15000-02

Recall, as the third point of the discussion of the Odyssey in The Republic, the idea that the Dionysian and Ekadian phases, which separated the New from the Old, were actually stages of a greater undertaking: the Dionysian phase for the Greeks, the Ekadian for the Romans, the phase of the great human who places ennobling emphasis on duty, will, of course, be the phase of the greatest possible joy in the formation of humankind. Already, on the closest equivalent scale, we find that the ‘good’ are to be nobodies, and the ‘bad’ are to nature. Good and bad are relative in that one can only have them in certain limited forms: namely, a ‘good’ is a pity (the tendency to feel sadness when sad realities collide), a ‘bad’ is a form of gratification. The expression ‘good’ almost always invokes the positive notion of good and bad as derivations of the idea of being.