How ridiculous is it, to be ‘superior to oneself’? A serious enquiry into the relationship between virtue and governance in Book IV of The Republic

Based on a paper delivered at The Prometheus Trust conference 2025, 'Being human in a divine cosmos'

‘The function of spirit is to desire to repay pain for pain,’^[1] so Proclus writes in Essay 7 of his Commentary on Plato’s Republic; this essay the one in which he discusses Book IV, the subject of today’s presentation. One might hope that if the spirited part of the soul desires to repay pain for pain, it may also desire to repay pleasure for pleasure, for as Socrates says in The Phaedo, the two follow from each other: ‘If any person pursues and receives the one, he is almost always under a necessity of receiving the other, as if both of them depended from one summit.’^[2]

Academic Josh Wilburn might agree, as the ‘central claim’ of his book The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City is that the spirited part’s most primitive expressions are savageness and aggressiveness on the one hand, and gentleness and affection toward the familiar on the other.^[3] He develops his argument with an analysis of the passage from Republic II in which Plato first introduces his conception of “spiritedness” in the dialogue through an analogy to noble dogs, a passage that we will return to later in this paper.

I open this talk with pleasure and pain because it seems that it is the spirited part which propels actions that can be considered better or worse, superior or inferior, pleasurable or painful. For now, we will take the argument against the incontinence of will from The Protagoras as a sufficient explanation for why the spirited faculty drives the actions it does: ‘no wise man considers any man as erring voluntarily, and as acting basely and wickedly with the concurrence of his will; but he wells knows that all those who acts basely and wickedly, do so involuntarily.’^[4] The implication being that any rational actor, one in possession of conscious awareness and agency, acts toward the good.

In cases when the spirited faculty allies with the appetite against reason, as when Leontius’ succumbs to his desire to look at dead corpses in the sewer, recounted by Socrates in Republic IV, it is depicted as a grievous failure; his eyes are ‘wretched’ gluttons, feasting on a ‘fine spectacle’ which is evidently not fine at all.^[5]

Lloyd P. Gerson analyses this anecdote in his book Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato and comes to conclude that Leontinus is not quarreling with his appetite or trying to figure out what he ought to do – he knows what he ought to do, which is not look at the dead bodies. The quarrel is between Leontius as a subject of appetite or a subject of rational thought and can only take place because Leontius is not a unified agent. In choosing to look at the dead bodies, his identification with the appetitive faculty identifies him with what he is not really or ideally. He is pretending not to be what he really is, which is a rational agent.^[6]

Socrates seems to be alluding to the nonsensical nature of aligning oneself with the appetites when he asks Glauco in Book IV of The Republic: ‘Is not then the expression ‘superior to oneself’, ridiculous? For he who is superior to himself must somehow be likewise inferior to himself, and the inferior be the superior; for the same person is spoken of in all these cases.’^[7] The answer to the question itself reveals what’s going on when someone seriously considers they are divided on better and worse lines, as ‘he who is superior to himself must somehow be likewise inferior to himself, and the inferior be the superior.’ The second clause spells it out – something is out of joint, something is rotten within The Republic – as the inferior part has rulership.

For Socrates, the idea of being a divided self probably is ridiculous – but yet he takes the enquiry seriously, making the partite nature of the soul explicit for the first time in the dialogue in the following paragraph: ‘the expression seems to denote, that in the same man, with respect to his soul, there is one part better, and another worse; and that when the part more excellent in his nature is that which governs the inferior part, this is called being superior to himself, and expresses a commendation,’ but when the better part is ‘conquered by the crowd’, that is being ‘inferior to oneself’.^[8]

It is implied in The Republic and in other works that the partition of the soul only serves as a sufficient explanation of the soul from one vantage point; the soul is really a unity. At the beginning of Book VI, Socrates says those who are now philosophers, ‘would have better discovered themselves, if it had been requisite to speak concerning this alone, and not to have discussed the multitude of other things.’^[9] Here, Socrates suggests that when the soul truly knows itself, it knows itself as one thing. Elsewhere in the dialogues, Plato goes further, writing in The Phaedrus:

But respecting its [the soul’s] idea we must speak after the following manner: To give a perfect description of its nature, would indeed be the employment of narration every way prolix and divine; but to describe a certain similitude of this idea is the business of a human and shorter discourses.^[10]

