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Classics
The Republic by Plato
In Classics, Hilarius Bogbinder reviews Plato’s Republic.
You may never have heard of Aristocles (428-347 BCE). Well, not under that name, anyway. But if you were reading the sports pages in the (non-existent) Greek newspapers of around 420 BCE, you would know as an eminent wrestler. Indeed, he won the Isthemian Games in this sport, and also had strong feelings about this particular martial art. Like many a purist (then as well as now), he was none too pleased with wrestling when it was all a show; he was also pretty old-school, and praised “the legitimate manoeuvres of regular wrestling – extricating the neck and hands and sides from entanglement” (Laws, 281). He returned to his sport later in life, once he had become an established writer, and he wasn’t a fan of the new, showier type of this most ancient of martial arts: introducing ‘boxing devices’ was ‘absolutely useless’; and such antics, the former champion fighter declared, “don’t merit the honour of being described” (Ibid).
The wrestler who wrote these comments was known for being exceptionally broad shouldered. The Greek word for ‘broad’ is platys – so, his contemporaries called him ‘Plato’, and that’s how we know him today.
Plato was many other things besides being sporty. Born into an aristocratic family, he harboured ambitions of becoming an author of the tragic plays of which the Greeks were so fond. Yet once he became as one of the most gifted writers of the philosophical canon, Plato did not have much time for comedians –perhaps because some of the comic playwrights of his time had mocked his beloved mentor Socrates. That great man was portrayed as a farting buffoon in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Perhaps then it was the mocking portrayal in plays that led Plato to denounce poets and playwrights in his magnum opus The Republic (c.375 BCE), and to suggest, rather illiberally, that “the only forms of poetry we are to allow to our [ideal] state are hymns to the gods” (Republic 607a). Plato was at least consistent in his intolerance: a biographical sketch of him reads that he ‘consigned his poems to the fire’ (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, Book III, 281).
The Greek title of The Republic is Politeia, which is more accurately, but less eloquently, translated as ‘The Conditions and Rights of Citizens’, or what the Romans would call civitas. But thanks to Cicero (106-43 BC), who idolised Plato, it has become known as The Republic. The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) famously wrote that “the safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, p.39, 1929). But he might have specified it even further, and said that Western philosophy is a series of responses to The Republic. Written in Plato’s so-called ‘middle-period’, after he had set up his famous Academy, the book covers ethics (‘How should one live?’), metaphysics (‘What is the world?’), and epistemology (‘How do we know?’) – in short, all the major fields of philosophy. Yet, as the title implies, the book, at least superficially, concerns the art of government. However, the ideal state, the kallipolis (kallos means ‘beautiful’ in Greek) the book depicts, only comes up as an illustration by Socrates within a longer discussion with Glaucon and Adeimantus (who in real life were Plato’s older brothers). And as much as subsequent writers have denounced Plato for being a totalitarian proto-fascist in The Republic – above all Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) – Socrates is vague as to whether he believed it actually feasible to implement his ideal, of a government of those who ‘love to observe the truth’ (Republic 475e).
Aristocles or ‘Plato’, by Ron Schepper
In The Republic, the model state is, so to say, the soul writ large. For Socrates, “everything to which a function is assigned has an excellence” (Republic 353b). This means that if each of the three parts of its soul (or mind) perform their function then the soul has aretê (excellence or virtue). To do this, the rational part of the mind – the logistikon – must steer the spirited part (thymoeides) and the desiring part (epithymetikon). Plato had originally developed this metaphor in his shorter dialogue Phaidros, where the soul was compared to a ‘winged charioteer’ (Phaidros 246b) which steered a pair of horses – one ‘of noble stock and the other the opposite in every way’ (246b). But in Politeia Plato elaborates, and suggests that these three parts are also found at the larger level in the ideal state. Thus, the logistikon is equivalent to its ‘philosopher kings’, and the spirited part synonymous with the guardians – the protectors of the state – who keep the lustful (‘desiring’) mob in place.
Controversially, Plato suggests that the mob must be kept ignorant, and that “our government will have to use frequent doses of lies and deception for the benefit of their subjects” (459d). (Plato uses the word pharmakon to imply that these lies are a necessary medicine) So far, so reactionary. Yet, progressively, the rulers who administer this golden lie ‘drug’ should be of both sexes: “There is no job among those who serve the state which is given to a woman because she is a woman, nor any to a man because he is a man; the natural aptitudes are distributed similarly between the two sexes.” (455d)
Some commentators believe that Plato’s journey to Syracuse to advise Dion, the brother-in-law of that city-state’s ruler, was an attempt to turn The Republic’s polity into reality. Certainly, as he wrote in the Seventh Letter, his pupil was “a more enthusiastic convert to my views than any young man I have ever met.” Yet the advice he gave Dion was rather different from that outlined in Politeia, and closer to that of Plato’s Statesman – namely, that “statesmanship is… management by consent” (Statesman, 276e). In any case, Plato was a failure as a political consultant. Briefly enslaved, he only regained his freedom when a fellow philosopher paid 30 Minas – the equivalent of half a million pounds in today’s money – for his liberty. Plato then returned to Athens and established his Academy.
