Republic

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Republic

by Plato

THE LITERARY WORK

A philosophical dialogue set in late fifth- century b.c. Athens; written around 380 b.c.

SYNOPSIS

The Republic examines the concept of “justice” in the state and the human soul and provides a detailed description of Plato’s vision of the perfect society.

Events in History at the Time the Dialogue Takes Place

The Dialogue in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Dialogue Was Written

For More Information

Plato (428-347 b.c.) was the son of wealthy and powerful Athenian parents. He rejected the political life that had corrupted members of his family and became a student under the famous scholar and philosopher Socrates. The Republic was written at a time when Athens was shaking itself off from its defeat by other Greek city-states in the Peloponnesian War, and when it and other city-states were negotiating the best methods of civic organization and rule.

Events in History at the Time the Dialogue Takes Place

Athenian democracy

The established political system out of which Plato wrote the Republic was a type of democracy, although Athenian democracy always had an element of aristocratic control about it. The Athenian democracy, which began in 510 b.c., replaced an earlier form of government by individual rulers called tyrannoi, or “tyrants,” although the Greek word did not at first have a negative connotation. A tyrant was a man who had overthrown a local aristocracy and seized power in the government illegally. The tyrant’s power was closely linked to the general populace who had supported him in his overthrow of the former aristocracy. Some of the early tyrants were strong leaders who provided an effective transition government before the eventual democracy. However, the last tyrant of the era became a harsh ruler, and he was ousted in 510 b.c. Some nobles at first attempted to restore the aristocracy, but this was very unpopular with the now democratically inclined populace. It was Cleisthenes, a member of the Alcmaeonid family, who came up with the brilliant idea of bringing the masses of ordinary Athenians into an alliance with his family. Thus was born the Athenian democracy.

Cleisthenes sought to avoid factional disagreements among the Athenian people by breaking up the four regional “tribes” of Athens into ten tribes, with members of each tribe drawn from many different Athenian regions. A strong sense of centralized nationhood was thereby encouraged. He also set up the “Council of 500,” manned by fifty men drawn by lot from each of the ten tribes. The council prepared business for the assembly, which included all free adult male citizens. The assembly voted on all matters concerning the city. A program of “ostracism” was also installed; if 6,000 citizens voted to exile a man, he could be banished from the city-state, with his property and other rights intact, for a period of ten years. It was a program designed to ensure that no one person rose to a position of extreme power in the city, whether by wealth or influence, and with a few exceptions, it endured into the time that Plato wrote the Republic.

FROM DEMOCRACY TO DICTATORSHIP: THE SOCRATIC METHOD

Socrates: The finest government and the finest kind of man remain for us to discuss, dictatorship and the dictatorial man.

Glaucon: They certainly do remain.

Socrates: Come, my dear friend, what is dictatorship like? That it evolves from democracy is pretty clear.

Glaucon: Obviously.

Socrates: Does it not evolve from democracy in much the same way as democracy does from oligarchy?

Glaucon: How?

Socrates: What they put before them as the good, which was the basis of oligarchy, was wealth, was it not?

Glaucon: Yes.

Socrates: Then their insatiable desire for wealth, and their neglect of other things for money-making was what destroyed it. was it not?

Glaucon: True.

Socrates: Now insatiability for what democracy defines as the good also destroys it.

Glaucon: And what do you say it defines as such?

Socrates: Liberty…

(Republic, 562a-c)

There were many different levels of responsibility and rights within the Athenian democracy. Not everyone who lived in the city-state had a voice in what went on. Women, slaves, and foreigners were unable to participate in the democratic process. Early on in the Athenian experiment with democracy, even some of the men who were eligible could not participate in the assembly for practical reasons. Attendance at assembly was an unpaid activity that absorbed a lot of time. Only those with a lot of time and money were able to take part on a regular basis. Although this situation had changed by the time Plato was writing the Republic, it does tend to suggest that, at its heart, Athenian democracy was not perceived as the system of utter equality that we sometimes associate with the word “democracy.” What’s more, the aristocrats did tend to have a dominant role in the city’s political life. From 445 to 429 b.c., for example, the Athenian democracy was dominated by Pericles, a great general from the Alcmaeonid family who single-handedly directed the city’s lively effort at civic reconstruction and imperial expansion. As one author comments, “so special a position seems to have been possible only in Athens, and there largely because the change to democracy had been so rapid and so thorough that people, used to more authoritarian systems, still looked for a leader” (Bowra, p. 76).

