ABSTRACT
Before Socrates in the Republic can make the case that injustice is always damaging to its perpetrator as well as to its victim, he must first describe the essential nature of the human soul by means of a "likeness in speech". In the picture of the soul from the Republic, the appetites, remember, were a "many-headed and intricate beast" having a ring of the heads of wild and tame beasts, a thing of nature, bestial and ever-changing and monstrous. The highest human emotions are idealized, yet at the same time they are absolved of any responsibility for improving the disorder made necessary by the cycles of cosmic history, the alternation of Love and Strife. Empedocles' Love is a domesticated sexuality, put in its cosmic place, not a mysterious inexplicable force. Finally, it is the source of harmony and affection in our Strife-dominated world, a reminder of the lost paradise in which men and nature were as one.
