POLITICAL

10.1177/0090591702239438
Carmola / JUSTICE
THEORYAND
/ February
INTERGENERATIONAL
2003 TENSION
NOBLE LYING
Justice and Intergenerational Tension
in Plato’s Republic

KATERI CARMOLA
Middlebury College

N ear the end of Book III of the Republic, in the midst of a long discussion
about the best way of educating the rulers of the imaginary city, Socrates
claims that in order for a just city to exist, it will have to be founded on a
gennaion pseudos, a “noble” lie or falsehood. This lie will be used “to per-
suade, in the best case, even the rulers, but if not them, the rest of the city” that
the citizens are earth-born siblings, and that the political role of each was cho-
sen by a paternalistic god prior to their birth (413c).1 The noble lie is just one
of many famous images, myths, and stories used by Socrates in the Republic,
and the role of such literary references in a city which ostensibly bars litera-
ture and poetry from its midst has often been analyzed.2 These interpreta-
tions, however, tend to see the noble lie primarily in light of its role in the
founding of the city. In contrast, I argue that this lie has a much larger role in
Socrates’ overall project, especially when interpreted in light of its strange
subtext. This project, articulated explicitly at the beginning of Book II, is to
give an account of justice—what it means, what it might look like, and why it
is good, even pleasurable, for its own sake (358b). It is a compelling project
and an enduring question: how is justice not mere whim, or angry vengeance,
or inequality cloaked in the guise of fairness, or utilitarian calculation for the
sake of peace? How can justice resolve or lessen the tensions and resentments
of political life?
By Book III, there is a partial, and very problematic answer: justice seems
to require a “noble” lie about the origins of citizens, and only by means of

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay was written with the support of a postdoctoral research grant
from the Charles T. and Louise H. Travers Program in Ethics and Accountability in Government.
I also wish to acknowledge the many helpful comments of David Neidorf, Peter Euben, Hanna
Pitkin, the late Michael Rogin, and an anonymous reader at Political Theory.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 31 No. 1, February 2003 39-62
DOI: 10.1177/0090591702239438
© 2003 Sage Publications

39
40 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

such a lie will a just city be established. I maintain that the word Socrates
chooses to describe this lie as noble—gennaion, or “wellborn”—points to a
particular form of injustice, one dominated by what I here term
“intergenerational” tensions and resentments. Seen in this way, the noble lie
is a response to a particular type of injustice articulated in the first two books
of the dialogue, and expressed throughout in familial or generational terms.
Socrates uses the noble lie to artfully highlight and indulge the fantasies of
justice implicit in these early articulations of injustice, even as he subtly criti-
cizes and undermines them. The noble lie is one of the most powerful tools
used by Socrates in his attempt to move his interlocutors, especially Glaucon,
away from their simplistic ambitions and resentments, and toward a more
complex and realistic form of political justice.
In this essay I first analyze the meaning of the term gennaion and the
intergenerational tension that appears repeatedly in the dialogue. Then I
examine four other sections of the dialogue in which the problem of injustice
is depicted in intergenerational terms. Finally, I turn to a close reading of the
noble lie itself, focusing on the tale of Cadmus, which Socrates openly uses
as a model and ironic subtext.

GENNAION AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION

The term gennaion means “noble” in the sense of “well-born” or “well-
conceived.” Its root, gennaios, refers to birth and familial background, and
carries the connotation of something being “suitable to one’s birth or
descent.”3 A gennaion pseudos is not “noble” in the sense of kalos, which is to
say aesthetically beautiful or fine. The word for noble lie instead contains
explicit references to both the ability to generate and the existence of past
generations, specifically an aristocratic, or “well-born,” ancestry. Interest-
ingly, gennaion is often used with a sarcastic or defensive tone in the Repub-
lic, in ways that suggest a class consciousness, but also an underlying wari-
ness about the role of familial background in politics.4 The noble lie will
generate an ideal just state by falsifying the origin, or generation, of the citi-
zens, but it is a justice undercut by a pointed reference to the continued prob-
lem of past generations.
Socrates’ interlocutor at the time of the noble lie is Glaucon, and for good
reason: Glaucon, more than his brother Adeimantus, is clearly interested in
political power, rather than philosophy. In the Republic, Socrates describes
him as “courageous in everything” (357a), loving victory (368a, 548d), and
unskilled at philosophy (533a). And as Xenophon tells it, Glaucon was politi-
cally ambitious and unstoppable except for Socrates, who “took an interest in
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 41

him for the sake of Plato.”5 I see the Republic as driven by a concern for those
like Glaucon; youths who are politically ambitious but not as dismissive or
cynical as Thrasymachus, and spirited in philosophical discussion. But this
interest in politics and philosophy, I argue, is driven by a resentment of the
past, and rooted in desires for power and autonomy, desires repeatedly con-
ceived in generational terms. Socrates’ use of the word gennaion in Book III
suggests that Glaucon is becoming a founder (in the context of the dialogue’s
imaginary city in speech) and eventual ancestor, and in doing so he engenders
his own city and descendents.
Why must a lie be told at all? What needs to be lied about, or covered up, if
justice is to be discovered and established in the city? Commentators have
traditionally read the attempt to replace human ancestors with the common
earth as arguing for the importance of a unified citizenry, and recent scholar-
ship has tended to emphasize the related attempt to cover over the social dis-
tinctions between citizens and noncitizens, foreigners and native born, legiti-
mate “well-born” heirs and bastards.6 On the surface the myth clearly does do
away with the chaos of particular and familial differences in the city, but the
use of the word gennaion here points to two additional and highly important
tensions. The first is the specific problem of parentage, embodied in the
implied distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. The second
is much more general: the problem of particular past generations for those
who found new cities, begin new orders, or try to establish a new sense of
justice—the inescapable (and tragic) hold of the past on the present. The
intergenerational tension, or irresolvable conflict, is between those who see
political action as an expression of freedom and autonomy, and those who in
founding regimes attempt to limit and impose lasting and just structures and
institutions.
This tension is a familiar one in political life and is often embedded in the
simplistic dichotomies that frame political reality (idealism and realism, lib-
eralism and conservatism) and in the various ways in which justice is estab-
lished, legitimated, and perpetuated given such categories. Such an aware-
ness of intergenerational tension lies behind the attempt to remove founders
from human parentage by making them foundlings, divinely born, or
autochthonous.7 The problem of founding is one of establishing a lasting par-
entage, and the problem of each political generation is to come to terms, in
some way or another, with the hold of the past on the present. For Glaucon
this lie speaks to his particular concerns with intergenerational tensions. For
modern readers the lie serves to remind us of the resentments at the heart of
any search for justice in political contexts. How to address these resentments
in the least destructive way possible is, I argue, Socrates’ project in the
Republic.
42 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