Plato is not tolerant of what he sees as the excesses of democracy; in Book 8 of the Republic, Socrates—the central character in the dialogue—sarcastically describes a democracy as a wonderful state in which everyone gets to do what he likes: “In this city... there is no compulsion to rule, even if you are capable of it, or again to be ruled if you do not want to be, or to be at war when the others are, or at peace unless you desire peace. If some law forbids you to hold office or to go to law, you nevertheless do both if it occurs to you to do so. Is that not a divine and pleasant life for the time being?” (Plato, Republic, 557e)

Socrates

The Republic is set in the late fifth century b.c., while Socrates, who died in 399 b.c., was still alive. Perhaps the most famous and influential man of his day, Socrates left not a single written word to be remembered by—everything we know about him and his philosophical theories comes from his many students, most notably Plato.

Socrates was born in Athens around 470 b.c., the son of a stonemason. He came into conflict with the Thirty Tyrants, a group of aristocrats installed by the Spartan commander Lysander to oversee the defeated Athens at the conclusion of

the Peloponnesian War. Yet when these men failed to take control of Athens and democracy returned, Socrates was charged with corrupting youth and failing to worship the old gods of the city. In response to these charges, Socrates chose not to break out of prison, as a friend encouraged him to do, but rather to follow the state’s order to poison himself by drinking hemlock. The death of his beloved teacher at the hands of the reinstated democracy in 399 b.c. spurred Plato to try and discover the “just” state by writing the Republic.

Socrates is often referred to as “the greatest teacher in European history” (Jaeger, p. 27). He revolutionized Greek society by questioning every traditionally held pattern of thought and by studying the motivations of the individual as a philosophical subject. “Education is more than teaching,” one scholar notes, “and Socrates’s chief aim was not to impart information but to make the other man think, and thus to make him a better person” (Ehrenberg, p. 381). The late fifth century b.c. is commonly held by modern historians to have been a time when Athenians began to question the political and social traditions that had long guided them; the teachings of Socrates were an important part of this self-examination.

The Thirty Tyrants

In the turmoil surrounding Athens’ defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.), the city was badly disorganized. Thirty members of the aristocracy were installed to take charge of the city, a move that was heralded as a return to ancestral laws. The appointments, however, were actually orchestrated by the leaders of Sparta. Plato came from the wealthy and powerful class of landholders in Athens, and his family was well represented among these thirty men; one of his uncles and a cousin were prominent members of the group.

The Thirty Tyrants proved to be a corrupt group. They hired thugs with whips to strike fear into the citizens and keep order in the streets, banished 5,000 of the city-state’s residents, and executed more than 1,500 Athenian citizens, mostly rich and powerful men who opposed their policies. The reign of terror was relatively shortlived, however. After about ninety days, the Thirty Tyrants were defeated and exiled, and Athens once again operated under a democratic constitution.

Sparta

The city-state Sparta, the traditional enemy of Athens, figures at different times and in different ways in the Republic. Sparta is cited as an example of how things can go wrong in a city if it is run by its aristocrats or by its military, but also as a model of the ideal city. Sparta was the second largest city-state in Greece and was run in a way almost exactly opposite to the democratic management of Athens. It was led by two hereditary kings who were in charge of the city during times of war, which tended to be often. The city was dominated by its military, which had the leisure to develop its strength because it had groups of other people to tend the land and do most of the labor necessary for running the city. Among these groups were the helots, the native people of the area. The helots outnumbered the Spartans by about five to one but were kept in a state of serfdom in the agricultural lands surrounding the city. They were not actually slaves, but they were required to give half or more of their produce to the city-state. Moreover, they were subject to unspeakable abuse by the Spartans, whose soldiers seem to have had an initiation ritual—called the “hiding game”—that involved attacking and killing helots at night. The other large group of people under Spartan rule were the perioeci, which means “the people living around here.” These people inhabited towns in the vicinity of Sparta and were allowed to be more or less independent except at times of war, when they were forced to serve in the Spartan army.

