The main difficulty which besets Plato is that guardians and auxiliaries must be endowed with a character that is fierce and gentle at the same time. It is clear that they must be bred to be fierce, since they must ‘meet any danger in a fearless and unconquerable spirit’. Yet ‘if their nature is to be like that, how are they to be kept from being violent against one another, or against the rest of the citizens?’35 Indeed, it would be ‘simply monstrous if the shepherds should keep dogs … who would worry the sheep, behaving like wolves rather than dogs’. The problem is important from the point
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