Editing the Text of Homer in Plato's Republic

Before the Homeric epics are accepted for performance in the ideal city in Plato’s Republic, Socrates identifies and expunges problematic passages, which he deletes from the Iliad and the Odyssey to make the poems conform to the ethics of the new city. This article analyses Socrates’ engagement with Homer as an example of early Homeric criticism and proto-scholarship. The discussion focusses on the list of Homeric quotations in Republic III and in particular on the terms that Socrates uses to characterize his interference with the Homeric text, and is contextualized in terms of the realities of the fifth and fourth centuries BC—the turn towards textuality, the co-existence of written texts and oral performances, as well as the social practices of emending and updating public documents—in order to demonstrate that the Republic contains a precious and hitherto overlooked example of how the textual scholar’s approach was a natural way of thinking about the Homeric poems in the fourth century BC.