I Have Some Questions

On the first page of his essay “On Plato’s Republic” in The City And Man, Leo Strauss makes the following claim:

As long as we do not know [why Plato uses several different spokesmen in his dialogues], we do not know what it means to be spokesman for Plato; we do not even know whether there is such a thing as a spokesman for Plato. But this is still sillier [than something else he had said earlier]: every child knows that the spokesman par excellence of Plato is his revered teacher or friend Socrates to whom he entrusted his own teaching fully or in part.

So here’s what I want to know:

1. Is this actually true? I would like to conduct an experiment, but I do not have any children. I need your help. If you have a child, please summon him or her to your side and say, “Dear child, who is the spokesman par excellence of Plato?” And then inform me of his or her response.
1. Incentive to participate: If in fact any child does respond, “his revered teacher or friend Socrates to whom he entrusted his own teaching fully or in part, Mom!,” I will eat my copy of the Republic, including the notes and Allan Bloom’s interpretive essay. It is five hundred and twelve pages long.

2. What do you think are the odds that Leo Strauss ever actually met any children?

I took myself out for breakfast on my birthday. I have friends, I promise, but this kind of stuff is fun for introverts! I left my schoolwork in the car, sipped coffee, ate slowly, read a fun book, and didn’t have to do the dishes. Bliss.

You should have heard Arwen laughing at me when I described the book and then she realized that it wasn’t for class. Maybe it sort of explains why, when I told her I had a chocolate chip pancake for breakfast, she thought I said I had “a talk with a pancake.” I am the kind of person for whom books about socioeconomic stratification in America qualify as recreational reading. Conversations with breakfast food probably aren’t that far off.