The Republic
by Plato
- Pages
- about 700
- Category
- Philosophy
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 13 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
(1) The affected ignorance of music, which is Plato’s way of expressing
that he is passing lightly over the subject.
(2) The tentative manner in which here, as in the second book, he
proceeds with the construction of the State.
(3) The description of the State sometimes as a reality, and then again
as a work of imagination only; these are the arts by which he sustains
the reader’s interest.
(4) Connecting links, or the preparation for the entire expulsion of
the poets in Book X.
(5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the
valetudinarian, the satirical jest about the maxim of Phocylides, the
manner in which the image of the gold and silver citizens is taken up
into the subject, and the argument from the practice of Asclepius,
should not escape notice.
BOOK IV. Adeimantus said: ‘Suppose a person to argue, Socrates, that
you make your citizens miserable, and this by their own free-will; they
are the lords of the city, and yet instead of having, like other men,
lands and houses and money of their own, they live as mercenaries and
are always mounting guard.’ You may add, I replied, that they receive
no pay but only their food, and have no money to spend on a journey or
a mistress. ‘Well, and what answer do you give?’ My answer is, that our
guardians may or may not be the happiest of men,—I should not be
surprised to find in the long-run that they were,—but this is not the
aim of our constitution, which was designed for the good of the whole
and not of any one part. If I went to a sculptor and blamed him for
having painted the eye, which is the noblest feature of the face, not
purple but black, he would reply: ‘The eye must be an eye, and you
should look at the statue as a whole.’
A short sample. Read the whole book
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