Plato treats personal enmity as more central than war-derived enmity

Evidence

In a rare discussion ,of the Greek terms for “enemy” in Plato, Leon Harold Craig notes the inverse disproportion of space dedicated to war and peace in the Republic (war largely dominates), versus the “hundreds of references to the several species oflove, and the scant dozens to any kind of hate.” Craig also remarks that, “of the available range of everyday terms for hating and loathing, the philosopher declines to use several (e.g., stygein, apoptiein, echthairein) and restricts himself to two families of words.” This lexical singularity should already displace the question of affect and its relation to enmity. Craig goes on to write that “one term for hatred, echthra, appears most frequently as a kind of enemy (echthros). In fact, there are more references to echthroi (thirty-eight) than to polemioi (the term for ‘enemies’ derived from the word for ‘war’, polemos, and employed twenty-three times)” (Craig, The Wtzr Lover, 55). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1001

Categorization

• XREF: Counts of Greek enemy-terms in Plato connect to linguistic analysis of how conceptual categories (enemy vs. foe, love vs. hate) are coded into vocabulary — parallels the kind of lexical investigation done on terms like ‘sacrifice’ or ‘enemy’ elsewhere.
• QUESTION: Why did Plato restrict himself to two families of hate-words and neglect stygein, apoptein, echthairein — what lexical or conceptual line does that reflect?
• SHARE: A classicist or Plato scholar would find the echthroi/polemioi count (38 vs 23) and the lexical-restriction observation genuinely nerd-worthy.
• DEFINE: Distinguishes echthros (personal enemy, from hatred) from polemios (war-enemy, from polemos) — a key definitional distinction for the whole book’s argument that the enemy must be addressed apart from war.