[I]f we are at all concerned to preserve friendly relations with the other Greeks. Rather we shall fear that there is pollution in bringing such offerings to the temples from our kind unless in a case where the god bids otherwise...And in the matter of devastating the land of Greeks and burning their houses, how will your soldiers deal with their enemies...In my view,...they ought to do neither, but confine themselves to taking away the annual harvest...In my opinion, just as we have the two terms, war and faction, so there are also two things, distinguished by two differentiae. The two things I mean are the friendly and kindred on the one hand and the alien and foreign on the other. Now the term employed for the hostility of the friendly is faction, and for that of the alien is war...Consider, then, if this goes to the mark. I affirm that the Hellenic race is friendly to itself and akin, and foreign and alien to the barbarian...We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature, and that war is the fit name for this enmity and hatred. Greeks, however, we shall say, are still by nature the friends of Greeks when they act in this way, but that Greece is sick in that case and divided by faction, and faction is the name we must give to that enmity...Then observe,” said I, “that when anything of this sort occurs in faction, as the word is now used, and a state is divided against itself, if either party devastates the land and burns the houses of the other such factional strife is thought to be an accursed thing and neither party to be true patriots. Otherwise, they would never have endured thus to outrage their nurse and mother. But the moderate and reasonable thing is thought to be that the victors shall take away the crops of the vanquished, but that their temper shall be that of men who expect to be reconciled and not always to wage war.” “That way of feeling,” he said, “is far less savage than the other.” “Well, then,” said I, “is not the city that you are founding to be a Greek city?” “It must be,” he said. “Will they then not be good and gentle?” “Indeed they will.” “And won't they be philhellenes, lovers of Greeks, and will they not regard all Greece as their own and not renounce their part in the holy places common to all Greeks ?” “Most certainly.” “Will they not then regard any difference with Greeks who are their own people as a form of faction and refuse even to speak of it as war?” “Most certainly.” “And they will conduct their quarrels always looking forward to a reconciliation?” “By all means.” “They will correct them, then, for their own good, not chastising them with a view to their enslavement or their destruction, but acting as correctors, not as enemies....They will not, being Greeks, ravage Greek territory nor burn habitations, and they will not admit that in any city all the population are their enemies, men, women and children, but will say that only a few at any time are their foes, those, namely, who are to blame for the quarrel. And on all these considerations they will not be willing to lay waste the soil, since the majority are their friends, nor to destroy the houses, but will carry the conflict only to the point of compelling the guilty to do justice by the pressure of the suffering of the innocent.” “I,” he said, “agree that our citizens ought to deal with their Greek opponents on this wise, while treating barbarians as Greeks now treat Greeks.” “Shall we lay down this law also, then, for our guardians that they are not to lay waste the land or burn the houses?” Plato, Republic, Book 5 470-1, Translated by Paul Shorey.
In Context Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the Guardians's behavior toward foreign enemies. Socrates anticipates here an argument that I think of the less dominant strain in Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace: (recall) a kind of argument from enlightened self-interest to the conclusion that one must be willing to restrict voluntarily one's conduct in war. The enlightened self-interest of restraint in war, makes possible decent relations after war. And, in fact, Socrates anticipates a key point of Kant's that the way one conducts oneself in way is a means toward looking forward to a reconciliation. For, conduct in war is a signal toward the kind of outcome one (is willing to) foresee(s).
Now, in my piece on Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace, I noted that there is a more dominant strain of argument (clearly indebted to Hobbes) in Kant's work: to take Hobbes's idea that the very point of a state is to escape from the state of nature seriously and to adhere to that even in the conduct of war (and so to prepare a durable escape from the state of nature). That conduct in war (say of the stronger party), can become self-undermining because it facilitates an outcome which is a permanent state of nature.
Socrates also anticipates the spirit of this second Hobbesian argument. (I say 'spirit' because in context he is not connecting the argument to a social contract.) But he does so in terms of a principled distinction between self and other, or a version of would-be-friends and would-be-permanent-enemies (along what we would call civilizational, ethnic, religious, or even nationalist lines). And hostilities among one's own are for Socrates really a form of civil war, which undermines the whole point of having a state. That is, Socrates comes extremely close to treating intra-Greek war as undermining the very rationale of the polity.
The last sentence of the last paragraph is probably too speculative for most. But notice that Socrates quietly inserts a useful myth (one that anticipates a Kantian position), which Plato's readers know can barely sustain scrutiny even if it appeals to a self-conception that one may wish to have about one's fellow citizens: that the wars among the Greeks are always and everywhere caused by minority factions (who have a self-interest in war) and that the majority of each polity wishes to have friendly relations with others.* The last comment by Glaucon quoted above suggests that in reality Greeks are savage with each other. And in Book VI, when discussing the greatest corruption of would be philosophers in a democracy at say 494ff, Socrates makes clear that moderation is incompatible with nearly all political life. So, what I am calling Socrates' myth is a normative idea (would the world be like that the majority of wars are caused by minority factions.)
I have mentioned Hobbes and Kant a few times already, because Socrates assumes that relations between Greeks and non-Greeks is one of permanent would be enmity (the Hobbesian state of nature). And while I am not claiming that Socrates anticipates Machiavelli's dream of national (Italian) unification (recall), it is notable for Socrates the relationships among Greeks should be governed by an ideal of fraternity (470A).+
Socrates and Plato are often treated as idealist who demand a reform of human nature and peddle unattainable ideals (and (recall) one sees comments to this effect in, say, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant--sometimes More's Utopia is the target sometimes Plato). One can understand the charge when one focuses on the internal order of Kallipolis. (The previous sentence leaves open that the charge is mistaken.) But once international relations are brought into the picture a more distressing (or realist) feature of Socrates's analysis emerges: if there are would-be-permanent enemies, this entails that (preparation for) strife is permanent.
*That we're in the realm of wishful thinking is clear from the assumption that the winning side in a way tends to be the innocent side.
+Socrates does not mention the possibility of confederation, but there would have been conceptual space for him to do so here.
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