πολιτεία
1554
- political science
- early works to 1800
- utopias
- ouvrages avant 1800
- science politique
- utopies
- ciencias políticas
- early works to 1700
- education
- greek education
The story
The Republic is Plato's most famous work and one of the seminal texts of Western philosophy and politics. The characters in this Socratic dialogue - including Socrates himself - discuss whether the just or unjust man is happier. They are the philosopher-kings of imagined cities and they also discuss the nature of philosophy and the soul among other things.
What it’s like
Dense, dialogic prose with no scenery to speak of: this is a Greek text in its 1554 printing, so the page is a sixteenth-century edition, its Greek type set in close, unbroken blocks where argument is the only texture. The voice is conversational yet relentlessly probing, a series of questions and counter-questions passed between speakers around a Piraeus dinner table that the reader rebuilds in the mind's eye. Its mood is contemplative and austere, with a cool intellectual intensity rather than drama; there is no violence, no sensory indulgence, and the emotional register stays level and searching. Its shape is a long, slow unfolding in which ideas about justice, the soul and the ideal city are turned over patiently, one definition tested and abandoned after another. It suits an unhurried afternoon with a pencil and a notebook, or a quiet hour set aside for thinking rather than escape. It is for readers who enjoy rigorous, slow argument, historians of the book and early printing, and anyone curious about how the foundational questions of political philosophy first took shape.
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