The single feature of Spartan life for which that city has remained famous is its military might. Sparta built its military prowess in a ruthless manner. Raising the perfect soldier began at birth, when weak-looking babies were killed at the discretion of the state, not of the parents. Beginning at age seven, boys were taken from their parents and housed in military dormitories. Admitted into the army at age twenty, they continued to live in strictly military quarters. They were prevented from residing with their wives unless they had children, though in some cases even this right was refused. “Military training was the central and ongoing part of [a soldier’s] life,” one historian observes. “All facets of [the soldier’s] existence indicated the final goal: the production of the single-minded, simple-living, superbly disciplined soldier” (Robinson, p. 57).

The Republic’s perfect city-state bears some likeness to Sparta in several respects. Plato, for example, argues that the ideal form of education is state-sponsored, a notion based in part on the Spartan model. Plato’s own city-state, Athens, allowed the family to educate its children, an arrangement that Plato thought made for poor citizens. In addition, Plato’s statement that the guardians of the city should not have money echoes the Spartan refusal to provide gold and silver to its citizens, a prohibition that was designed to keep them from trading for foreign luxury goods. It is a mark of how revolutionary the Republic was intended to be that Plato, who was writing for an Athenian audience, should invoke Sparta as a model in any way, given the long and ongoing history of war between the two cities.

The Dialogue in Focus

The plot

The Republic tries to define justice and to show that justice is better for states and for individual men than injustice. Summing up the author’s views, one researcher explains: “Plato taught a conception of justice as a quality of the soul, in virtue of which men set aside the irrational desire to taste every pleasure and to gain a selfish satisfaction out of every object, and accommodated themselves to the discharge of a single function for the general benefit” (Barker, p. 171).

The Republic is divided into ten books in which Socrates, the major character of the work, asks questions of his listeners in order to arrive at a definition of the ideal city-state. In the context of his discussion, Socrates describes the three classes of citizens (the guardians, or leaders; the auxiliaries, or soldiers; and the workers, providers of food and clothing) and explores the need for these classes to function together harmoniously. Socrates compares them to the components of the human personality, which must function together well if a person is to succeed in life. In Socrates’ view, the ideal man is the philosopher, literally a “lover of wisdom,” and guardians of the state should, along with their other preparation, be trained as philosophers so that they might be wise leaders. In a famous analogy, Socrates compares the philosopher to a man who leaves a dark cave and discovers the true world outside; he returns to the cave to illuminate others, who believe that reality consists only of the shadows on the cave wall in front of them. Because he has dared to explore beyond the confines of the average mind, the philosopher becomes able to teach wisdom to the common man.

Examining different types of government, Plato’s Republic investigates the relative strengths and evils of timocracy (rule by the military), oligarchy (rule by aristocrats), democracy (rule by the masses), and dictatorship (absolute rule by one person). The ideal city as explained in the Republic is ruled by the philosopher-king, a completely just man, and managed by the guardians, people of both genders who are intelligent, liberal, and stable.

But the Republic is much more than simply a political document; it aims to reorganize the life of every person in the city-state and offers detailed advice on how to carry this out. The work is accordingly wide-ranging, addressing social, economic, political, and religious concerns. Plato develops theories of education, public housing, child-rearing, marriage, labor division, and poetry—all of which are shown to contribute to the happiness of citizens and the effective running of their state.

PLATO LOOKS BACK

Plato recalls the days immediately following the fall of the Thirty Tyrants and how they affected the rest of his life:

In general the restored democratic exiles exhibited considerable decency. As it chanced, however, some of those in control summoned our companion Socrates before the law courts and brought a most unholy charge against him, one that he least of all deserved, for they charged him with impiety [disrespect against the old gods] and the people condemned and put [him] to death.... The result was that I, who had at first been full of eagerness for political affairs, when I considered all this and saw how things were shifting about every which way, at last became dizzy. I didn’t cease to consider ways of improving this particular situation, however, and, indeed, of reforming the whole constitution... and I finally saw that the constitutions of all actual cities are bad and that their laws are almost beyond redemption.
(Plato in Klosko, p. 2)

Gender revolution?

