The Republic, the greatest as well as the longest of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, cannot be dated accurately, but we can guess that Plato wrote it during his middle years. It retains the freshness and charm of his earliest writings but at the same time reveals a profundity of philosophical thought that is characteristic of his later works.
Like all of the Platonic dialogues, but especially the early ones, Republic is both a dramatic and a philosophical work. It is written in the form of an account by Socrates, Plato’s teacher, of a long conversation that had occurred on the previous day, involving a number of different people of varying opinions, and also involving some very heated interchanges. Socrates had been the main speaker.
The subject of the dialogue is justice, the search for which had obsessed Socrates for years. What does justice mean? Can it be shown that justice is always a good and injustice always an evil, apart from any consideration of consequences? Socrates maintains that this can be done. The Republic is Plato’s attempt to do it.
In the dialogue, Socrates first describes a conversation with Cephalus, an elderly rich man of Athens who has been Socrates’ friend for many years. Like so many others, Cephalus does not care to strive to understand justice. The next interlocutor is Thrasymachus, the Athenian general, who is certain he already understands it: justice is the interest of the strong. Might makes right, no bones about it. Socrates describes his spirited battle of wits with Thrasymachus, who retires from the fray disgruntled and unhappy.
Socrates is not happy either. He knows that making your opponent look like a fool isn’t the best way to win an argument. Two young men, followers of Socrates, agree, and ask their master to take the time and make the effort to instruct them in the meaning of justice. I will do so, Socrates says, if you will help me, and the search begins.
It ranges far and digs deep. Plato has Socrates concede from the start that justice is a hard idea to understand in the life of a man—so hard he proposes to magnify it, as it were, and view it in the context of a state. A state is good, he finds—that is, just—when every member of it takes his rightful and proper place within it and performs his rightful and proper role. Those who are naturally laborers and merchants take those jobs, those who are naturally soldiers find themselves guarding the state, and the most competent and intelligent of all are rulers. When philosophers are kings, Socrates says to Glaucon and Adeimantus, and kings philosophers, then and then only will states be truly just. Once this conclusion is reached it is applied to individuals. The three types of citizens correspond to three parts of the soul, and only when a man is ruled by his intellectual part, with his appetitive and spirited parts playing their necessary but subservient roles, can he be said to be just.
The conversation, which occupied an entire day and the account of which fills three hundred pages, covers many subjects. Two of them are the system of education to be developed in the ideal state—the “republic” of the title—and the place of artistic productions, notably music and theater, in such a state. Socrates’—or Plato’s—ideas about education are both radical and modern. Plato held, for example, that education should be the leading concern of the state, that it should be provided free to all, and among the “all” he included girls and women, maintaining that there should be no difference between their education and that of boys and men. He was the first serious thinker in human history to take this position and one of the very few to take it before modern times.
Regarding the place of art in a just society Plato was not nearly so modern; in fact he proposed, and seems to have believed, that works of imaginative artistry—poems, songs, plays, and so forth—should be banned altogether as being essentially subversive of the state’s true health. Plato left a loophole in this severe position, and Aristotle took advantage of it in his Poetics. It is an interesting, if not a pleasant, theory nevertheless.
The English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once said that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” He could have said footnotes to the Republic, for almost all of Plato’s ideas are at least touched upon in this dialogue. Plato puts these ideas in the mouth of Socrates, of course. The real Socrates, on the other hand, may have been the source, or at least the inspiration, of the dialogue’s most potent images. No reader who has seriously read this greatest of philosophical books will ever forget the story of the Cave, the account of the Divided Line of knowledge, or Socrates’ retelling of the Myth of Er, which closes the dialogue. These and other moments are wonderfully dramatic whether or not they are also profoundly true. (I think the myth of the cave, when properly understood, is true.)
The Republic of Plato is far from a mere entertainment for an evening. Purchase or borrow a good translation (I suggest that of F.M. Cornford, with copious notes), block out a period of some consecutive days—ten or more would not be too many—accept no engagements of any sort, prepare a quiet space with a table close by with paper and pencils on it (for your own inevitable notes), and begin the incomparable journey. Everyone who counts for anything has taken it, and in twenty-five hundred years very few, I believe, who have seriously made the effort have been other than glad they did.
Every one of Plato’s dialogues is a human drama as well as an intellectual discourse, but none is more entertaining than the Symposium, or banquet. Here is what happens on that night when there occurred one of the most famous dinner parties ever held.
The company is large and all male. Some twenty men sit, or rather recline, on couches, around a long, low table. Socrates was not among those originally invited, but he is brought by another guest and warmly welcomed by the host, Agathon, who the day before has won the prize for his first tragedy; the party is in celebration of the victory. The first question asked by the host is whether the company shall drink hard or not. The majority say not, which opens the way for rational discourse unspoiled by drunkenness, and the female flute players, whose activities would also spoil rational discourse, are sent away. A subject is chosen, and it is decided that each guest shall speak in turn, going around the table and ending with Socrates, who all agree is the best speaker.
The subject is love. Fine speeches are made about it, but all are rather solemn until that of Aristophanes, the comic poet. To explain the power of love, Aristophanes says that once upon a time we were not divided into two sexes but instead were wholes, with both sexes in one person; round creatures, we rolled from place to place and were contented with our lot. But the gods, to punish us for some transgression, split us in half and now we go through the world seeking our other half and are not happy until we have found him or her. “A likely story!” the other guests cry. Aristophanes smiles, knowing full well that his tale is worth a dozen of their speeches.