The Do-It-Yourselfer in Plato's Republic

American Journal of Philology 124 (1):1-18 (2003)
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Abstract

The key expressionta hautou prattein, "to do one's own," has two opposite meanings in Plato's Republic: to perform for oneself all tasks required to meet one's own needs (2.370a); or to specialize exclusively in one task, leaving others to other specialists (4.433a and thenceforward). The former sense also appears in Charmides 161e-162a, with a list of tasks that closely matches that atHippias Minor 386b-c. Given these contexts, the inconsistency in Plato's usage in Republic suggests an answer to the teaching of the sophist Hippias, that the goal of life is self-sufficiency though mastery of many specialized crafts.

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10.1353/ajp.2003.0018

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