And The Timaeus:

Thus we have spoken considering both the mortal and divine part of the soul, and have related where they are situated, in conjunction with what natures, and why they are separated from each other. That all this indeed is unfolded according to indisputable truth, can only be asserted when confirmed by the vocal attestation of a God.^[11]

That the intimate form of the soul is divine is also strongly alluded to in Book VI of The Republic, when Socrates asks rhetorically of the philosophic genius: ‘Do you then suppose that he who possesses magnificent conceptions in his dianoetic part, and a contemplation of the whole of time, and the whole of being, can possibly consider human life as a thing of great consequence?’^[12] The kind of being that has access to this type of knowledge is not a human being, as we commonly understand it.

If that’s the case, then why bother with tripartition at all, and not contextualise the soul as an absolute unity from the off? The Republic is very concerned with what guardians are and their function; ‘this work of guards is one of the greatest importance, by so much it should require the greatest leisure from other things, and likewise the greatest art and study.’^[13] The guards are dependent on a ‘competent genius’^[14] to excel in their profession, and ‘must be’ – not that they are, they must – be ‘a philosopher, and spirited, and swift, and strong’.^[15]

At the moment the guardians are introduced, so is the idea of navigating a paradox: ‘If he be deprived of either of these [a mild or magnanimous temper] he cannot be a good guardian; for it seems to be impossible [to have both]; and thus it appears, that a good guardian is an impossible thing.’^[16] The dual-nature of the guardians implicates a certain volatility; in Book II, they are said to only become necessary to a state when it engages in war and that they possesses ‘the power’ to try and make themselves ‘the master of everything’ in Book V – with grievous consequences implicated if they do.^[17]

Education is required to manage this volatility; in Book III, music and gymnastic are described as a gift from a God to adapt the mild philosophic temper with the magnanimous, irascible one.^[18] In fact, only when these two are ‘nourished’, ‘taught’ and ‘instructed’, can the rational part govern over the concupiscible part – the larger part of the soul.^[19] Again, the danger of not receiving a good education in music and gymnastics is described as great, lest the irrational part, ‘become great and vigorous, and not do its own work, but attempt to enslave and rule over those it ought not, and overturn the whole life of all.’^[20] The privileged position of education in music and gymnastics particularly seems to relate to their correspondence with the harmonies and revolutions of the cosmos in The Timaeus; in part, because the ratios that compose the World Soul correspond with the basic musical intervals of the Greeks,^[21] and because emulating them is explicitly described as supporting the establishment of stable rulership in the soul:

On surveying the circulations of intellect in the heavens we may properly employ the revolutions of our dianoëtic part, which are allied to their circulations; and may recall the tumultuous motions of our discursive energies to the orderly processions of their intellectual periods. That, besides this, by learning these and participating right reason according to nature, and imitating the revolutions of Divinity which are entirely inerratic, we may give stability to the wanderings of our dianoëtic energy.^[22]

Education is necessary to tame the worst impulses of the guardians – and I’d go so far as to say The Republic itself is intended as a work of pedagogy for a ‘guardian’ readership, those who understand themselves as in position of a superior and inferior part. When the question of how to best educate the guardians arises in Book II, it is said to be necessary to develop an understanding of justice and injustice – the former being the dialogue’s skopos. Knowing justice and the guardian’s identity are inextricably linked. Socrates proposes that he will explain why – that he will ‘educate these men in our reasoning’, gesturing to his audience of Glauco et al, in a way which ‘these men’ can also be interpreted as a meta-textual allusion to the readers, especially when considered in the context of the following books discussing methods of education that will establish the rule of reason in the guardians,^[23] that, presumably, a form of justice.

