Plato · c. 380 BCE · translated by Benjamin Jowett
Read The Republic with context
You can read the dialogue and save notes and quotes from it. The Republic begins with a question about justice and expands into a model city, a theory of education, a psychology of the soul, a critique of poetry, and the famous image of the cave. World Lit Reader can also place Plato beside later thinkers who inherit his idealism, rebel against his confidence in reason and fixed truth, or replace essences with experience, perspective, use, and historical change.
Key Reading Paths
- What is justice?: Socrates tests inherited definitions, friendly duties, truth-telling, debt, advantage, and the claim that justice serves power.
- Justice and power: Thrasymachus, tyranny, law, and the danger that political rule becomes organized advantage for the stronger.
- Education of the guardians: music, gymnastic, myth, courage, censorship, and the shaping of souls for public responsibility.
- Poetry under judgment: Plato's quarrel with Homer, imitation, emotional education, and the old question of whether art liberates or misleads.
- The cave and the sun: the movement from shadows to knowledge, the pain of education, and the obligation to return to the city.
- Philosopher-rulers: Plato's argument that political power and philosophical wisdom must be joined if the city is to become just.
- Democracy and tyranny: the sequence of political decline, from honor and wealth to freedom without measure and the rise of the tyrant.
- Soul and city: the analogy between a just city and a well-ordered person, with reason, spirit, appetite, harmony, and inner conflict.