360 BC
THE REPUBLIC
by Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
THE INTRODUCTION
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 humor 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 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, although
he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own writings.
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.
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, 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 sympathizing with
the struggle for Hellenic independence, singing a hymn of
triumph over
Marathon and Salamis, perhaps making the reflection of
Herodotus 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.
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 recognized, 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 un 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" 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.
ARGUMENT
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 would
quickly degenerate. To the perfect ideal succeeds the government of
the soldier and the lover of honor, 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. ...
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