The noble lie presents a specific and careful response to this problem of
“intergenerational tensions.” These tensions permeate political relationships
and are felt internally, and hence are irresolvable conflicts. And they are
intergenerational because throughout the Republic, they are seen in terms of
the relationship between parent and child, father and son, or past and present.
These tensions appear most often in certain sections that reveal a concern
with origins and autonomy: in the drama of Book I, in the tale of Gyges, in the
story of the changeling child in Book VII, and in Socrates’ account of fathers
and sons in Book VIII. The ideal city not only disallows diversity and differ-
ence, it also tries to control the tense and often violent relationship between
generations, including literal fathers and sons, and more widely, political
generations. The noble lie is thus the first response to the threats of civil war,
political dismemberment, and intergenerational violence that continue to
surface amid the search for a just regime.
The subtext for the noble lie, the tale of Cadmus and the founding of
Thebes, is central to this concern, and will be addressed later in detail. I will
show that this Cadmean subtext of the noble lie turns the lie on its head, and
clarifies the ultimate meaning of the noble lie in the dialogue. While Socra-
tes’ use of it is many-layered, I argue that he uses it to teach a lesson about the
project of founding a new type of city, and new types of citizens, but not those
he explicitly depicts. Obviously, Socrates is in the process of educating
Glaucon and the others; he wants to make them better citizens, and he uses the
activity of jointly “founding a city in speech” to do so. But during this process
he repeatedly circles around, indulges, and gradually undermines two press-
ing concerns for his interlocutors: the sense that justice needs to be more than
the pious (and sometimes resented) deference to old customs, and the related
revolutionary desire to start anew, to throw out the old order and inaugurate a
truly just era in which established authorities will disappear or be over-
thrown. For Socrates, as it has often been argued, the project of showing how
justice can be something other than, as Thrasymachus puts it, “the advantage
of the stronger” (338c), must be done in the context of conversations with his
interlocutors. And for them, justice and injustice are embedded in a specific
resentment of the past, manifested in a preoccupation with familial origins,
and an empty deference toward, or overt rebellion against, established paren-
tal authorities. The lesson he hopes to teach about political justice must begin
by painting a full picture of their simplistic ideas of justice and immature
desires for autonomy.
As mentioned, there are four parts of the dialogue aside from the noble lie
wherein justice is discussed in terms of the relations between parents and
children. The boundaries of the problem are set forth in Book I, Socrates’ ini-
tial responses are given in Books II and III , the problem is transformed and
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 43

amended in the story of the “changeling child” in Book VII, and the explicit
connection to politics is made by way of the genealogies of regimes in Book
VIII. In the following section, and before going on to analyze the noble lie in
detail, I examine these passages in order to demonstrate further how justice,
generation, and falsehood are connected in the Republic.

WELL-BORN? JUSTICE AND

INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION
In Book I, the problem of justice is framed right away in terms of genera-
tional tensions and issues of parental power. After Socrates has begun to
question his aged host Cephalus about the benefits of old age, his son
Polemarchus enters the dialogue in an attempt to rescue his bumbling father
from his inconsistent reasoning (331d). Polemarchus takes over, and imme-
diately cites another authority figure, Simonides, whose argument Socrates
proceeds to defeat, pushing Polemarchus to develop his own argument about
the nature of justice instead of relying on higher authorities (334e).8 A dia-
logue then ensues between Socrates and Polemarchus on what is meant by
justice “itself,” after which Socrates notes that he and Polemarchus have
forged a “partnership” of inquiry (335e). At this point Thrasymachus
famously enters the conversation “like a wild beast,” calling Polemarchus the
blind dupe of Socrates, and accusing Socrates of arguing in circles, hiding
what he thinks, and remaining suspiciously aloof (336b). Justice is not
human virtue, Thrasymachus says; the real truth is that justice is the will (or
interest) of the “stronger,” and all the rest is a facade (338c). Thrasymachus’s
frustration, I suggest, comes in response to not only the content of what Soc-
rates and Polemarchus have said but also the falsified manner in which they
have made their arguments. Socrates has termed his conversation with
Polemarchus a “partnership,” but Thrasymachus sees only Polemarchus’s
subservience to, or dependence on, one authority figure after another: his
father, Simonides, and Socrates (335d). In this case, “the stronger” are these
authority figures, controlling the opinions of the childlike “weak” or politi-
cally immature even as they condescend to engage in “partnership.”
Thrasymachus’s own definition of justice is thus an explicit response to the
type of deferential respect that Polemarchus displays toward authority fig-
ures. It also betrays Thrasymachus’s own resented sense of powerlessness in
the face of Socrates’ rhetoric and sway.
The problem set up in Book I is how justice can be shown to be more than
the three examples offered initially: more than the nervous religious sacri-
fices of Cephalus, more than the filial piety displayed by Polemarchus, and
44 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

more than Thrasymachus’s argument that only the strong have the power to
call their actions “just.” At the end of Book I, Socrates underscores the ways
in which these examples are insufficient by admitting that after subduing
Thrasymachus, he has himself become unrestrained and childlike, like a glut-
ton at a feast (354b). He realizes that having been caught up in the battle, he
has been unable to teach those suffused with such resentments; and that his
arguments have been ineffective for those who matter most. The rest of the
dialogue is Socrates’ way of regaining his own status as a more restrained
adult while subtly teaching his interlocutors about political restraint.
While the dramatic tensions of Book I are a prelude to the problems of
establishing justice within a city, the fact that the ideal city eventually disal-
lows all familial relationships in order to include justice indicates the contin-
uing intractability of these intergenerational tensions (541a). Thrasymachus’s
anger is a measure of the tensions inherent in a conception of justice based in
deference to authority but suffused with resentment. And it is just such anger
toward authority figures that will be censored from poetry and tragedy in
Book II.
The intertwining themes of justice, parental power, and deception in Book
I are augmented, in Book II, by a focus on violence between parents and chil-
dren in the stories of Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus. The issue is framed by
Glaucon’s retelling of Herodotus’s story of Gyges.9 Given such magical abil-
ity to do what one wants with impunity, Glaucon asks, who wouldn’t commit
injustice (360c)? In response to this, Socrates argues that certain stories about
the gods must be censored (377c). Many of these tales subsequently deemed
most dangerous have the overriding theme of abusive familial relationships.
Socrates explicitly mentions as examples the following well-known myths:
Hesiod’s tale of how Cronos castrated his father, Uranus, to avenge Uranus’s
casting out of his other children, the Titans; Cronos’s eating of his own chil-
dren because he feared they might kill him; and the eventual overthrow of
Cronos by his son, Zeus, raised in hiding.10 One of the most revealing cen-
sored stories is that of Hephaestus’s abuse by his parents:

But Hera’s bindings by her son [Hephaestus], and Hephaestus being cast out by his father
when he was about to help out his mother who was being beaten . . . [these tales] must not
be accepted in the city, whether they are made with a hidden sense or without a hidden
11
sense. (378d, emphasis added)

