Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch

Abstract

This chapter offers a new gloss of the pivotal “bed” in book 10 of Plato’s Republic as the classical kline or triclinium, the couch. This new object introduces the stakes of Socrates’s position in his debate with Protagoras by way of the threat of the polis descending into a hedonistic city arranged around the determined hedonism of the couch, of uncontrolled or contagious leisure in contrast to searching for the good.