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The article places the excerpt from Plato’s Republic in Nag Hammadi codex 6 in the context of Clement’s polemic with the Christian Platonists Carpocrates and his son Epiphanes. It proposes that the origin of the excerpt goes back to the 2nd-century effort to assimilate Platonic ideas about the human soul into Christian ethics. It focuses on the possibility that Christians with Platonic tendencies were exploring the nature and power of human passions and considering how they could be controlled. The place of the excerpt in the Nag Hammadi collection is not coincidental but agrees with other mythological and didactic treatises present there. The community which used it, and possibly other documents as well, might have lived on the margin of the emerging Coptic monastic network.