The censorship of Greek myths in general has an obvious point: how can the
Greek gods, depicted as so unjust, also punish injustice on earth? Adeimantus
in particular is incensed at such hypocrisy, but Thrasymachus and Glaucon
also give evidence of wanting justice to be rescued from hypocritical stan-
dards.12 The ambiguous “hidden sense” of such stories referred to above is the
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 45

political necessity of filial restraint, the self-serving character of which

Adeimantus, for one, can discern (365c).
But the story of Hephaestus is especially significant: as with two other
prominent unwanted children, Dionysius and Oedipus, he survives being cast
out by his mother to acquire a type of knowledge that allows him to exact
revenge on those in power. Hephaestus, as the god of craft or techne, brings to
mind the power of the poets and craftsmen (often compared in Plato) and per-
haps, by extension, those who craft noble falsehoods, those myths that are “as
a whole, false, but there are some true things in them too” (377a).
Hephaestus’s lameness serves as a spur to pursue both the truth and some
form of revenge justice, often by means of crafty bindings.13 In the Republic,
and in contrast to this use of techne to trap or tie down truths, Socrates
employs stories, lies, and “appropriate” silences ostensibly to deny or dimin-
ish the truth about intergenerational tension and resentment. And by Book
VII families will be maneuvered out of the picture altogether.14
The existence of families in general, and of angry and punishing parental
power in particular, is thus presented as a threat both to the uncovering of jus-
tice and to its enduring existence in the city. In censoring these stories Socra-
tes acknowledges the corresponding powerful desire to be parentless, auton-
omous, and perhaps autochthonous. These tales, myths, and falsehoods
express a wish for a kind of justice that could occur only under such absurdly
false conditions. Importantly, neither the banning of stories nor the denial of
the family within the city has anything to do with a positive notion of what
justice itself is. Instead, both the censorship of the poets and the noble lie do
away with those situations that are filled with the indignant sentiment of
injustice. These early books of the Republic thus locate the idea of justice
within a context of intergenerational tensions that result from the rivalry of
fathers and sons, the conflict between founders and citizens, the experience
of injustice, and the consequent restraints, rebellions, and resentments this
situation creates.

PROBLEMS OF PARENTAGE IN BOOKS VII AND VIII

The story of the “changeling child” in Book VII links the issues of
intergenerational tension and lies. Coming, as it does, after the revelation of
the architectonic role of the good in Book VI, the story reminds the reader
that the problems of intergenerational tension persist despite the practice of
philosophy. Even worse, philosophical education tends to increase the anger
and suspicion of the young toward parental figures of authority. The story of
the changeling child appears in the midst of a discussion of dialectics and its
46 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

effect on the young, and contains many subtle references to the tale of
Oedipus.15 Premature knowledge of philosophy, Socrates tells Glaucon, is
like the situation of a child given at birth to foster parents. The practice of dia-
lectics and the philosophic perspective that it provides are not appropriate for
the young or the improperly educated, just as the truth about one’s actual ori-
gins may be dangerous for those not ready to deal with the implications. The
truth is dangerous because it can lead to the undermining of ancestors and
respect for their laws:

It is like the case of a changeling child . . . reared in much wealth, in a . . . great family
amidst many flatterers, who on reaching manhood, becomes aware that he does not
belong to these pretended parents and isn’t able to find those who really gave him
birth. . . . I divine that in the time when he doesn’t know the truth he would be more likely
to honor his father and his mother and the others who seem to be his kin than those who
flatter him. . . . And when he has become aware of that which is, I divine that now he
would relax his honor and zeal for these people and intensify them for the flatterers.
(538a, emphasis added)

On the surface, Socrates is distinguishing between the truth provided by

dialectics and the false opinions of children (in this case, about their origins).
Those who are capable of an “overview” of things—who are able to use a dia-
lectical method to move from what is apparent to what is—leave behind their
earlier false opinion of “reality,” or in this case, their false “parents.”
Knowing only part of the truth, they are vulnerable to the arguments of dan-
gerous “flatterers,” presumably those sophistic types who encourage the
newly freed child to disregard not only his “pretend” parents but all other
authority figures as well (537e). But is the knowledge of philosophy itself
dangerous, or is the problem the mere possibility of philosophical knowl-
edge, the questioning of laws and parental authorities, leading perhaps to
charges of impiety, and a loss of authority of those (false) parents? Socrates
implies it is both: the story of the changeling child emphasizes the necessity
of “noble” lies about false parentage. Unless the child is “by nature particu-
larly decent,” philosophy will make the situation worse, not better (538c).
The story of the changeling child reveals once again the very real political
problem of intergenerational tensions and emphasizes the fact that philoso-
phy doesn’t solve this tension. The question then remains, how is genera-
tional authority maintained and legitimized over time without the use of false
stories and structures of legitimation? Education that is built around ques-
tioning inevitably undermines parental and political authority, and the act of
founding a city, or beginning anew, inevitably involves a sense of throwing
off old “false” parents, and discovering, or reinventing, new and superior
lines of descent.16 After the discussion of the changeling child, the decision is
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 47

made to only allow those who are older and more “stable” to pursue philoso-
phy for the sake of the city.
The story of the changeling child provides a direct commentary on the
noble lie. In Book III, Socrates has Glaucon participate in the telling of a false
genealogical story, one that not only purports to provide the foundation for a
just city, but one that also speaks to Glaucon’s fantasies. The changeling child
is a continuation of this story: for those raised to believe a myth of
autochthonous and divinely dispensed origins, giving rise to a simplistic
notion of distributive justice, the complex truth of the matter is dangerous.
What Socrates implies by this story, however, is that even for those who have
grown up and learned philosophy, the truth about the origins of authority
remain dangerous unless they are particularly “sensible”; in this case at least
fifty years old, and of parental age themselves. Despite the noble lie, the sepa-
ration of parents and children, and the teaching of philosophy, the threat of
intergenerational tension persists. At the end of Book VII a final solution is
proposed: since inquisitive and rebellious children are in danger of being
influenced by those who do not have their best interests in mind, all members
of the city over the age of ten will be sent out into the country, and the remain-
ing children will be “taken over” and reared according to the newly estab-
lished principles of justice (541a).
At this point Glaucon agrees that with the institution of aged, moderate
and sensible philosopher/kings, the dissolution of the family, the common
rearing and education of children, and the quasi-equality of women and men,
justice finally exists in the city and the “argument has reached its end” (541b).
But Glaucon isn’t completely satisfied and continues to be preoccupied with
the processes of generation and degeneration and the fact of genealogy. At
the beginning of Book VIII he asks to hear more about how imperfect regimes
are generated: oligarchies, timocracies, democracies, and “noble”
(gennaion) tyrannies (544c).17
Socrates responds to this new request with a subtle but undeniable attack
on the wish for autochthony and autonomy, expressed here in Glaucon’s idea
that any form of rule could exist without historical precedent. To make the
point that each regime has its own corresponding human character and its
own particular historical genealogy, he asks, “Do you suppose that the
regimes arise from an oak or rocks and not from the dispositions of the men?”
(544d, emphasis added). In the Apology, Socrates used the same passage,
taken from a famous encounter in the Iliad, to justify his lack of reliance on
familial witnesses: “Of course I have some relatives. To quote the very words
of Homer, even I am not sprung ‘from an oak or from a rock,’ but from human
parents.”18 In the Republic, this question and its reference to the Iliad serves
to remind Glaucon once again of the inescapable fact of ancestral and familial
48 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

connections, connections initially deemed destructive to the city and thereby

covered over by the noble lie and hidden from children and political adoles-
cents. In contrast to the previous books, then, Socrates’exasperated comment
at the beginning of Book VIII reminds Glaucon of the tragic truth that no one
can escape their particular human parentage; no one can plausibly believe in
myths about dragon’s teeth or stones, and no regime can be founded from
scratch.
But after reminding Glaucon of this inevitable connection between par-
ents and children, and as a qualification of this fact, Socrates goes on to detail
the consequent and inevitable decay of cities, which he claims is based in
faulty eugenics and problematic parenting. Without a rational means of creat-
ing the next generation, “unworthy” children will be born who will be unfit
guardians:

