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THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO - TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY A. D. LINDSAY
THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY A D LINDSAY Author:PLATO THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY A. D. LINDSAY, M. A. - 1908 - NOTE - THE translations of passages in Homer are taken, with some necessary alterations, from Chaprnans translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I have to acknowledge my great obligations to previous translations, to Professor Bosanquets Companion to the Republic of... more » Plato, and to Mr. Adams edition of the Republic. WHAT is the subject of the Republic P That seems a simple question, but it is hard to answer. The dialogue opens by Socrates telling us how he went down to the Peirreus to see a festival, how Polemarchus and some friends met him and induced him to stay with them for the evening to see the torch race and the night festival. He goes home with them and finds a circle of his friends there, with one or two sophists, and begins to talk to Polemarchus father, Cephalus, and to question him about old age. Cephalus tells his experience simply, saying that he has found that happiness depends mainly on mens dispositions, not on their riches, and that the consciousness of approaching death makes a man thoughtful about his life and careful to pay all his debts to God and man. Then Socrates, partly as though he wished to understand Cephalus secret, partly as though the words had raised again a question over which he had long puzzled, asks But as to this justice, can we quite, without qualification, define it as truthfulness and repayment of anything that we have received 2 or are these verv actions sometimes iust and sometimes unjust The disdussion does not interest Cephalus. He goes off to pay one of his debts of sacrifice to God, and leaves the young men to frame a satisfactory definition of his conduct. So the subject of the conversation becomes, What is justice But as various answers are being discussed, the sophist Thrasymachus sweeps aside the attempt to define justice by declaring that injustice is a far wiser and stronger and better thing. Then from the attempt to define justice Socrates turns to meet the assertion that the unjust life is the better life. attach much greater importance, he says 347, to Thrasymachus present position that the life of the unjust man is superior to that of the just man. Though Thrasymachus is easily silenced, his defeat is not the end of the discussion. , Socrates reviewing the argument at the end of Book I. says that until we know what justice and injustice are, we cannot really tell whether the just or the unjust life is the better. The two subjects are therefore united. The conversation is now directed towards the aim of so defining justice and injustice, and describing their necessary results on society and the soul of man, that an answer may be given to the question between the iust and the uniust life based on such , universal and ultimate facts of human experience that it must win the agreement of every man who will consent to use his reason. With this the rest of the dialogue is concerned, and at the end of Book IX. the results are gathered together. The superiority of the just life is established by three proofsone based on what we have learnt about justice and injustice from their effects on society, the second on what we now h o w of the constitution of the human soul, and the third on the account of the nature of reality and truth which has been discussed in Books VI. and VII. Finally, in Book X. the Myth of Er reaffirms this superiority from the standpoint of eternity...« less