In Book 5, Plato writes that women should be allowed to be guardians, the governors of the ideal state under the philosopher-king:

[I]f the male and the female are seen to be different as regards a particular craft or other pursuit we shall say this must be assigned to one or the other. But if they seem to differ in this particular only, that the female bears the children while the male begets them, we shall say that there has been no kind of proof that a woman is different from a man as regards the duties we are talking about, and we shall still believe that our guardians and their wives should follow the same pursuits.
(Republic, 454e)

Many historians have seen this statement as an early vote for feminism, but others caution that “Plato’s interest is neither in women’s rights nor in their preferences as they see them, but rather with production of the common good, and a state

where all contribute the best they can according to their aptitude” (Annas, p. 181). Just the same, because Athenian women were kept almost completely inside the home—they were not allowed to shop, socialize, or even walk about freely—and were often denied access even to their own husband’s social lives, any move toward granting them duties other than bearing and raising children was revolutionary for the time.

Plato’s style of family planning

Perhaps the best glimpse into Plato’s conception of the role of women in an ideal society comes later in Book 5, where he proposes that “guardian” wives be shared among the ruling class: “All these women shall be wives in common to all the men, and not one of them shall live privately with any man; the children too should be held in common so that no parent shall know which is his own offspring, and no child shall know his parent” (Republic, 457d). (The guardian class, it should be noted, is to be small, intelligent, and morally upright; sharing wives and children is not a practice that Plato suggests for all members of the city.) From the age of twenty to forty, women are to breed children for the state; men can continue to father children until they are fifty. Plato writes that only the best men and women should be allowed to bear children and describes how their offspring should be raised communally: “The children of good parents they will take to a rearing pen in the care of nurses living apart in a certain section of the city; the children of inferior parents, or any child of the others born defective, they will hide, as it is fitting, in a secret and unknown place” (Republic, 461c). Here, Plato is really recommending that weak babies be killed, a practice that was fairly common even in his day; the Spartans, as noted earlier, practiced this grim version of family planning.

Sources

After Socrates died, Plato went to mainland Italy and Sicily and may have studied with the Pythagorean philosophers living there. These men believed that numbers and ratios were the key to understanding the world. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Pythagorean philosophers on Plato’s ideas: “One can easily imagine Plato seeing . . . the possibility of giving precise definitions in wholly mathematical terms of such apparently vague and evaluative notions as harmony and disharmony, beauty and ugliness, maybe even justice and injustice, good and evil, and the other things of which Socrates sought definition” (Grube in Republic, p. xii).

Of course the most important sources for the Republic were the teachings of Socrates, Plato’s mentor. His beliefs cannot be studied firsthand because Socrates did not keep any written record of his thoughts. We do know that Plato copied from Socrates the method of learning through dialogue—in which answers to difficult problems are arrived at through a series of logically connected questions. Socrates also influenced Plato’s thoughts on the relationship between ethics and politics. Socrates’s extraordinary impact on Plato is evident in even a cursory examination of his student’s collected works, for Socrates is the main character in most of Plato’s dialogues.

The dialogue’s impact over the years

In later years, the Republic had a varied history. It influenced the Latin writer Cicero in his attempt to work out a just system of government for the Romans. Cicero in turn influenced the early medieval philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo, who tried to do the same for Christian culture. In the Renaissance the Republic emerged as a very important text; it influenced Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, for example. The Republic was also embraced by more sinister elements. It has been pointed out that “in our own century a regime like that of Hitler tried to use the Republic as some sort of prototype for its own particular type of Brave New World” (Robinson, p. 122).

IMPOSSIBLE DREAM?

What has been said about the State and its government is not a mere dream, and though difficult it is not impossible; but it is only possible when philosophers become kings, or kings philosophers.

