Classical Greece, 4th century BCE

Republic

Name: Republic
Author: Plato

Plato's dialogue on justice in the soul and the city — the central inquiry in classical political philosophy, traditionally dated to the middle period of his writing.

By Plato · traditionally dated mid-4th century BCE

What it is

The Republic is the longest and most ambitious of Plato's dialogues. It is divided into ten books and is set as a conversation in the house of Cephalus in the Piraeus, the port of Athens. The principal speaker is Socrates; the principal interlocutors are Plato's brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, after the opening exchanges with Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus.

The work is conventionally treated as belonging to Plato's "middle period" of writing. As with most of the dialogues, an exact date of composition cannot be fixed.

What it argues

The dialogue opens as an inquiry into justice (dikaiosynē) — what it is, and whether it is choice-worthy for its own sake. The argument proceeds by analogy: to read justice in the individual soul, the speakers propose, look first at justice in the larger letters of the city. The conversation then constructs, in speech, a city designed to make justice visible, and uses that construction to draw a picture of the well-ordered soul as a structured arrangement of reason, spirit and appetite.

Among the threads the Republic has handed on to the later tradition are the proposal of philosophic rulers, the division of the soul, the account of the regime-types and their decay, the analogy of the Sun, the Divided Line and the allegory of the Cave (Books VI–VII), the critique of the poets, and the closing myth of Er. None of these is a self-contained doctrine; each is part of the dialogue's larger argument about how a life and a polity can be ordered toward the good.

Why it matters for Virtue & Power

The Republic sets a great deal of the platform's agenda. It is the central classical text on the relation between virtue and the political order, between the philosopher and the city, between the shape of a person's soul and the shape of the regime they live under. The questions it presses — what justice is, who should rule, whether the good life and the just life are the same life — are not behind us.

Citing the Republic

The Republic is cited by Stephanus pages, the page-and-letter scheme established by Henri Estienne's 1578 Geneva edition (e.g. the Allegory of the Cave begins at 514a). The standard critical Greek text remains John Burnet's Platonis Opera. See our Sources page for the editions and archives we work from.

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