[327a]

Socrates
I1 went down yesterday to the Peiraeus2 with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions3 to the Goddess,4 and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.5 I thought the procession of the citizens very fine, but it was no better than the show, made by the marching of the Thracian contingent.

1 Socrates narrates in the first person, as in the Charmides and Lysis; see Introduction p. vii, Hirzel, Der Dialog, i. p. 84. Demetrius, On Style, 205, cites this sentence as an example of “trimeter members.” Editors give references for the anecdote that it was found in Plato's tablets with many variations. For Plato's description of such painstaking Cf. Phaedrus 278 D. Cicero De sen.. 5. 13 “scribens est mortuus.”

2 Cf. 439 E; about a five-mile walk.

3 Plato and Xenophon represent Socrates as worshipping the gods,νόμῳ πόλεως. Athanasius, Contra gentes, 9, censures Plato for thus adoring an Artemis made with hands, and the fathers and medieval writers frequently cite the passage for Plato's regrettable concessions to polytheism—“persuasio civilis” as Minucius Felix styles it. Cf. Eusebius Praep. Evang. xiii. 13. 66.

4 Presumably Bendis (354 A), though, as the scholiast observes, Athena is ἡ θεός for an Athenian. For foreign cults at the Peiraeus see Holm, History of Greece, iii. p. 189.

5 See Introduction.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.

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