explains that his role in the city involves stinging
“anyone [he] happens to meet” into wakeful contemplation of themselves,
thereby exhorting them to care about virtue (29d– 31b). Likewise, I will
argue, Plato’s dialogues reveal that interactions with foreigners can expose
contradictions in the values that undergird one’s political community and
thus encourage a more self-r eflective citizenship. Foreigners can play the role
of gadfly because, as the title of this book suggests (and as will be further
explained in chapter 2), though every citizen lives in a polity that shares the
basic features of the cave in Plato’s famous allegory (of prisoners in a cave
forced to stare at shadows on the wall, puppeteers who cast the shadows, and
liberators who try to help the prisoners recognize the artificiality of their per-
ception of reality), each polity varies, at least slightly, in the details of this
arrangement (e.g., who the puppeteers are and what kinds of shadows they
cast). This means that when one interacts with a foreigner, or with someone
raised in a different “cave,” one is faced with the possibility of another way
of life and hence with the occasion to reflect on one’s own conception of the
true and the good. To be clear, I am not claiming that Plato thinks foreigners
are philosophers who can help citizens achieve full enlightenment— though
various dialogues imply that philosophers could well be foreigners.16 Rather,
my claim is that foreigners, philosophical or not, can play the initial role of
revealing our lack of knowledge.

Unfortunately, as the cave allegory also shows, few appreciate the pain that
accompanies such self- realizations. Consequently, though cross- cultural en-
gagement can help citizens become more aware of the contradictions in their
beliefs, this is such a painful experience that, instead of facing it, citizens will
be tempted to run away— that is, to seek to silence foreigners through as-
similation, marginalization, expulsion, or extermination, just as Athenians
reacted to Socrates. If Plato at times seems wary of cultural diversity, that
is why. It is not that foreigners are corrupting per se; rather, the problem is
that most people do not know how to interact well with foreigners. This does
not, however, invalidate the potential benefit of cultural diversity. Although
Plato admitted that Socrates ultimately failed to educate the demos, he did
not conclude that Athens would have been better off without its gadfly. To
draw on the ship analogy in the Republic, just because those aboard the ship
do not make use of the captain does not mean that the captain is useless
16 Cf. Republic 499c–d ; Laws 951b; and Phaedo 78a.