· Do people who are sensitive to “proportion and grace” tend to be sensitive to truth? If so, why might this be? What is the relation between truth and beauty?
· Socrates says at 485c that philosophers “must never willingly tolerate falsehood in any form.” What then of the marriage lotteries ( 459c-460a ) and the myth of the metals ( 414c-415d )? Is this not the toleration, indeed the propagation, of falsehood? How might Socrates defend himself against the charge of inconsistency? Consider what he says at the end of Book II about lying and the divine ( 382a-e ).
? What makes a good political leader? Is the challenge of politics above all an intellectual problem, a matter of thinking through what is best for the city and how to achieve it?
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