 The life-style designated for the upper classes also seems open to objections. The soldiers’ musical and physical training is strictly regimented; they must take satisfaction in the obedience to the laws for the sake of preserving the city’s inner and outer peace, and in deeds of valor in war. Theirs is an austere camp-life; not all of them will be selected for higher education. But even the philosophers’ lives leave a lot to be desired, and not only because they have to starve their common human appetites and devote many years to administrative duties back in the ‘Cave’. Their intellectual pursuits are also not entirely enviable, as a closer inspection would show. Not only do the philosophers have two jobs – in violation of the rule ‘one person – one function’ – in that they are responsible for both administrative work and philosophical reflection: They are also not to enjoy open-ended research, but are rather subject to a mental training that is explicitly designed to turn their minds away from the enjoyment of all worldly beauty in order to focus exclusively on the contemplation of the Forms. This is indicated in the injunctions concerning the study of astronomy and harmonics (529a–531d). The students are not to crane their necks to watch the beauty of the “embroidery in the heavens”, but rather to concern themselves with the ideal motions of ideal moving bodies in a purely geometrical fashion, and they are not to listen to audible sounds, but to attend to the mathematics of harmonics. The universe is not treated as an admirable cosmos, with the explicit purpose of providing moral and intellectual support to the citizens, in the way Plato is going to state in the Timaeus and in the Laws. Given these limitations of the philosophers’ mental exercises in the Republic, the claim that their lives are 729 times more pleasant than the tyrants’ (IX 587e) seems like a gross exaggeration, even if they enjoy the pleasures of being filled with pure and unadulterated truths while everyone else enjoys only semblances of the really real (581e–588a).