on Lydias teasers:

I will write in male pronomina exclusively, if I don't talk about females specifically.I know this is not politically correct, but I also think that Plato would have laughed his ass if anybody would have suggested PC to him. But see under 'justice'

Things to think about:
Consider these questions both for life now and for life in ancient Greece?
Is old age a good or bad time of life?

the answer is a clear: It depends. And it does depend on both, thelife lived up to the time and the outlook on the rest of the live. And this is of course not a specific problem of old age. At least not in modern time. But even in Ancient Times, people died young, elder, old and very old.
So we may state that not having dies young or in middle age should be some kind of joy for the aged person. However some heroes choose fame over long live. Being physically on the downward street is a hard experience for people used to the notion of being strong.
Aged people are wiser generally, namely when they have succeeded to learn by their mistakes and those being comitted by others. Thius should also lead to a positive lookout, shouldn't it? Of course if one sees that people generally don't learn from history it can turn into bleakness also.
So every coin has two sides.

How should you act to make old age seem good?
First one needs to concentrate on the points one have become stronger, such as wisdom. And one has to take the right stand on topics as physical strength and beauty. Thos ewishing to be like the eternal (beautiful?) Gods won't have a positive attitude towards aging. Those who are open to make the best out of every condition will of course lead a happier life.

How important is wealth?
Wealth is quite agreeable as Plato also suggests, but then wealth can't buy you everything. And wealth may become a burden if the thoughts circle around maximizing wealth exclusively. One has to consider that nobody has taken anything with him. And here I deviate I strongly support Diogenes, that he is wealthy who doesn't need anything.

Can it make you virtuous?
We have of course the problem of definition. What is virtue afer all? I personnally am convinced that wisdom will create virtue, as will strong dependence on God.
Virtue comes more or less automatically when one does not concentrate on the personal adavntage at every point.

What is justice?
Ideally ( and not described here by Plato) justice is that everybody gets what he has earned. Or alternatively : That everybody gives as much as he can and hgets as much as he needs.

This sounds very idealistic and is of course not to be fulfilled by humans, just because we don't know and people have both the ability to lie and the tendency to perceive situations very self-centered.So people may overestimate both what they are contributing and what their needs are.

We are on the point to ask how can human jsutice look like and we will meet some answers in the next few books of the republic.

One aspect of justice is of course to treat all humasn equal. That would in the first point mean man and woman,and here we run into linguistic problems immidiately. Our language (and I talk abiout English here abut it is the same with most other European languages) treats men and women differently, and in English Man stands for mankind. And if we talk about humasn people expect that we are talking about animals also. We can't write good or just acceptable style when always refferering to male and female pronomina, thus women are treated often as less important if we look at this. However if we see this we can introduce new ways also in language, but it will take some generations for those to become standard.



Is a just or unjust man happier?
Is it better to be just or unjust?

those I won't answer just now, given that my text has become very long already and I have not adressed all aspect I would have wanted to.