The Republic

The Republic is Plato’s dialogue on justice, written around 375 BC. It asks what justice is, and whether a just person is happier than an unjust one. To answer, its speakers imagine an entire city, because justice may be easier to see written large in a state than in a single soul. This Atlas Media edition uses Benjamin Jowett’s English translation, based largely on his revised third edition of 1888.

The dialogue begins at the port of Piraeus, where Socrates is persuaded to join a gathering at the house of Cephalus. The old man suggests that justice means telling the truth and paying what one owes. Socrates finds exceptions at once. His son Polemarchus proposes helping friends and harming enemies, and the sophist Thrasymachus argues that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger.

In Book II, Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus press the challenge harder. Glaucon tells the story of the ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible, and asks whether anyone with such power would stay just. If justice is good only for its rewards, why not merely seem just? Socrates sets out to show that justice is good in itself.

To do so he builds a city in words. It begins with simple needs and grows into a state with three classes: producers, auxiliaries who defend the city, and guardians who rule. The guardians’ education in music, poetry and physical training is examined in detail, including which stories should be told to the young. A founding myth, the “noble lie” of gold, silver and bronze souls, is proposed to persuade citizens to accept their places.

In Book IV the city’s justice is found to be each class doing its own work. The same pattern is traced in the individual soul, which has reason, spirit and appetite. A just person is one whose reason, supported by spirit, governs desire.

Books V to VII contain the work’s most famous and controversial proposals. The guardians are to hold property in common, and women of suitable nature may serve as guardians alongside men. Socrates then argues that cities will know no rest from trouble until philosophers rule or rulers become philosophers. To explain what the philosopher knows, he offers the images of the sun, the divided line and the cave, in which prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for reality until one is freed and climbs toward the light.

Books VIII and IX describe how a good city decays, through timocracy, oligarchy and democracy into tyranny, with a matching type of person at each stage. The tyrant, apparently the freest of men, is shown to be the most enslaved to his desires.

Book X returns to poetry, criticising imitation, and closes with the Myth of Er, the story of a soldier who returns from death to describe how souls choose their next lives.