Rulers chosen from [these children] won’t be guardians very apt at testing Hesiod’s races
and yours—gold and silver and bronze and iron. And the chaotic mixing of iron with sil-
ver and of bronze with gold engenders unlikeness and inharmonious irregularity, which,
once they arise, always breed war and hatred. . . . Faction must always be said to be “of
this ancestry” where it happens to rise. (546e-547a, emphasis added)

This significant phrase—“of this ancestry”—is the second reference to

Homer and genealogy in this section, and uncovering its meaning requires a
bit of a detour. Socrates is quoting a famous passage from Book VI of the
Iliad, in which Glaukos (whose name cannot fail to resonate with Glaucon) is
asked by the hero Diomedes to identify himself and his lineage. Glaukos’s
famous reply questions the need to do so: “Why ask of my generation?/As is
the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity”: all parents are mortal and
alike, and particular ancestors mean nothing.19 Eventually, however, Glaukos
relents and recites the story of his own grandfather and father, ending with the
sentence Socrates partially quotes above: “Such is my generation and the
blood I claim to be born from” (VI.21).20 Upon hearing this genealogy,
Diomedes announces his friendship, claiming it is rooted in the historic
friendship of their grandfathers. The two men exchange their armor as proof
of their friendship, but in a strange twist, Homer tells how “Zeus the son of
Kronos” mysteriously “stole away the wits of Glaukos,” causing him to
exchange “with Diomedes . . . armor of gold for bronze, for nine oxen’s worth
the worth of a hundred” (VI.234).21
Homer’s Glaukos thus exemplifies those criticized by Socrates in the
above quoted section; he has little concern for genealogy and is punished by
being unable to distinguish differences. A recognition of the past is thus inti-
mately connected to knowledge of value or worth, and as the reference to
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 49

metals reminds us, such knowledge is central to the justice exemplified by the
noble lie, with its bronze, silver, and gold citizens. Far from being godlike and
ahistorical, knowledge of justice requires knowledge of specific particular
facts. In other words, the use of the forms as a model for justice in Book VII is
tempered by the repeated references to the importance of generation and a
knowledge of the past in Book VIII.
Put together, these Homeric passages and their acknowledgment of the
past and the necessity of genealogy qualify the autochthonous city of the
noble lie, and a notion of justice as being rooted in abstract forms and princi-
ples. Actual human beings are mortal and contingent: they must heed the
company they keep, the environment that shapes their souls, and role of the
(unchosen) past on the present. But a concern with being well-born is not
merely a simplistic concern with pedigree. Socrates has already noted the
problem of well-bred animals not always being the best when referring to
Glaucon’s interest in breeding hunting dogs and cocks: “Although they are all
noble [gennaion], aren’t there some among them who are and prove to be the
best?” (459a).
Book VIII adds context to this more superficial concern with pedigree:
good sons from good fathers can fall into bad company or fall victim to a
mother’s complaints (549c, 550b). Regimes might unjustly take away the
riches and honor of a father, which may cause the son to grow up fearful of
being deprived himself (553b-c). Or a son, reared to imitate his “stingy, oli-
garchic” father, forcibly denies himself pleasures and freedoms, but later
gives himself over to them (558d-560a). In the completely free city, anarchy
reigns, and fathers imitate and fear their sons, while sons have no shame or
fear of their parents (562e): “[These children] end up . . . paying no attention
to the laws, written or unwritten, in order that they may avoid having any mas-
ter at all” (563d). The sarcastic reference to gennaion as pedigree, within the
larger context of parents and children, points to an acknowledgment of con-
tingency and history, rather than a simplistic reliance on membership in a
dynasty. One’s social class and background need to be acknowledged and
interrogated, but the idea of throwing off the past to inaugurate justice de
novo is as problematic and puerile as the idea that a good background (such as
Glaucon’s) is all that is needed.
As these passages make clear, a concern with intergenerational tension
and its relation to the establishment of justice runs throughout the Republic.
This teaching of the dialogue is a specific response to both the concerns and
personality of especially Glaucon, whose political ambition, combined
with his eagerness to impose justice, requires tempering. In the next section
of this essay, I will argue for a reading of the noble lie informed by these
conclusions.
50 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

THE NOBLE LIE, AUTOCHTHONY, AND

THE MYTH OF METALS
The noble lie appears at the end of Book III, following a section detailing
the training needed for the “guardian” or ruling class. At this point in the dia-
logue Socrates and Glaucon are involved in refounding the “city in speech,”
after the failed “city of pigs” in Book II (372d). Glaucon has so far proved to
be the most tenaciously interested in the issue of justice and injustice, and in
addition to being Plato’s own older brother and father figure, it also seems as
if Socrates sees him as either the most promising of the lot, or else as the most
dangerous, should he go unmoderated.22 The details about the guardian class
all meet with Glaucon’s enthusiastic support. But immediately after that,
Socrates suggests the need for an additional safeguard to sustain these rulers’
convictions: “Could we . . . somehow contrive one of those lies [pseudoi] that
come into being in case of need . . . some one noble lie to persuade, in the best
case, even the rulers, but if not them, the rest of the city?” (414b). When
pushed to give an account of this as yet unspecified lie, Socrates hesitates to
continue (414c-d). Even after Glaucon encourages him, Socrates continues
to stress the difficulty of both giving the account and accomplishing the
deception:

I’ll attempt to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of the city, that the
rearing and education we gave them were like dreams; they only thought they were
undergoing all that was happening to them, while, in truth, at that time they were under
the earth within, being fashioned and reared themselves, and their arms and other tools
being crafted. When the job had been completely finished, then the earth, which is their
mother, sent them up. And now, as though the land they are in were a mother and nurse,
they must plan for and defend it, if anyone attacks, and they must think of the other citi-
zens as brothers and born of the earth. (414d-e)