Later commentators, most notably Damasicus and Olympiodorus, systemised a doctrine of the ladder of virtues, which David Nowakowski described as ‘the notion is that all of the core human virtues, or excellences, appear at seven different levels as we progress through our philosophic and spiritual journey.’^[24] Damascius explicitly taught that the political/constitutional virtues are addressed in The Republic:

The civic virtues… belong to reason only, since they are based on knowledge; but of reason in so far as it regulates irrational being and uses it as its own instrument: by prudence it governs the cognitive faculty, by fortitude the spirit, by temperance desire, and all together by justice… They actually imply each other.^[25]

Olympiodorus further relates conception of the soul as partite as corresponding to the political level of virtue on the ladder of ascent: ‘It is possible to know oneself as a civic or social person, when one knows oneself in the tripartition of one’s soul.’^[26] Self-knowledge of oneself as partite is implicated as one step on a journey toward knowing oneself as a unity – ‘when a person knows himself as a unity and, thus bonded to his proper god, acts with inspiration.’^[27]

Book III suggests that the best of the guardians have the ability to be appointed ‘governor and guardian of the state’ after they prove themselves worthy following a series of trials.^[28] This suggests that the development of one’s virtue changes the being of the philosopher, aligning with later interpretations that an ascent through virtue reconstitutes one’s identity and self-knowledge concurrent to the change in one’s moral character.

The Republic is resplendent in veiled guidance on how to establish the rule of the better part over the worst, but makes it clear in Book IX that the best thing that one who knows the soul as partite can do is be ruled: ‘In order that such a one may be governed in the same manner as the best man is, do we not say that he must be the servant of one who is the best, and who has within him the divine governor?’^[29]

Earlier in this paper, we explored how music and gymnastics are particularly relevant to a guardian-philosopher striving to establish the rule of reason, that of ‘the divine governor’ within the soul. Additionally, The Republic seems to imply that a particular deity might be particularly helpful to our guardians. The guardian’s obedience is predicated on a natural discernment faculty that is introduced at the first point in the text that guardianship is linked to spiritedness, when they are analogised to noble dogs.^[30] Josh Wilburn suggests that Plato has drawn on the Odyssey for this analogy, an argument strengthened by the fact that the lines which follow it ‘Endure, my heart! thou heavier ills hast borne’ is quoted by Plato on two occasions^[31]:

Round his swoln heart the murmurous fury rolls,

As o’er her young the mother-mastiff growls,
And bays the stranger groom; so wrath compress-d
Recoiling, mutter’d thunder in his breast.^[32]

He also notes that Odysseus is identified as a lover of honor in the myth of Er, which suggests that (from The Republic’s perspective) he was ruled by the spirited part of his soul.^[33] Note that the dog in question is a bitch. Sarah Iles Johnston writes in her book Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece, that as early as the 3rd century, Hecate was associated with the bitch in an origin myth:

Artemis visited the home of Ephesus, an early king of the same-named city, but was thrown out by a rude woman. In anger, Artemis first changed the woman into a bitch, but then in pity changed her back into human form. Ashamed of her behavior, the woman hanged herself with her girdle. Artemis then took off her own clothing or jewelry (kosmos) and adorning the corpse, "named her Hecate.”^[34]

There’s a lot to say about this passage. For one, it implies the bitch was both sacred to Hecate and a lower, earthly manifestation of the celestial goddess. It also implies that the ‘bitch-nature’ must die in order to ascend to the celestial Hecate.

It also demonstrates that Artemis and Hecate have a unique relationship. The Republic begins with a festival in devotion to the Goddess, left unnamed, which Thomas Taylor writes was:

According to Proclus, (in Plat. Polit. p. 353.) was the Bendidian, in which Diana was worshipped agreeably to the law of the Thracians. For Bendis, says he, is a Thracian name. He adds, “The theologist of Thrace (Orpheus), among many names of the Moon, refers that of Bendis also to the goddess.”^[35]

So if we take the Goddess as representing Artemis, we can also see her as representing Hecate, for we find support for early syncretism of Artemis and Hecate in the Suppliant Women of Aeschylus: ‘We pray that other guardians be always renewed, and that Artemis‑Hecate watch over the childbirth of their women.’^[36]

In this quote, Artemis-Hecate is directly attributed to have a protective role for the generative capabilities of guardians. And it is hard to believe that Socrates was ignorant of it, as (a lost work of) Aeschylus is cited by name in Book II by Glauco when he describes the just man as one who desires ‘not the appearance but the reality of goodness.’^[37]

The Goddess presides over childbirth, but was also strongly associated with presiding over the souls of the dead by the 5th century, according to Johnston,^[38] who in her earlier work Hecate Soteira describes her as both a birth goddess and a death goddess, accompanying souls on their two greatest journeys.^[39] Her role is uniquely dual – aligning with the guardian’s possession of two natures that, at first, seem impossible to reconcile – and she is also associated with crossroads,^[40] those liminal places or states where one can go one way or another – choosing a route that is superior or inferior, from a particular vantage.

