The Republic
Plato
The Republic
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Socrates is asked whether a just man is happier than an unjust one and answers by building a city in conversation, on the grounds that justice will be easier to see written large. The argument runs through education, poetry, property, the rule of philosophers, the famous cave and the fate of every kind of constitution.
About the book
Written around 375 BC, the Republic begins at a house in the Piraeus with a simple question — is the just man happier than the unjust? — and Thrasymachus’s answer that justice is merely whatever suits the strong. Socrates proposes to look for justice in a city first, on the grounds that it will be written larger there, and the dialogue then builds one: its classes, its education, its censorship of poetry, its philosopher-rulers, its guardians who hold property and families in common. The middle books contain the images everyone knows — the sun, the divided line, and the cave in which prisoners take shadows for the world and turn on anyone who goes out and comes back. The last books work down through the degenerate constitutions to tyranny, and return to the man. It is the foundational work of Western political philosophy and the one that has been argued with hardest.
Characters
Socrates — Narrator
Who tells the whole dialogue the next day, and builds the city in speech by asking the questions.
Thrasymachus — Sophist
Who breaks in to say justice is the advantage of the stronger, and is not really answered for ten books.
Glaucon — Interlocutor
Plato’s brother, who restates the case against justice better than its enemies and demands a real reply.
Adeimantus — Interlocutor
Plato’s other brother, pressing the practical objections about education, poetry and what people actually praise.
Polemarchus — Host
In whose house the conversation happens, and whose definition of justice as helping friends goes first.
Cephalus — Elder
Polemarchus’s elderly father, who opens the conversation on old age and leaves to attend a sacrifice.
About the author
Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was an Athenian philosopher, a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, and he founded the Academy — arguably the first university in the West, and one that ran for nearly three centuries. He never writes in his own voice: the thirty-odd dialogues that survive are arguments between named Athenians, usually with Socrates in the middle asking the questions. The execution of Socrates by the city in 399 BC is the event behind all of them. The Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedo and the Apology are the most read.