In response to this, Glaucon agrees that Socrates should be “ashamed to tell

the lie!” (415e).
Socrates hesitates to tell the content of the lie even as he repeatedly
stresses to Glaucon that the story will be, in no uncertain terms, false. The
meaning of his purported hesitation, however, is unclear. Is he embarrassed at
the outlandishness of the lie, ironically underscoring its impossibility, or does
the activity of lying, so soon after it has been “banished” in the city earlier in
the dialogue, require a dramatic pause?23 Socrates hesitates to say that justice
should necessitate a lie, and yet he stresses the fantastical nature of what citi-
zens are to believe, and the difficulty of convincing them of its truth. In the
telling, he layers lies within lies, all the while qualifying each lie with a
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 51

caveat, almost as if to highlight the conspiratorial nature of the lie.24 Appar-

ently, it is essential that Glaucon is to know the lie as such.
Most commentators see this first half of the noble lie as an extreme mea-
sure to ensure patriotic harmony among citizens, or as evidence of Plato’s
conviction that notions of justice must be rooted in prepolitical society.25 But
Socrates’ pointed hesitation qualifies the use of this lie and draws attention to
its status as a political tool. Such false stories of origins will provide secret
ties among the founders of the city, and the illusion of a clear boundary
between the founders, rulers, and subjects. In speaking of such things, Socra-
tes must admit Glaucon into a secret and hidden arena. But Socrates is not
Machiavelli; he does not boldly advocate lying as an obvious remedy for
political ills. His hesitancy is meant to have an effect on Glaucon, to make
him think, to make (at least some) lies both more alluring and more absurd.
And while it may be that the hypothetical citizens of this city are to believe
what they are told, Socrates intends Glaucon to learn that prepolitical origins,
and origin myths denying the importance of parental figures, or political his-
tory, are false and misleading possibilities.
Why? These false possibilities—for clear relationships between the
classes and a just distribution of parentage—speak to some of Glaucon’s
deepest wishes. The denial of any historical influence, together with an
emphasis on autochthony and autonomous self-fashioning, establishes a city
with no familial ties to the past. The noble lie will continue the pattern set by
the censorship of the poets by falsifying the actual, familial origins of citi-
zens. Socrates stresses the link between such institutionalized lies and jus-
tice, and thereby reveals the unjust nature of the true relationships, and by
extension, the very incompatibility of historical political reality and absolute
justice. The imposition of pure justice would require a radical severing of all
ties to historical and political reality; but this is an explicit lie.
The noble lie thus serves to emphasize for Glaucon the specific conflict
that needs to be hidden from the imaginary citizens. And even though the
noble lie falsifies reality, it tells the truth about a certain seductive notion of
distributive and procedural justice, characterized by the wish for a shared,
wholly harmonious motherland, autonomy from parental authorities, a false
brotherhood among citizens, and a true and just distribution of goods and tal-
ents. Justice as having anything to do with a reconciliation with the past, how-
ever, is left unanalyzed and unacknowledged. The noble lie replaces political
conflict and actual community with peaceful, and prepolitical, pseudo-ties.
And these pseudo-ties reveal a wish for a certain simplistic account of justice
that, ultimately, Socrates criticizes.
The second part of the noble lie is not called a lie at all, but a tale or myth
(mythos). After affirming the shameful nature of the first part, Socrates asks
52 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

Glaucon to bear with him and “hear out the rest of the tale” (415a). This sec-
ond part describes how the distinct social and political classes of the city are
created. The rulers have gold mixed in their souls; the auxiliaries silver; and
the farmers and craftsmen iron and bronze.26 Children will be raised by those
best suited to their nature, rather than their biological parents (415b). The
idea that a “god” will be able to discern the qualities of various souls, and
thereby assign them their proper role in the city, has major consequences for
an understanding of justice. And once again, in doing away with the problem
of particular and mortal parents, Socrates underscores the problem of
intergenerational tension for political justice in general, and for Glaucon
specifically.
This part of the myth allows for the resolution of some of the most difficult
of all political problems: the just distinction between ruler and ruled. If the
innermost qualities of each soul are made transparent, and if the correct kind
of work is assigned to each soul, then the city is just—each having and doing
what is appropriate to their nature (434a). The godlike mythic authorities, the
“parents” of the children, know them fully, educate them appropriately, and
never fail in understanding the essential aspects of their souls. But all this is
presented to Glaucon as an explicit fantasy.
Along with the obvious utopian and radical implications of both sections
of the noble lie, the underlying problem of parentage and generational ten-
sion remains. Justice, presented here, is embedded in attitudes of rebellion
and deference, attitudes that are rooted in the sense of injustice that accompa-
nies the acknowledgment of fallible parental figures and specific political
histories. The two halves of the noble lie are linked: the first part aims to pro-
vide a mythical basis for fraternity among citizens, and the second part aims
to prevent the consequential threat of fratricide. The noble lie thus rests on a
wishful image of mythical parents and children, ascribing godlike perception
to parental figures, transparent natures to children, and easy relations
between siblings.
Socrates guardedly maintains that such fraternity and social unity and the
required social reorganization are impossible. These are mythic possibilities:
only a “god” could implement them, only children would believe them. Ear-
lier in the dialogue, Socrates has explained that speech can be both true and
false, but that children are best educated by the initial use of appropriate false
tales gradually replaced by the truth: “and surely [these early tales] are, as a
whole, false, though there are true things in them too” (377a). But if the noble
lie is a children’s story, what are the “true things” it eventually reveals? In
other words, how does it operate as a myth: literally false, but conveying
underlying truths? The noble lie maintains that justice could be perfectly
worked out and that such arrangements must be unquestioningly accepted.
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 53

The “shameful” impossibility of such a tale, the fact that Socrates openly
calls it a lie, qualifies the ultimate place of justice in the city, or certainly of a
justice conceived in such idealized terms.27
So far, then, what is provided for this city is a mythic facade of justice.
This facade will provide a false image of justice that nonetheless reveals the
tragic truth of the matter. But this facade will ultimately fail, and its failure
will reveal the actual boundaries and requirements of justice, politically con-
ceived. Part of the undoing of this facade (an undoing which, as I have tried to
show, is heavily implied in the manner of its telling) is found even more strik-
ingly amid the strange and revealing origins of the noble lie in Greek
mythology.

THE CADMEAN SUBTEXT TO THE NOBLE LIE

The noble lie is based on the widely known story of the founding of Thebes
by Cadmus. Socrates explains that the noble lie would be “nothing new,” but

a Phoenician thing, which has already happened in many places before, as the poets
assert and have caused others to believe, but one that has not happened in our time—and I
don’t know if it could—one that requires a great deal of persuasion. (414c)

Although there is some argument about the exact content of this reference in
the Republic, the Laws strongly suggests that the model for these lies is the
story of Cadmus, the Phoenician, or Sidonian. In the Laws the Athenian
Stranger asks, “Didn’t it prove easy to persuade people of that myth told by
the Sidonian, though it was incredible, and doesn’t the same hold for tens of
thousands of other myths?” (663e). The tale of Cadmus—both the story of his
adventures and a story that he told—is not merely an example demonstrating
that strange myths can be believed, but also the specific source of the noble
lie, and one that provides sobering commentary on the fantasy of
autochthony and the denial of intergenerational tension.28
The story tells of the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus who
sowed the teeth of a dragon like seeds in the ground.29 From these seeds
armed warriors sprang up, and then threatened to attack Cadmus, their osten-
sible progenitor. In defense, he threw a rock into their midst, which caused
them to begin fighting each other, and all but five were killed. These five,
referred to in other stories as “the sown men” (spartoi), became the ancestors
of other warriorlike peoples, including the Spartans.30 One, Eichion, married
Cadmus’s daughter Agave, the mother of Pentheus. From these men and their
54 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

