Republic (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Plato Read Free Book Online Page B

book divisions, they are retained for the sake of convenience.
    Again, the date of Republic’s composition is a matter of conjecture. Some scholars argue that it was actually composed in stages, on the grounds that the current text imperfectly marries two (or more) “dramatic” conceptions. Although the physical setting is certain (the house of the metic Polemarchus in Piraeus), there is much disagreement over the dramatic date. Debra Nails (The People of Plato, pp. 324—326) compellingly summarizes the evidence for viewing the current text of Republic as a combination of and expansion upon two earlier works: first, an inconclusive (“aporetic”) Thrasymachus or On Justice, similar to Gorgias and Protagoras and set in the 420s B.C.E., which would have supplied the basis for what is now called book 1, and second, an Ideal State, which would have been the foundation for what is currently in books 2-5. If the latter composition featured Plato’s older brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus as interlocutors, it would have been set in or after 411. This analysis comfortably accounts for the many anachronisms that arise if one attempts, as some critics do, to fix the dramatic date of Republic in a particular year such as 411 or 410, and it also permits some reconciliation with the apparent reference to the discussion of Republic as “yesterday‘s” conversation in Timaeus 17a-19e, which seems to be set in the 420s.
    The text that we now possess surely could have been composed in more than one stage. Yet, since anachronisms are present in dialogues that have readily identifiable dramatic dates, the obligation to explain away Republic’s anachronisms by means of theories concerning its composition is less than pressing. Awkward anachronisms and all, Republic is a unified work with a logical and elegant organization, to which we will now direct our attention.
    Socrates himself is the narrator of Republic, in which he tells an unknown audience about a conversation that took place “yesterday.” His main interlocutors, from book 2 on, are Glaucon and Adeimantus. His host Polemarchus and Polemarchus’ aged father, Cephalus, are instrumental in getting the conversation going, and the aggressive challenge posed by the rhetorician Thrasymachus in the second part of book 1 is what determines the dialogue’s main interests.
    Other men are present in the dialogue: Polemarchus’ half-brother Lysias, a professional speech writer who is discussed in Phaedrus and whose works still survive; another half-brother, Euthydemus; a man named Charmantides, who could be either an elderly man from the rural Attic deme of Paeania or his grandson; and Niceratus, the son of the well-respected political leader and strategos Nicias. These four men are silent witnesses to the conversation, as are the nameless “others” mentioned in 1.327c. Aside from the slave who calls upon Socrates and Glaucon in the first paragraph of book 1, the only other speaker is Cleitophon, an Athenian politician who briefly comes to Thrasymachus’ aid at 1.340b-c.
    We do not know much about Glaucon and Adeimantus aside from what Plato shows us. They participated in a battle at Megara, to which Socrates refers at 2.368a. If this was the battle of 409 B.C.E., they could have been only a few years older than Plato, which is the estimate of most scholars; if it was an earlier battle in 424, they would have been much older. Adeimantus, along with Plato, apparently attended Socrates’ trial (Apology 34a), and both he and Glaucon appear on close terms with Socrates in Republic. Cephalus hailed originally from Syracuse on Sicily, and he and his sons were wealthy, well-established foreign residents in Athens. Represented by Plato as an old man, Cephalus was almost certainly dead by 411. Republic’s original readers would have also known that the Thirty Tyrants had Polemarchus executed in 404 so as to seize his property, and this fact puts Thrasymachus’ passionate glamorization of