The Republic

Contents

1. I Book I 1 h 21 min 23

   Socrates, returning from a festival at the Piraeus, is detained at the house of the rich old metic Cephalus. Asked about old age and wealth, Cephalus suggests that justice means telling the truth and paying one’s debts; Socrates refutes this, and then Polemarchus’ version, that justice is helping friends and harming enemies. Thrasymachus bursts in to declare that justice is the interest of the stronger, and that injustice on a grand scale brings power and happiness. Socrates argues that every true art serves its subject, that injustice destroys common action, and that the just soul lives well, but ends admitting he still does not know what justice is.

2. II Book II 1 h 15 min 30

   Glaucon and Adeimantus revive Thrasymachus’ case: justice is a compromise of the weak, the ring of Gyges shows anyone would be unjust with impunity, and poets and parents praise justice only for its rewards. They ask Socrates to show that justice is good in itself. He proposes to look for it first in a city. The city arises from need and the division of labour; Glaucon rejects the simple “city of pigs”, and the luxurious city that follows needs land, war and a class of guardians. Their education begins with the censorship of stories about the gods, who must be shown as good, unchanging and truthful.

3. III Book III 1 h 31 min 56

   Socrates continues the guardians’ education. Poetry must not make death fearful, show heroes lamenting or gods laughing, or encourage disobedience and greed; only the rulers may lie, for the public good. Imitation is restricted, and the versatile poet is honourably sent away. Music is limited to the Dorian and Phrygian modes and simple rhythms, and gymnastic to a plain soldier’s regimen; medicine and law should serve only the curable. The rulers are chosen from the guardians by lifelong tests, and a “royal lie” teaches that citizens are born of the earth with gold, silver or bronze and iron in them. The guardians live in common, without property or gold.

4. IV Book IV 1 h 15 min 18

   Adeimantus objects that the propertyless guardians are made unhappy; Socrates replies that the city aims at the happiness of the whole. The guardians must keep out wealth and poverty, preserve education in music and gymnastic without innovation, and leave petty legislation to good character and religion to Delphi. Socrates finds the four virtues in the city: wisdom in the rulers, courage in the soldiers, temperance in agreement about who should rule, and justice in each class doing its own work. Arguing from inner conflict, he divides the soul into reason, spirit and appetite, defines the virtues in the individual, and calls justice the health of the soul.

5. V Book V 1 h 30 min 23

   About to describe the corrupt constitutions, Socrates is made to explain the community of women and children, and faces three “waves”. First, women of the guardian class are to share men’s education, military service and offices, since sex does not affect capacity for the work. Second, the guardians are to have no private families: the rulers arrange unions, rear children in common and conceal parentage, so that all say “mine” of the same things. Rules of war among Greeks follow. Third, the city is possible only if philosophers rule, and philosophers are defined as lovers of the Forms who have knowledge, not opinion.

6. VI Book VI 1 h 17 min 17

   Socrates sets out the philosophic nature and meets Adeimantus’ objection that philosophers are useless or wicked. The parable of the ship blames their uselessness on cities that will not use them; their corruption he blames on the crowd, the greatest sophist, and on unworthy men from the trades who take up philosophy. A small remnant survives, and no existing state suits it, but rule by philosophers is not impossible. The rulers must reach the highest study, the Form of the Good, which Socrates describes only through images: the sun and the divided line.

7. VII Book VII 1 h 14 min 15

   Socrates gives the allegory of the cave: prisoners who see only shadows, one freed and dragged up to the sun, and his return, mocked and threatened by those below. The ascent is education, the turning of the soul toward the Good, and the philosophers who make it must be compelled to go back and rule. Their training is set out: arithmetic, plane and solid geometry, astronomy and harmonics, studied for their power to draw the mind toward being, then dialectic, the coping-stone. A timetable of selection runs to the vision of the Good at fifty, for women as for men.

8. VIII Book VIII 1 h 14 min 22

   Socrates returns to the four corrupt constitutions and their matching characters. Discord among the rulers, begun by a failure to time the guardians’ births, turns aristocracy into timocracy, the Spartan rule of honour. Private hoarding brings oligarchy, rule by a property census, which splits the city into rich and poor and creates drones and paupers. The poor overthrow it and found democracy, free, various and disorderly; its insatiable thirst for freedom breeds a popular champion who asks for a bodyguard, turns on his supporters, and becomes a tyrant. Each type of man is traced from father to son.

9. IX Book IX 59 min 12

   Socrates describes the tyrannical man, ruled by a master passion that releases desires others indulge only in dreams. Such a man, if he becomes an actual tyrant, is the most enslaved, fearful and miserable of all, like a slaveholder carried off alone among his slaves. Three proofs follow that the just man is happiest: the comparison of constitutions, the judgement of the philosopher who alone has tasted every pleasure, and the argument that only the pleasures of wisdom are true. The king lives 729 times more pleasantly than the tyrant. An image of the soul as man, lion and many-headed beast closes the case.

10. X Book X 1 h 15 min 15

    Socrates returns to poetry. Using the theory of Forms, he argues that the painter and the poet copy appearances at a third remove from truth, know nothing of what they imitate, and appeal to the irrational part of the soul; tragedy and comedy weaken even good people. Poetry may come back only if it can prove itself useful. He then argues that the soul is immortal, restores to justice its rewards in this life, and ends with the myth of Er: judgement after death, the spindle of Necessity, and the souls’ choice of their next lives.