offspring the city of Thebes was founded, a city that, not incidentally, went on
to become the setting for tales of horrific interfamilial and intergenerational
violence, and as it has been argued, often served as both a rival and contrast to
Athens.31
The myth of Cadmus is one of the very few foundation myths in Greek
mythology, and, like the mythic founding of Athens, it begins with
autochthony.32 Linking the noble lie to the story of Cadmus reconnects the
city of the Republic—from which stories involving familial violence have
been banned—to the most violent, cannibalistic, and incestuous family tree
in Greek mythology, the house of Thebes. How could the noble lie be a
“Phoenician thing”? And when Socrates claims, in the Republic, that this
kind of “thing” has been done many times before, to what exactly is he refer-
ring? From the Republic it appears that the reference is to autochthony, the
idea that a citizenry could be born of the earth. But the reference in the Laws
to a “tale told by the Sidonian,” implies another noble lie, a story told by
Cadmus. If the noble lie refers to the story about Cadmus and the founding of
Thebes, then the first half of the noble lie is a revision of a well-known story,
tale, or lie, of Theban and Athenian autochthony. But if it refers to the story
told by Cadmus, its political teaching is that founders of cities will do well to
make up a story that provides divine or extrahuman legitimacy to their
actions. In Thebes, however, the legacy of continuing violence undercuts this
advice.
In the Bacchae Euripides has Cadmus advocate a noble lie, one that has
everything to do with falsifying genealogy in order to consolidate power.
Cadmus speaks to his grandson and heir, Pentheus, who has refused to acqui-
esce to his cousin Dionysius’s demand to be recognized as a new god.
Pentheus sees Dionysius as a dangerous rival, and wants to have him and his
followers arrested, but Cadmus admonishes him:

Even if this Dionysius is no god,/as you assert, persuade yourself that he is./The fiction is
a noble one, for [your aunt] Semele/will seem to be the mother of a god, and this confers/
33
no small distinction on our family.

Euripides describes Dionysius’s return to the city of his birth to demand rec-
ognition and worship from the family that has slandered him by disbelieving
the story of his divine origins. In his opening speech, Dionysius bitterly sets
forth this slander:

They said that Dionysius was no son of Zeus,/but Semele slept beside a man in love/and
fathered off her shame on Zeus—a fraud, they sneered/contrived by Cadmus to protect
his daughter’s name./They said she lied, and Zeus in anger at that lie/blasted her with
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 55

lightning. . . . Therefore I shall prove to [Pentheus]/and every man in Thebes that I am

34
indeed [a god].

This attempt to prove the truth of a lie results in, among other violence, the
killing of Pentheus by his mother. The revengeful rage of Dionysius over
Cadmus’s fraud is played out in violence between parents and children, the
literal dismemberment of children, and the end of the Cadmean line. And in
the play, Cadmus is depicted as willing to cover up origins and persuade oth-
ers to believe in “noble lies,” especially those that confer divinity on a mortal
family.
The noble lie of the Republic could be seen as a revision, even a contradic-
tion, of the story of Cadmus’s founding of Thebes. This revised version
replaces the heavily armed, violent, and fratricidal “sown men” with citizens
reared underground and separated from their actual familial origins, so that
they see each other as brothers and sisters, and accordingly love and respect
each other. The noble lie replaces the childlike god of Dionysius, who sows
disorder and violently blurs boundaries, with its opposite: an authoritative
parental figure who is able to see clearly the souls of the citizens, and provide
clear boundaries between them. The noble lie thus explicitly addresses the
underlying threat of fratricide or faction found in the original story of
Cadmus, his fratricidal autochthonous “sons” and vengeful grandsons. In the
Bacchae, the chorus of Dionysius’s followers demands repeatedly that
Pentheus be punished for his lack of piety: “O Justice, principle of order,
spirit of custom/ . . . stab the evil earth-born spawn of Eichion!”35 The justice
that the chorus invokes is still rooted in custom, even though Dionysius
claims to be a new god with the power to unseat powerful traditional figures
such as Cadmus and Teiresius. The chorus asks for the old form of blood
revenge, and reasserts the inferiority of those born of the earth. In the Repub-
lic, this desire for blood revenge will be hypothetically solved through a tale
of mythic kinship. And yet this new order will be rooted in the old Cadmean
myth, rather than the more obvious story of Athens’ own autochthonous
founder, Erechtheus.36 What are we to make of the tale of Cadmus, with its
overt warnings of political and familial disaster? What does it have to do with
the false but ideal city being constructed for Socrates’ interlocutors? And
what does the Cadmean subtext have to do with the possibility of a less ideal
but politically realistic sense of justice?
The noble lie, as it appears in both the Republic and the Laws, serves to
make two points about the possible realization of justice in a city. First, Soc-
rates and the Athenian Stranger claim that only an outright lie, perhaps in the
form of a tale (mythos), but still an outright falsehood (pseudos), can provide
a secure foundation for justice. Second, both point to the tale of Cadmus, and
56 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

possibly to his own lies, as a model for this founding lie. The overt elements
of the Cadmean reference—concerns with genealogy, fratricide and infanti-
cide, transformations of humans into animals or gods—explicitly contradict
the aims of the just city, the measures taken to reduce injustice, and the types
of stories that are to be allowed there. Does it serve as a warning, a negative
example, one that is to be directly revised by a lie about a peaceful and loving
brotherhood?37 Or is the reference ironic, and does it undercut the entire pos-
sibility of either a city founded upon such a lie or a notion of justice as histori-
cally and politically contingent? These two possibilities, of course, corre-
spond to two rival interpretations of the Republic as a whole: as either a
genuine blueprint for a just city or a rhetorical device, a game or thought
experiment, with details that undercut the possibility of its realization. Socra-
tes treads a rocky path between mocking the desires of his interlocutors for
absolute power and knowledge, and giving in to them. Throughout the dia-
logue he offers myths and images designed first to indulge, and then to redi-
rect, these wishes of especially Glaucon and Thrasymachus. The tension
between the political act of founding, which may require autonomous “self-
made” founders and false tales that justify their actions, and the political act
of preserving or consolidating previously created institutions, is embedded in
the myth of Cadmus and provides commentary on the noble lie. The violent
tensions in the lie’s subtext reflect those generational tensions that surround
the dialogue as a whole: those between Socrates and his interlocutors, Socra-
tes and Plato, Plato and Glaucon. In addition, and as scholars have often
pointed out, the setting of the dialogue in the Piraeus, amid revolutionary
times, also highlights generational uncertainties.38

CONCLUSION: JUSTICE AND

INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION
The noble lie is well-born for a number of reasons. It is an ironic, sideways
look at a deeply problematic issue: how justice can administer “each his due”
and embody equality, and yet still solve the problem of the past. The noble lie
undercuts its own simplistic solutions by reminding Glaucon of the
misbegotten generations of Cadmus, the situation of Oedipus, the wishes of a
Glaucon or Glaukos, and the races of Hesiod. Without drastic solutions, it
seems, the city must be at least partially unjust. But even given drastic solu-
tions, as the Cadmean subtext of the lie indicates, the “house of Thebes” is
beset with intergenerational and familial violence, and so injustice. Why
then, is a lie told at all? What does the fact that this tale is a lie tell us about
political communities, justice, and the capacity for truth?
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 57

