The Republic

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon to offer my prayers to the goddess and see how they would celebrate the festival. As we started for home, Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, insisted we join him. In his house, his aged father spoke of the peace that comes with old age when one has lived a just life, a peace he felt his wealth had helped secure. This led us to our question: as for justice, what is it? Is it merely speaking the truth and paying one's debts? But surely, I asked, you would not return a weapon to a madman, even if it is his? Polemarchus, inheriting the argument, offered that justice is giving each what is due: helping friends and harming enemies. Yet this, too, proved a shifting sand, for who can truly know which men are good and which are evil?

Just as our inquiry faltered, the rhetorician Thrasymachus, who had been listening with growing impatience, came at us like a wild beast. “What folly has taken possession of you all?” he roared. He would have no more nonsense. “I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” The unjust man, the tyrant who takes whatever he wishes by fraud and force, is the happiest of men, while the just man is always a loser. I questioned him, comparing a ruler to a physician who seeks the good of his patient, not his own, but Thrasymachus only scoffed, saying I imagined shepherds fattened their sheep for the good of the flock and not for their own table. Though I showed that injustice creates only division and hatred, rendering even a band of thieves incapable of action, I felt I had not been well entertained. I had gone from one question to another without discovering what justice truly is.

Glaucon and his brother Adeimantus, however, were not satisfied. They revived the argument with greater force, asking me to praise justice not for its rewards or reputation, but for what it is in its own nature. They painted a devastating picture: a just man, thought to be unjust, who is scourged, racked, and impaled, set against an unjust man who, cloaked in the reputation for justice, wins all the honors and riches the world can offer. Which of them is happier? To answer such a question, I proposed we look for justice not in the single man, but in a larger form where it might be more easily seen. Let us, I said, create a city in words.

We began with a simple city of needs, but Glaucon demanded the comforts of a luxurious, “feverish” state. Such a city would require an army of guardians to protect it, and their education became our chief concern. We decided they must be shielded from the tales of Homer and Hesiod, which portray the gods as warring and deceitful and the heroes as weeping and avaricious. Instead, they would be trained in simple, harmonious music and disciplined gymnastics, balancing the spirited element of their souls with the gentle, so they might be fierce to their enemies but mild to their own people. We established that these guardians would have no private property, no gold or silver, but would live in common, their needs provided for by the citizens they protect.

In this city, we found justice at last. It was the principle we had laid down from the beginning: that each person must do the one work for which his nature is best suited. When the artisans, the auxiliaries, and the guardians each do their own business and do not meddle with the work of others, the city is just. So too in the individual: the soul has three parts - a rational part that loves to learn, a spirited part that loves honor, and an appetitive part that desires food, drink, and other pleasures. Justice is the health of the soul, a harmony where the rational part, aided by the spirited, rules over the appetites. This conclusion, however, forced us toward a still more astonishing claim, a wave of argument I feared would drown me in ridicule: “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy…cities will never have rest from their evils.”

To defend this, I had to explain who these true philosophers are. They are not mere lovers of sights and sounds, but lovers of the vision of truth itself. I tried to explain this with an image: men living in an underground den, chained since childhood so they can see only the shadows cast on the wall by a fire behind them. They believe these shadows are the only reality. Now imagine one is freed and dragged up a rugged ascent into the sunlight. At first, he is blinded and pained, but as his eyes adjust, he sees the true world of being - and at last, the sun itself, the source of all light and truth, which is the idea of the Good. If such a man were to return to the den, his eyes would be unaccustomed to the dark, and his fellow prisoners would laugh at him, saying he had ruined his sight. - Like ourselves, I replied; for they see only their own shadows. The philosopher, having seen the truth, must be compelled to go back down and rule, for only he knows what is real.

From this perfect state, governed by reason, all other forms of government are a decline. The honorable timocracy, ruled by the spirited part, gives way to oligarchy, ruled by the desire for wealth. The insatiable greed of the oligarchs creates a resentful and impoverished class, which rises up to establish a democracy - a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, that treats all desires as equal. But the excess of freedom in a democracy leads to a demand for order, and the people raise up a champion to protect them.

This champion, at first full of smiles, soon asks for a bodyguard and reveals his true nature. He tastes the blood of his fellow citizens, purges the state of its best men, and surrounds himself with slaves and flatterers. He is a tyrant. And the man who is like him is a slave to a monstrous, winged drone of desire implanted in his soul. He is friendless, faithless, and lives his entire life beset with fear, unable to satisfy his endless wants, the most wretched of all men. Thus, we found that the best and justest man is the happiest, and the worst and most unjust is the most miserable, his misery multiplied 729 times over that of the kingly man.

Having fulfilled the argument, I could finally speak of the rewards of justice. But the greatest recompense awaits us after death. I told them the tale of Er, a soldier who returned from the dead and described what he had seen. Souls were judged, spending a thousand years in reward or punishment. Afterward, they were brought before the Fates to choose their next lives from patterns scattered on the ground. He saw the soul of Orpheus choose to be a swan, and the soul of Ajax choose to be a lion. The man who chose first, having come from heaven and been virtuous only by habit, foolishly snatched up the life of the greatest tyranny, not seeing that he was fated to devour his own children. Last of all came Odysseus, who, weary of ambition, searched for and joyfully chose the quiet life of a private man. For the responsibility is with the chooser - God is justified. Wherefore my counsel is that we hold fast to the heavenly way, following justice always, so that it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years to come.