SOURCE: McNeill, David N. “Human Discourse, Eros, and Madness in Plato's Republic.” Review of Metaphysics 55, (December 2001): 235-68.

In the following essay, McNeill compares three variations on the idea of eros as presented in Plato's Republic, Phaedrus and Symposium.

I

In book 9 of the Republic, Socrates tells Adeimantus that the “tyrant-makers” manage to defeat the relatives of the nascent tyrant in the battle over the young man's soul by contriving “to make in him some eros, a sort of great winged drone, to be the leader of the idle desires.” This “leader of the soul,” Socrates claims,

takes madness as its bodyguard and is stung wild, and if it detects in the man any opinions or desires deemed good and which still feel some shame, it kills them and pushes them out of him until it purges the soul of moderation and fills it with foreign madness.

Adeimantus responds...