As I have argued, when the noble lie is introduced Socrates is trying to

thread his way between two problematic understandings of justice put forth
in Book I. The first is the argument of Thrasymachus, an argument that car-
ries with it a tremendous amount of resentment and anger at those who pos-
sess power, and who can institute seemingly arbitrary measures and call them
“just.” The second understanding of justice is that of an idealized parental
authority found in the arguments of Cephalus and Polemarchus. The noble lie
responds to adolescent desires—to be separate from tradition, autonomous,
and yet secure, protected, and understood. It replaces political deliberation,
generational strife, and instability with a mythical autochthonous stability.
But the fact that Socrates explicitly characterizes it as a lie puts Glaucon in
the position of having to admit the opposite: souls are not transparent, human
beings are not autonomous, gods do not provide justice. Only an explicitly
false city could be constructed without the demands and problems of politics.
In this false city, justice is found in the godlike perception of the inner quality
of souls, not among the precarious and contingent deliberations of citizens.
Socrates thus offers the noble lie as a compromise. It serves as a first step in
weaning Glaucon from assumptions about justice that are purely (and exclu-
sively) about power and will, either that of the tyrannical father or that of the
tyrannical son.
Seeing the noble lie in this way involves reading the dialogue as primarily
a lesson for those who, like Glaucon, envision justice as a byproduct of auton-
omy. This lesson will involve his thinking through what is entailed in the act
of founding “a city in speech.” I argue that this experience, with the required
political maturity that may emerge, is designed to allow Glaucon to see jus-
tice as more than either the advantage of the stronger or the pious submission
to ancestral traditions, both of which are portrayed in Book I as always
accompanied by resentment. As a founder of the city, Glaucon is forced to
think through not only the fact of injustice and its content, but also the rela-
tionships and attitudes that might allow a less radical idea of justice to appear.
The noble lie casts Glaucon as a godlike knower of forbidden secrets. He
alone will know that the stories told to the citizens about their education and
rearing are lies, and that their assigned “souls” are a “tale,” and not a reality.
In thinking about this, he is subtly forced to wonder about the truth of his own
ideas and fantasies. His preoccupation with lying, with “seeming” versus
“being,” so obvious in Book II, is first indulged, then engaged, and finally
subtly criticized.39
What conception of justice emerges from this process of elimination? If
justice is not marked by an ordered, transparent equality among classes, and
cannot be politically realized by doing away with intergenerational tensions,
then what does the noble lie, or the ideal city it holds together, have to do with
58 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

justice? The status of the noble lie as a myth is key here. Like the other myths
and images Socrates uses throughout the text, the noble lie and its negating
subtext model a dialectical process of thinking and understanding, one that
emerges throughout the dialogue as being an alternative to the images of jus-
tice provided. This process involves a “partnership” in thought, a spinning
out and unpacking of images and ideals, enriched by the continual reminders
Socrates offers of the ways in which reality, and real cities, inevitably fall
short of these ideals.
The Republic, for all of its superficial antipathy to politics, reconstructs a
discourse on politics that goes beyond the superficial dichotomy of realism
and idealism, a dichotomy that is colored with resentment. Cities that see
themselves as both creatures of the past and creators of their own future, as (to
use intergenerational language) both children willing to handle the truth of
their origin and parents unwilling to deny it or cover it up, are the only cities
capable of action rooted in a mature sense of reality and not the adolescent
fantasies of simple realism or simple idealism. Tales, myths, and lies may be
“as a whole false,” but “there are true things in them too” (377a), and these
true things are the unspoken wishes of those who tell them or those who ask to
hear. For those engaged in political pursuits, it is important to see justice as
properly contested, multidimensional, dwelling between the poles of abso-
lute truth or absolute falsity, mythic yet not impossible.
In this way, the noble lie is not merely as I have portrayed it above: an
ironic response to Glaucon’s more adolescent (typically “modern”) demands
for total autonomy and power over the souls of citizens, and to his desire for
clear transparent boundaries. The noble lie does, in addition, say something
about justice. Justice of the kind Glaucon demands, a justice that is marked by
the easy institutionalization of one man/one job, is only possible in mythic
situations. Actual justice is neither so clearly recognized nor so effectively
instituted. It is akin, in fact, to lies or myths: justice reveals even as it
obscures, and is found “rolling around at our feet” (432d), perhaps like those
opinions that “roll around between not being and being” (479d).40 Glaucon’s
simplistic dichotomous way of seeing can only obscure a more humanly
complex, and even tragic, conception of justice, which ends up being at “his
feet” all the time.
The noble lie is also the first of many devices used by Socrates throughout
the Republic that momentarily gives in to the desires of his interlocutors, and
by implication his readers, in order to remind them of their destructive fanta-
sies about both politics and philosophy. The tyrannical attitudes of both a
Glaucon and a Thrasymachus are emblematic of the tyrannical attitudes at
the heart of a doctrine (as opposed to a dialectical theory) of forms, wherein
truth is available and accessible and politics is merely endured. As readers,
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 59

these images provoke our admiration and awe; as political theorists they hold
out deceptively simple answers which Plato’s Socrates undermines again and
again, returning both his interlocutors and his readers back to the interplay
between the past and the present, fantasy and reality, power and deference,
autonomy and dependency.

NOTES
1. The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
2. For a summary of recent debates, see David Dombrowski, “Plato’s ‘Noble’ Lie,” History
of Political Thought 18, no. 4 (1997): 565-578.
3. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek/English Lexicon (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1982). It is, of course, the root of many English words having to do with birth, children, and
family.
4. See 459a and 544c (discussed below).
5. Xenophon, Memorabilia, III.6.
6. See, for instance, Arlene Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 103; and Nicole Loraux, Born of the Earth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2000), 116.
7. One of the best examples of this is Machiavelli’s list of founders in chapter VI of The
Prince: Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. All were orphans or cast off by their parents in
some way or another.
8. Some see an even stronger undercurrent here, however, in that Polemarchus both rescues
and effectively kills off his father in the argument. See Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political The-
ory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 242.
9. Herodotus, Histories, I.8-13. As Glaucon tells the story, Gyges was a lowly shepherd
who discovered the dead body of a naked man “larger than human size” and wearing a large ring.
He stole the ring from the corpse, only to discover that it made him invisible whenever he wished.
Gyges used this power of invisibility to gain access to the queen’s bedroom, where he seduced
her, and killed the king (359d ff).
10. Hesiod, Theogeny, ll. 154-210, 453-506, 460, 492
11. Hephestus, child of Zeus and Hera, was born weak, and cast out of Olympus by his angry
mother. Rescued, and later readmitted to Olympus, he made a throne for her that had hidden
chains to restrain her, in order to exact his revenge for her rejection of him. Hephestus also pro-
tects his mother from being beaten by Zeus. See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: Volume 1
(New York: Penguin, 1955): 86-87; and Homer, Iliad, I.560 ff. In Homer, Hephestus tells his
mother to submit to the wrath and strength of Zeus, reminding her of how Zeus caused his lame-
ness by hurling him from Olympus in anger: “All day long I dropped helpless” (l. 392). But later
in the Iliad, Hephestus tells of how his own mother dropped him: “I suffered much at the time of
my great fall through the will of my own brazen-faced mother, who wanted to hide me, for being
lame” (ll. 395-7). On this, see Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek
Family (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 195-6. See also Loraux, Born of the
Earth, 2, on the difference between the autochthony of Hephestus and that of The Spartoi.
12. See, for instance, 358d, 361b-c, 363a, and 363e-364a.
13. See for instance the famous story in Book VIII of the Odyssey of a trap set for Ares and
Aphrodite, wherein Hephestus crafts a set of restraints to reveal the truth of their affair for all to
60 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

