icability of his ideas has nothing to
do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be
truly said to bear the greatest 'marks of design'--justice more than the
external frame-work of the State, the idea of good more than justice.
The great science of dialectic or the organisation of ideas has no real
content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the
higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and
all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato
reaches the 'summit of speculation,' and these, although they fail to
satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker, may therefore be regarded
as the most important, as they are also the most original, portions of
the work.

It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has
been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the
conversation was held (the year 411 B.C. which is proposed by him will
do as well as any other); for a writer of fiction, and especially a
writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless of chronology (cp. Rep.,
Symp., etc.), only aims at general probability. Whether all the persons
mentioned in the Republic could ever have met at any one time is not
a difficulty which would have occurred to an Athenian reading the work
forty years later, or to Plato himself at the time of writing (any more
than to Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas); and need not
greatly trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having no answer
'which is still worth asking,' because the investigation shows that we
cannot argue historically from the dates in Plato; it would be useless
therefore to waste time in inventing far-fetched reconcilements of them
in order to avoid chronological difficulties, such, for example, as
the conjecture of C.F. Hermann, that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the
brothers but the uncles of Plato (cp. Apol.), or the fancy of Stallbaum
that Plato intentionally left anachronisms indicating the dates at which
some of his Dialogues were written.

The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus, Polemarchus,
Thrasymachus, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Cephalus appears in the
introduction only, Polemarchus drops at the end of the first argument,
and Thrasymachus is reduced to silence at the close of the first book.
The main discussion is carried on by Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus.
Among the company are Lysias (the orator) and Euthyd