In Politeia, Socrates openly stresses “the state we have been founding exists in words only”, and goes on, “I don’t think it exists anywhere on earth” (592b). However, he also stresses, “there is a model up in heaven for anyone willing to look” (592b). This is crucial for understanding Plato’s philosophy. For the truth is something of a higher order. This ultimate reality is encapsulated in Plato’s famous Theory of Forms. The forms are the ideals (the Greek is eidos) to which we subconsciously compare the things in the visible world, of which the things we see are only ever imperfect imitations. For instance, we compare a chair to some higher ideal of this item of furniture, namely its form or ideal. It follows from this that those who paint a picture of a chair (Plato’s own example) are creating something which is even further removed from the ‘real’ reality, the ideal of the chair. This, as it happens, is the cause of Plato’s dislike of artists who imitate the world.
The relationship between ultimate reality and mundane appearance is explained in The Republic’s famous Allegory of the Cave. Here, prisoners chained up in a cave mistake shadows cast on the wall opposite them for real people, and only occasionally see the proverbial light (515a, ff). Or in another image, which his interlocutor describes as one he ‘understands but not fully’ (511d), Socrates asks us to “Imagine a line cut in two [and then] to take [the] two segments and cut each one in the same ratio, one for the invisible class, the other for the intelligible. Now take these four functions, understanding [of the Forms] at the highest, [normal] thought at the second, belief at the third, and [artificial] images at the bottom” (511e). All this is rather abstract, as even Plato admits. Yet none other than the Uncertainty Principle’s Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) declared himself a Platonist: “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato,” he wrote – and went on to say that the “smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, they are forms” (Natural Law and the Structure of Matter, p.34, 1967).
Plato’s overall aim for The Republic is to define justice. For Plato, to act justly is to identify the form or ideal nature of Justice, and act accordingly. Yet, Socrates, and perhaps Plato, is not consistent about justice: at the beginning of The Republic to be just is valued ‘for its own sake’ (358a); but fast forward to the last of its ten books, and those who act justly are rewarded in the afterlife.
As with any great work of literature, Politeia contains perceptive asides and acute observations – such as, ‘no study pursued under compulsion remains rooted’ (536e). It even has its fair share of humour, like ‘idleness… make people full of wind like emissions from the swamp’ (405d). Possibly the greatest mind of all times was happy to tell a fart joke perhaps because “jokes which you would yourself be ashamed to make… [are ones] which you will be very pleased to hear” (405d).
However, it’s the political observations which are the most insightful. Certainly, Plato was no lover of democracy. In fact, he maintained that a benign aristocracy was better than a democracy – but that democracy was preferable to tyranny. A sociologist as well as a philosopher, Plato’s description of the decay of democracy and the birth of tyranny is a perceptive as it is accurate, and still relevant 2450 years after it was penned. At a time when law courts are used as political battlegrounds, we might well be wary when Plato describes the prelude to the final days of democracy as when “arise impeachments, prosecutions, and trials directed by each party at each other” (565d).
Plato posited that democracies turn into dictatorships because citizens crave recognition. More specifically, when citizens feel that the politicians or elites ‘had been unjust to them’, their ‘spirit’ would start ‘boiling’, and they would “select a special champion for their cause, whom they maintain and exalt to greatness” (565b). This individual, the demagogue, “will promise largely in public… [but] in private… make grants of land … to his own” (565e). Soon the people will realise that their chosen leader is a tyrant who will “find an excuse to get rid of… the free thinking individuals” (567). Then “The government will henceforth be an open and avowed tyranny; and according to the proverb, the commons, flying from the frying-pan of the service of free men, will have fallen into the fire of a despotism exercised by slaves. In other words, they will have exchanged that vast and unseasonable liberty for the new dress of the harshest and bitterest of all slaveries” (569a). Maybe it’s reassuring then that a survey showed that The Republic is the most studied book in the top universities in the US (‘The most popular required reading at America’s top 10 colleges’, Abby Jackson, Business Insider, 5 Feb, 2016).
© Hilarius Bogbinder 2025
Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born writer and translator. He studied politics and theology at Oxford University and lives in London.