The Republic
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THE REPUBLIC
By Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Note: See also “The Republic” by Plato, Jowett, eBook #150
Contents
INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
THE REPUBLIC.
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE.
BOOK I.
BOOK II.
BOOK III.
BOOK IV.
BOOK V.
BOOK VI.
BOOK VII.
BOOK VIII.
BOOK IX.
BOOK X.
INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
The Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of
the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer
approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist;
the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of
the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the
Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other
Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same
perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or
contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and not
of one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony or
a greater wealth of humour or imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in
any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave life and
speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. The Republic is
the centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here
philosophy reaches the highest point (cp, especially in Books V, VI,
VII) to which ancient thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks,
like Bacon among the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of
knowledge, although neither of them always distinguished the bare
outline or form from the substance of truth; and both of them had to be
content with an abstraction of science which was not yet realized. He
was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in
him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future
knowledge are contained. The sciences of logic and psychology, which
have supplied so many instruments of thought to after-ages, are based
upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition,
the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the
distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion,
between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the
division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible
elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and
unnecessary—these and other great forms of thought are all of them to
be found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato.
The greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers on
philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference between words and
things, has been most strenuously insisted on by him (cp. Rep.; Polit.;
Cratyl. 435, 436 ff), although he has not always avoided the confusion
of them in his own writings (e.g. Rep.). But he does not bind up truth
in logical formulae,—logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and the
science which he imagines to ‘contemplate all truth and all existence’
is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism which Aristotle claims to
have discovered (Soph. Elenchi, 33. 18).
Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a
still larger design which was to have included an ideal history of
Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy. The fragment of
the Critias has given birth to a world-famous fiction, second only in
importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is said as
a fact to have inspired some of the early navigators of the sixteenth
century. This mythical tale, of which the subject was a history of the
wars of the Athenians against the Island of Atlantis, is supposed to be
founded upon an unfinished poem of Solon, to which it would have stood
in the same relation as the writings of the logographers to the poems
of Homer. It would have told of a struggle for Liberty (cp. Tim. 25 C),
intended to represent the conflict of Persia and Hellas. We may judge
from the noble commencement of the Timaeus, from the fragment of the
Critias itself, and from the third book of the Laws, in what manner
Plato would have treated this high argument. We can only guess why the
great design was abandoned; perhaps because Plato became sensible of
some incongruity in a fictitious history, or because he had lost his
interest in it, or because advancing years forbade the completion of
it; and we may please ourselves with the fancy that had this imaginary
narrative ever been finished, we should have found Plato himself
sympathising with the struggle for Hellenic independence (cp. Laws,
iii. 698 ff.), singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis,
perhaps making the reflection of Herodotus (v. 78) where he
contemplates the growth of the Athenian empire—‘How brave a thing is
freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every
other state of Hellas in greatness!’ or, more probably, attributing the
victory to the ancient good order of Athens and to the favor of Apollo
and Athene (cp. Introd. to Critias).
Again, Plato may be regarded as the ‘captain’ (‘arhchegoz’) or leader
of a goodly band of followers; for in the Republic is to be found the
original of Cicero’s De Republica, of St. Augustine’s City of God, of
the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary
States which are framed upon the same model. The extent to which
Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the
Politics has been little recognised, and the recognition is the more
necessary because it is not made by Aristotle himself. The two
philosophers had more in common than they were conscious of; and
probably some elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle.
In English philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only in
the works of the Cambridge Platonists, but in great original writers
like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas. That there is a
truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears witness to
herself, is a conviction which in our own generation has been
enthusiastically asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground. Of the Greek
authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato
has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato is also the first
treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke,
Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants. Like
Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is
profoundly impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church
he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the Revival of
Literature on politics. Even the fragments of his words when ‘repeated
at second-hand’ (Symp. 215 D) have in all ages ravished the hearts of
men, who have seen reflected in them their own higher nature. He is the
father of idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature. And many
of the latest conceptions of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the
unity of knowledge, the reign of law, and the equality of the sexes,
have been anticipated in a dream by him.
The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the nature of
which is first hinted at by Cephalus, the just and blameless old
man—then discussed on the basis of proverbial morality by Socrates and
Polemarchus—then caricatured by Thrasymachus and partially explained by
Socrates—reduced to an abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus, and
having become invisible in the individual reappears at length in the
ideal State which is constructed by Socrates. The first care of the
rulers is to be education, of which an outline is drawn after the old
Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and morality,
and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, a manlier strain of poetry,
and greater harmony of the individual and the State. We are thus led on
to the conception of a higher State, in which ‘no man calls anything
his own,’ and in which there is neither ‘marrying nor giving in
marriage,’ and ‘kings are philosophers’ and ‘philosophers are kings;’
and there is another and higher education, intellectual as well as
moral and religious, of science as well as of art, and not of youth
only but of the whole of life. Such a State is hardly to be realized in
this world and quickly degenerates. To the perfect ideal succeeds the
government of the soldier and the lover of honour, this again declining
into democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but regular
order having not much resemblance to the actual facts. When ‘the wheel
has come full circle’ we do not begin again with a new period of human
life; but we have passed from the best to the worst, and there we end.
The subject is then changed and the old quarrel of poetry and
philosophy which had been more lightly treated in the earlier books of
the Republic is now resumed and fought out to a conclusion. Poetry is
discovered to be an imitation thrice removed from the truth, and Homer,
as well as the dramatic poets, having been condemned as an imitator, is
sent into banishment along with them. And the idea of the State is
supplemented by the revelation of a future life.
The division into books, like all similar divisions (Cp. Sir G.C. Lewis
in the Classical Museum, vol. ii. p 1.), is probably later than the age
of Plato. The natural divisions are five in number;—(1) Book I and the
first half of Book II down to the paragraph beginning, ‘I had always
admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus,’ which is introductory;
the first book containing a refutation of the popular and sophistical
notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues,
without arriving at any definite result. To this is appended a
restatement of the nature of justice according to common opinion, and
an answer is demanded to the question—What is justice, stripped of
appearances? The second division (2) includes the remainder of the
second and the whole of the third and fourth books, which are mainly
occupied with the construction of the first State and the first
education. The third division (3) consists of the fifth, sixth, and
seventh books, in which philosophy rather than justice is the subject
of enquiry, and the second State is constructed on principles of
communism and ruled by philosophers, and the contemplation of the idea
of good takes the place of the social and political virtues. In the
eighth and ninth books (4) the perversions of States and of the
individuals who correspond to them are reviewed in succession; and the
nature of pleasure and the principle of tyranny are further analysed in
the individual man. The tenth book (5) is the conclusion of the whole,
in which the relations of philosophy to poetry are finally determined,
and the happiness of the citizens in this life, which has now been
assured, is crowned by the vision of another.
Or a more general division into two parts may be adopted; the first
(Books I - IV) containing the description of a State framed generally
in accordance with Hellenic notions of religion and morality, while in
the second (Books V - X) the Hellenic State is transformed into an
ideal kingdom of philosophy, of which all other governments are the
perversions. These two points of view are really opposed, and the
opposition is only veiled by the genius of Plato. The Republic, like
the Phaedrus (see Introduction to Phaedrus), is an imperfect whole; the
higher light of philosophy breaks through the regularity of the
Hellenic temple, which at last fades away into the heavens. Whether
this imperfection of structure arises from an enlargement of the plan;
or from the imperfect reconcilement in the writer’s own mind of the
struggling elements of thought which are now first brought together by