Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the ‘Satires,’ a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ or ‘Who will watch the watchmen?”.
The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though the phrase is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the ‘Republic.’ It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works.
In Juvenal’s poem, the phrase refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behavior on women when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible. In its modern usage, it has wide-reaching applications to concepts such as tyrannical governments, uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, and police or judicial corruption and overreach. The phrase is used generally to consider the embodiment of the philosophical question as to how power can be held to account. It is sometimes incorrectly attributed as a direct quotation from Plato’s ‘Republic’ in both popular media and academic contexts. There is no exact parallel in the ‘Republic,’ but it is used by modern authors to express Socrates’ concerns about the guardians, the solution to which is to properly train their souls.
Socrates proposed a guardian class to protect that society, and the custodes (watchmen) from the ‘Satires’ are often interpreted as being parallel to the Platonic guardians (‘phylakes’). Socrates’s answer to the problem is, in essence, that the guardians will be manipulated to guard themselves against themselves via a deception often called the ‘noble lie.’ As Leonid Hurwicz pointed out in his 2007 lecture on accepting the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, one of Socrates’s interlocutors in the Republic, Glaucon, even goes so far as to say ‘it would be absurd that a guardian should need a guard.’ Which is to say, this issue was recognized even within the original text of Plato’s Republic, and it succinctly captures the dilemma of creating a system to oversee those in power, an idea of interest to Hurwicz due to his work in game theory.
The issue of the accountability of political power, traced back to different passages of the Old and New Testaments, received great attention in medieval and early modern Christian thought, especially in connection with the exercise of authority in the Church and in church-state relations. In the Protestant tradition it also animated the debate about who was to be the final arbiter in the interpretation of the Scriptures.
In his 2013 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, the United Nations Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, elucidated Juvenal’s continued relevance: ‘Crucial remains the conviction that the government should serve the people and that its powers must be circumscribed by a Constitution and the rule of law. Juvenal’s question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guardians?) remains a central concern of democracy, since the people must always watch over the constitutional behaviour of the leaders and impeach them if they act in contravention of their duties. Constitutional courts must fulfil this need and civil society should show solidarity with human rights defenders and whistleblowers who, far from being unpatriotic, perform a democratic service to their countries and the world.’
The Daily Omnivore 
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