(Republic, p. 540d)

Events in History at the Time the Dialogue Was Written

The polis

The Greek polis is the basic political unit about which Plato writes in the Republic; it is commonly referred to by modern historians as the “city-state.” But to fifth- and fourth-century b.c. Greeks, as one author points out, it was “not simply a city or a state; it implies active participation, a joint undertaking on the part of its citizens” (Klosko, p. 6). Political life was made more intense and more necessary by the populations of the city-states at the time: when the Republicwas being written, Athens had a population of only 40,000 active citizens (Athenian males), although this figure climbs to 110-150,000 if Athenian women and children are included, and to 300,000 if foreigners and slaves are counted. Because women, slaves, and foreigners were not allowed to vote, the polis was run by a small minority of its population. By the time Plato wrote the Republic, a very large percentage of the citizens of Athens were civil servants, earning their living by serving as jurors, or “sitting in the Assembly, in military service, as magistrates” and the like (Klosko, p. 6). But the strongest relationship between citizens and the polis was not political or economic, but spiritual: “The polis recognized no separation between state and church. Greek religion was state religion; the individual performed religious service by worshipping the gods of his polis” (Klosko, p. 6).

Social upheaval

The Republic is set during a time of political unrest and general cultural experimentation throughout Greece. The Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.), a conflict that pitted Athens against nearby Sparta and her allies, ended in 404 with the defeat of Athens and the widespread decay of all the cities involved in the war. The fall of Athens left a huge power vacuum in Greece that Sparta attempted to fill. Sparta had presented itself as the great liberator of Greek cities from the tyranny of Athens during the war. After the war Sparta became the tyrant. By the time the Republic was written, Sparta was more powerful than ever, but the city’s power was based on fear rather than respect. Moreover, the shattered Greek city-states were beset with massive interior weaknesses, “incapable not only of leading one another but of following a leader” (Hammond, p. 438). The Republic thus appeared at a time when the city-state was put to its crucial test as a political form and its citizens approached a new stage of intellectual freedom and capitalist development.

This fundamental questioning of the political, social, and intellectual status quo enriched Greek culture. It was “an age of bold experiments in politics, philosophy, literature and art” according to one historian; “[I]n the civilization of the fourth century [b.c.] many of the most fruitful ideas in human history came to birth” (Hammond, p. 438). We see the influence of the times in the Republic’s recommendation of a radical new view of traditional political and social arrangements such as the family.

The Academy

After the death of Socrates, Plato left Athens for some time and traveled to Sicily and mainland Italy. Around 385 b.c. Plato founded in Athens what some historians have called the first university. It was at this academy that Plato is said to have written the Republic. He spent the rest of his life working there. The Academy was Plato’s legacy to the city of Athens; it endured until 529 a.d. The curriculum at the Academy combined the studies of mathematics and geometry with work in ethics, politics, and psychology. Some members of the Academy, including Plato himself, were invited by various Greek and foreign cities to help develop workable civic constitutions. Such invitations put the Republic in the context that Plato intended—not as a text of theories with no consequences but as a document intended to be used in political reform. As far as Plato’s own efforts are concerned, however, the ideals of the Republic did not prove popular in his day, and his career as a political reformer went nowhere.

Aristotle comments on the Republic

The most complete response to Plato’s work, including the Republic, can be found in Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle, who studied under Plato at the Academy, was not always the most sympathetic reader of his teacher’s work. He registered objections to several of Plato’s more radical proposals, including that for a community pool of wives and children for the guardian class: “Each citizen acquires a thousand sons, but these are not one man’s sons; any of them is equally the son of any person, and as a result will be equally neglected by everyone” (Aristotle, Politics, 1261b32). He argued further that the severing of personal ties among people runs contrary to what is best for the state: “Community of wives and children is prescribed for the Guardian class. It would seem to be far more useful if applied to the agricultural class. For where wives and children are held in common there is less affection, and a lack of strong affection among the ruled is necessary in the interests of obedience and absence of revolt” (Aristotle, Politics, 1262a40).