It is worth mentioning that Hecate was associated with The World Soul of The Timaeus, itself an intermediary between the opposing principles of sameness and difference, which, according to Johnston, was understood by later Platonic commentators to come to represent the boundary between the intelligible and sensible worlds.^[41] Those same opposing principles are described, in The Timaeus, as providing motion to the fixed and moving stars,^[42] which means that here we have those harmonies of the ‘inerratic’ same that the philosopher can study and emulate to create stability in his dianoëtic faculty.^[43]

Later Platonists connected The World Soul as the source of individual souls with Hecate, as Johnston recounts:

Damascius (II.235.8), discussing the individual soul, says that its source is in Hecate. Proclus (In R. II.201.10), discussing the ensouling of individual men, says that "the Oracles speak rightly" when they say that the source of souls is she who ensouls all things; he then quotes Oracle fr. 51, which describes Hecate as ensouling All.^[44]

As The World Soul, Hecate was also considered as having a soteriological role for the theurgist, according to The Chaldean Oracles and the later Platonic commentators that work inspires.^[45] Theurgy involves cultivating the requisite sympathies that establish a bridge between the human theurgist and the divine, and as the guardian of the boundary between the sensible and intelligible worlds, Hecate can ‘help men utilise cosmic sympathy and thus take their first steps toward the theurgical ascension of the soul.’^[46] Johnston interprets fragment 224 of The Chaldean Oracles to cast Hecate as an educator, who teaches the theurgist his craft and supports him to progress further,^[47] in a role that aligns with the stated aims of The Republic’s education programmes, which, when successful, sculpts some guardians so nobly that when these die they become:

Good, holy, earthly daemones…

expelling evils, guardians of mankind.^[48]

In Proclus’ Hymn to Hecate and Janus, he supplicates the Goddess to ‘drive the evil diseases from my limbs; attract my soul, now madly raging around the earth, once it has been purified by through the intellect-awakening rites’.^[49] The Goddess has the power to unify the philosopher, alongside Janus and Zeus.

The network of significations in Book IV of The Republic imply that Hecate provides the education in music and gymnastic, the one which raises and nourish the mild philosophic temperament with beautiful reasonings and disciplines, and the which unbend the magnanimous, irascible temper with harmony and rhythm. The result is our warlike guardian conforms to the true opinion dictated by reason concerning what is terrible, and what is not.^[50] That act of conformation to true opinion is is suggested as a step on the soul’s journey toward the intelligible in the Divided Line analogy:

The soul was obliged to use hypothesis in the investigation of it [a species of the intelligible], not going back to the principle, as not being able to ascend higher than hypothesis, but made use of images formed from things below, to lead to those above, as perspicuous, as objects of opinion, and distinct from the things themselves.^[51]

Crossing the Divided Line will be an ‘arduous’ undertaking for our hot-headed guardian, who will necessarily require faith, the power linked to opinionative faculty associated with the spirited part of the soul at the end of Book VI. My suggestion is it is faith in the equally warlike Hecate, she who announces herself to the theurgist with ‘for I, the Divine, have arrived, armed from head to toe’,^[52] which will support him to advance to the cathartic level of virtue, described by Damascius, as the virtue in which ‘reason withdraws from everything external into itself, discards the instruments as useless and restrains the activities that depend on them,’^[53] in a passage that seems to emulate The Divided Line’s association with reason as an immaterial, intelligible power:

That which reason itself attains, making hypotheses by its own reasoning power, not as principles, but really hypotheses, as steps and handles, that, proceeding as far as to that which is unhypothetical, viz. the principle of the universe, and coming into contact with it, again adhering to those things which adhere to the principle, it may thus descend to the end; using nowhere anything which is sensible, but forms themselves, proceeding through some to others, and at length in forms terminating its progression.^[54]

A great journey for our concupiscible warrior. But we all start somewhere.