see (and laugh at) and thereby exacts his revenge. Plato’s Meno also uses the metaphor of binding
or tying down to describe thought (98a).
14. See 378a, 463c, and 546b-e.
15. Although his story is not referred to explicitly in the Republic, the story of Oedipus is
implied throughout the text (see esp. 571c-d). Both the stories of Gyges story and the “change-
ling child” have Oedipal elements; the shepherd who becomes king, the acquisition of the king’s
wife, the realization that one’s supposed parents are false, and the emphasis on the potentially
dangerous acquisition of wisdom.
16. One of the central dramas of the changeling child story is that of the “family romance”;
the fantasy that one is adopted, and that the true parents are of a different social class. The myth of
Cadmus contains two such implied familial romances: that of Dionysius claiming his descent
from Zeus, the “noble falsehood” that Cadmus asks Pentheus to believe, and quite possibly that
of Pentheus’s own father Eichorn, one of the “sown men,” perhaps another of Cadmus’s lies.
Seen in this light, the central conflict of the Bacchae is that between two possible bastards and
their family romances: Dionysius fantasizes he is fathered by Zeus, the sky, and Pentheus fanta-
sizes he is “rooted” in the earth (he is repeatedly referred to as “earth-born”). Cadmus, their
grandfather, supplies the tales for each, thereby setting them against each other. See especially
Freud’s 1909 essay, Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 5 (New York: Norton, 2000).
17. As I maintain, this sarcastic use of gennaion underscores the qualified use of it in refer-
ence to the noble lie.
18. Apology, 34d. This line is spoken by Penelope as she interviews the disguised Odysseus
upon his homecoming (Odyssey, XIX.163).
19. Iliad, VI.145-9.
20. This line is also quoted in the last line of the Sophist, following a section which is filled
with other veiled references to the Republic.
21. Diomedes is also the only person to use the word gennaion in the Iliad (V.253).
22. Much of the scholarship about Glaucon focuses on his ostensibly erotic character. This
interpretation is based primarily on the fact that Glaucon’s ring of Gyges tale involves adultery,
and the fact that when Socrates refers to “the good” in Book VI, Glaucon assumes he means plea-
sure. I am arguing that Glaucon’s central concern in the ring of Gyges story is a godlike auton-
omy, and founding by way of the act of overthrowing parental authorities.
23. See 378a, 379a, 381d, and 389b. Socrates claims that lies are “useful as remedies” and
allows them to be told by certain founding men who will operate like doctors to the city, using
lies judiciously like a drug. Part of his hesitation may be intended to draw attention to Glaucon’s
fitness for such a role.
24. It will be an “attempt” to persuade. The earth, which at first “is” their mother, is then qual-
ified: “And now, as though the land they are in were a mother and nurse, they must . . . defend
it . . . and they must think of the other citizens as brothers and born of the earth” (414e).
25. Scholarship on the uses and ethical implications of lies and lying invariably hold up the
noble lie as an unquestioned example of the use of paternalistic lies for the public good. See, for
instance, Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage,
1978), 167, 305; and J. A. Barnes, A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 83, 136, 154. Hannah Arendt (Between Past and Future
[New York: Vintage, 1968], 298) makes the opposite claim: “Under no circumstances can [the
noble lie] be understood as a recommendation of lying as we understand it.”
26. On the connection between the noble lie and Hesiod’s “myth of races,” see Margaret
Hartman, “The Hesiodic Roots of Plato’s Myth of the Metals,” Helios (1998): 103-15. She relies
 Carmola / JUSTICE AND INTERGENERATIONAL TENSION 61

heavily on the analysis of Hesiod’s myth in Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Myth and Thought among the
Greeks (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
27. The claim that justice is helped along by a noble lie is forcefully echoed in the Laws, one
of the later Platonic dialogues (663e).
28. Froma Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in Peter Euben,
ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 117.
Zeitlin argues persuasively that Thebes has always played the role of an anti-Athens: “[In
Thebes] Athens acts out questions crucial to the polis, to the self, the family, and society, but
these are displaced upon a city that is imagined as the mirror opposite of Athens.”
29. See, for instance, Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 165; and Ruth B. Edwards, Kadmos the Phoenician: A Study in Greek Legends and
the Mycenaean Age (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1979). See also Graves, 194-8. The main
source for Graves’s summary is Appollodorus.
30. Graves, 197. Graves lists their names as Eichion (“viper”), Udaeus (“of the earth”),
Chthonius (“of the soil”), Hyperenor (“the man who comes up”), and Pelorus (“serpent”), names
which refer explicitly to autochthony and suggest deception and evil.
31. The stories of the house of Thebes include that of Dionysius, Cadmus’s grandson by his
daughter Semele, and that of Oedipus, a descendant of Cadmus’s son Polydorus. Through his
sister Europa, Cadmus was also linked to the other great house of Greek myth, the house of
Atreus.
32. For comparisons between the two autochthonous foundlings, see especially Nicole
Loraux, Children of Athena (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Born of the
Earth.
33. Euripides, Greek Tragedies, vol. 3, the Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960), 206 (emphasis added). In the Republic, Socrates refers to
Euripides as “particularly wise” (568a). In Euripides, however, what is translated as a “noble”
fiction is not gennaion, but kalos.
34. Ibid., ll. 27-33, 47-8 (emphasis added).
35. Ibid., ll. 991-5, 1011-15.
36. Another prototype of the noble lie is Hesiod’s myth of races, itself a genealogy of past
races, and overwhelmingly preoccupied with issues of justice and injustice. Plato’s version
replaces the tale of generations with that of coexisting classes; he continues to do away with the
problems of the past.
37. Cadmus and Thebes would thus serve the same function for Socrates’ideal city as Zeitlin
argues Thebes did for Athens.
38. The time and place of the dialogue draw explicit attention to this tension. Barry Strauss
(Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War [Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993], 136-9, 199-209) demonstrates that from the mid-fifth
century until the end of the Sicilian expedition, it was the “hour of the son.” The reform of the
Areopagus, the Peloponnesian War losses, the ever-widening contact with foreigners by way of
Athens increasing trade, the rise of the sophists, and the decline of organized religious traditions,
all helped foster an environment wherein established institutional and parental authorities were
both resented and openly undermined. The Piraeus, where the Republic is situated, was seen as
the locus of these intergenerational transformations. Strauss revisits the argument that Socrates’
trial and death were symptoms of the “return of the father” after the Sicilian disaster and the sub-
sequent reform of Athenian politics.
39. On his preoccupation in Book II, see 357a, 361a, and 362a.
62 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

40. On the connection between lying and justice, and the use of the word for “rolling around”
(kylindesthai), see Kateri Carmola, Slanted truths: Theories of political deception (1999).
Manuscript.

Kateri Carmola is an assistant professor at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.

She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999, and did two
years of postdoctoral work with the Charles B. and Louise H. Travers Center for Ethics
and Accountability in Government.