In Republic II, when beginning his search for justice in the individual, Socrates suggests that he and his interlocutors would have better luck searching for justice in the origins of a city. The first city he suggests—called disparagingly the “City of Pigs” by Glaucon—is often considered a “false start.” In this paper, I argue that the so-called City of Pigs is not a city at all and is better understood as an economic association. The real, political city only comes to be after the introduction of delicacies and luxuries. What emerges from the discussion on the City of Pigs is a clear dichotomy between the public polis and the private oikos. 

I argue that Aristophanes’ hiccupping fit indicates the humor of his encomium of eros which, in turn, highlights the political aspect of Socrates’ account of eros. The fact that the humor of Aristophanes’ encomium is not picked up on by the pederasts attending the banquet (Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Agathon) but picked up on by Socrates and the reader indicates that the joke is at the expense of the pederasts. In his encomium, Aristophanes presents an incestuous eros and lures the pederasts into revealing that they find incestuous eros delightful. By contrast, Socrates explicitly distinguishes his account of eros from the incestuous type by highlighting the political nature of his eros. By seeing Aristophanes’ hiccups as indicating humor and by reading Aristophanes as a jokester rather than as a buffoon, the split between Socrates’ political eros and the pederastic incestuous eros becomes more apparent. 

The meaning of justice as ‘doing one’s own thing’ in the case of the city means that there is no interchange between the three different classes of citizens in the city; in the soul, it means that there is no interchange between the three different parts of the soul. Justice, in the case of the city, means that the rulers lead, the auxiliaries defend the laws established by the rulers, and the producers or money-makers follow the rulers and don’t try to become rulers or soldiers themselves. In the soul, it means that the reasoning capacity should be directed at knowledge and truth, the spirited capacity should align itself in accordance with reason, and the appetites should be guided by both reason and spirit and should not become the leading part of the soul. In my reading of the analogy, it isn’t the hierarchy of ruler and ruled per se that explains the nature of justice.  That is, justice in the city is not essentially determined by the relations among people who make up the separate classes of the Kallipolis; it isn’t determined by the fact that there are some people, who are rulers, who rule over some other group of people, who form the money-making sector of the city. Instead, I argue that the nature of justice is illuminated when we see that the parts of the city and their corresponding parts in the soul desire, and thus are motivated by, the same objects. The guardians are motivated by knowledge of the Good in the same way that the reasoning capacity of the soul is motivated by the Good. And in being motivated by the same object, the just person in Kallipolis, insofar as they are ruled by their reasoning capacity, is ruled by a part of themselves that also rules the city as a whole. This makes the just man in Kallipolis autonomous.