1. Feel free to download a digital copy of my commentary on Richard Kraut’s paper “Agathon and sumpheron: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.1, 1094a1—2”, delivered at the Princeton Classical Philosophy Colloquium, December 3—4, 2005. (Added December 4, 2005.)
   

2. The new OCT of Plato’s Republic, edited by the late S. R. Slings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), corrects a long-standing mistake in printing thêriou rather then thêrion in Book 4, 439b4. Burnet’s old OCT (1902) and James Adam’s CUP edition (also 1902), to give only two examples, both print thêrion.
   

The genitive, and not the accusative, is read by all three authoritative medieval manuscripts. The genitive also occurs in (the manuscripts of) Galen’s quotation of Rep. 439a9—d8 at PHP V 7, 36—40 (344.21–346.7 in De Lacy's edition; cf. De Lacy's commentary ad 344.24). The one feeble piece of support for the accusative is a quotation in Stobaeus’ anthology (I 49, 30), which dates from the fifth century A.D.

Once the correct text is restored, it is clear that Plato is likening the soul’s appetitive part, and not the soul as a whole, to a brute animal. This is exactly as it should be, both given Plato’s conception of appetite as a non-rationally desiring part of the human soul, and given the prominent and memorable image of appetite as a multicolored, manyheaded brute (thêrion) at Rep. 9, 588c7—10.

As is now documented by Slings’ posthumously published Critical Notes on Plato’s Politeia (Leiden: Brill, 2005), he was initially planning to print the accusative (see p. 71), but changed his mind when I called his attention to the strength of the case for reading the genitive instead (additional note on 439b3—5, p. 191). This conversation occurred in the spring of 2000, when Siem Slings was Donald Russell’s guest at High Table at St. John’s College, Oxford, where at the time I held a Junior Research Fellowship. (Added November 1, 2005.)