From the book
The Lovers
Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordAkolastainein is to be unruly or undisciplined.
- In The LoversThe words occur when the animal-training analogy becomes a civic argument.
- In this editionThe edition’s “unruly and break the law” keeps two descriptions where a loose paraphrase might say only “criminals.”
- A place to readτοὺς ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν ἀκολασταίνοντας καὶ παρανομοῦντας — The civic subjects are specified by unruliness and lawbreaking.
Meaning
Akolastainein is to be unruly or undisciplined. Paranomein is to act contrary to law or break the law. At 137d the present participles akolastainontas and paranomountas describe the people whom the relevant civic knowledge punishes rightly. The pair joins disorderly conduct with violation of law without explicitly making them synonyms.
Akolastainein belongs to the family of akolastos, literally unchastened, and is connected with kolazein, to punish or correct. Edition note 25 draws attention to that connection. Paranomein introduces law into the discussion, but the passage supplies neither a particular statute nor a systematic account of what makes a law just.
Use in the book
The words occur when the animal-training analogy becomes a civic argument. Socrates has secured agreement that the craft improving human beings also punishes rightly and distinguishes decent from worthless. He now asks for the knowledge that does this in cities, specifying people who are unruly and break the law. “The judge’s” is the answer, and the knowledge is identified with justice.
The specification prevents the argument from being read as punishment of people simply because a ruler dislikes them. There is conduct to be corrected, and punishment must be right. Yet the text does not spell out the relation between legal violation, moral badness and the need for improvement. The short question draws those considerations into one practical picture.
The resulting theory is therefore not a complete philosophy of law. It does not discuss unjust legislation, conflict between law and virtue or criteria for proportionate penalty. Those would be genuine further questions, not answers silently contained in the vocabulary. The dialogue uses the familiar judicial function to move toward a unity of corrective and discriminating knowledge.
The contrast with temperance is also suggestive. The unchastened person is the object of right correction, while the temperate person possesses self-knowledge. But the argument does not explicitly define temperance as having been punished. It identifies temperance with knowing oneself, then unites that knowledge with the knowledge of right punishment.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The edition’s “unruly and break the law” keeps two descriptions where a loose paraphrase might say only “criminals.” That broader modern noun could obscure the corrective word-family and imply a more precise legal category than the text provides.