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^[1] Dirk Baltzly, John F. Finamore, and Graeme Miles, eds. Proclus: Commentary on Plato’s Republic. Vol. 2, Essays 7–15, trans. by Dirk Baltzly, John F. Finamore, and Graeme Miles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 36.

^[2] Plato, Phaedo 60b, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. IV (Thomas Taylor Series, vol. XII; Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994–98).

^[3] Josh Wilburn, The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), chap. 2, “Spirited Motivation and the Two Faces of Thumos,” 54.

^[4] Plato, Protagoras 345e, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. V, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. XIII (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1996).

^[5] Plato, Republic 440a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[6] Lloyd P. Gerson, Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 111.

^[7] Plato, Republic 431a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[8] Plato, Republic 431a-b, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[9] Plato, Republic 484, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994), 413.

^[10] Plato, Phaedrus 246a3–6, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. III, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. XI (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1995).

^[11] Plato, Timaeus 72d4–7, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. II, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. X (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1995).

^[12] Plato, Republic 486a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[13] Plato, Republic 374d–e, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[14] Plato, Republic 374e, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[15] Plato, Republic 376c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[16] Plato, Republic 375d, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[17] Plato, Republic 466d-c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[18] Plato, Republic 411e-412a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[19] Plato, Republic 442a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[20] Plato, Republic 442a-b, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[21] Plato, Timaeus 36b, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. II, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. X (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1995).

^[22] Plato, Timaeus 47b-c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. II, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. X (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1995).

^[23] Plato, Republic 376d-e, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[24] David Nowakowski, Self‑Knowledge and Prayer on the Ladder of Virtue, discussion paper presented in “Self‑Knowledge and Prayer on the Ladder of Virtue,” Open Session, Prometheus Trust Education Programme, online via Zoom, January 14, 2025.

^[25] Damascius, Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, ed. and trans. L. G. Westerink, The Greek Commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo, vol. II (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 2009), passage 140.

^[26] Michael Griffin, Olympiodorus: On Plato First Alcibiades 10–28, 2nd ed., Ancient Commentators on Aristotle (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 102.

^[27] Michael Griffin, Olympiodorus: On Plato First Alcibiades 10–28, 2nd ed., Ancient Commentators on Aristotle (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 102.

^[28] Plato, Republic 414a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[29] Plato, Republic 590d, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[30] Plato, Republic 375a-375c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[31] Plato, Republic 390d, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994); and Plato, Phaedo 94d7–e1, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. IV, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. XII (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1996).

^[32] Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope (Oxford: Ex Fontibus, 2012), Book XX.

^[33] Josh Wilburn, The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), chap. 2, “Spirited Motivation and the Two Faces of Thumos,” 59.

^[34] Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 343.

^[35] Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994), 219.

^[36] Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth, in Aeschylus, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), line 674ff.

^[37] Plato, Republic 361b-c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[38] Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 291.

^[39] Sarah Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 144.

^[40] “Several ancient sources tell us that these were left by the statues or shrines of Hecate (hekataia) that stood at crossroads, and were dedicated both to the goddess and to "those who must be averted.” Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 107.

^[41] Sarah Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 16.

^[42] Plato, Timaeus 39a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. II, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. X (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1995).

^[43] Plato, Timaeus 47b-c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. II, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. X (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1995).

^[44] Damascius, Commentary on the Parmenides II.235.8, and Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus II.201.10, quoted in Sarah Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 177.

^[45] This relationship is articulated at depth by Johnston in Hekate Soteira, referenced in full above.

^[46] Sarah Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 110.

^[47] Sarah Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 131.

^[48] Plato, quoting Hesiod, Republic 469a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[49] Van den Berg, R. M. Proclus' Hymns: Essays, Translations, Commentary. Philosophia Antiqua, vol. 90. Leiden: Brill, 2001, 260.

^[50] Plato, Republic 441e-442c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[51] Plato, Republic 511a, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).

^[52] Majercik, Ruth. The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Studies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 5. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989, 79.

^[53] Damascius, Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, ed. and trans. L. G. Westerink, The Greek Commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo, vol. II (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 2009), passage 141.

^[54] Plato, Republic 511b-c, trans. Thomas Taylor, in The Works of Plato, Vol. I, Thomas Taylor Series, vol. IX (Sedbury, UK: Prometheus Trust, 1994).