xes, have been
anticipated in a dream by him.

The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the nature
of which is first hinted at by Cephalus, the just and blameless old
man--then discussed on the basis of proverbial morality by Socrates and
Polemarchus--then caricatured by Thrasymachus and partially explained
by Socrates--reduced to an abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus, and
having become invisible in the individual reappears at length in the
ideal State which is constructed by Socrates. The first care of the
rulers is to be education, of which an outline is drawn after the old
Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and morality,
and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, a manlier strain of poetry,
and greater harmony of the individual and the State. We are thus led on
to the conception of a higher State, in which 'no man calls anything his
own,' and in which there is neither 'marrying nor giving in marriage,'
and 'kings are philosophers' and 'philosophers are kings;' and there
is another and higher education, intellectual as well as moral and
religious, of science as well as of art, and not of youth only but of
the whole of life. Such a State is hardly to be realized in this world
and quickly degenerates. To the perfect ideal succeeds the government
of the soldier and the lover of honour, this again declining into
democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but regular order
having not much resemblance to the actual facts. When 'the wheel has
come full circle' we do not begin again with a new period of human life;
but we have passed from the best to the worst, and there we end. The
subject is then changed and the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy
which had been more lightly treated in the earlier books of the Republic
is now resumed and fought out to a conclusion. Poetry is discovered to
be an imitation thrice removed from the truth, and Homer, as well as
the dramatic poets, having been condemned as an imitator, is sent into
banishment along with them. And the idea of the State is supplemented by
the revelation of a future life.

The division into books, like all similar divisions (Cp. Sir G.C. Lewis
in the Classical Museum.), is probably later than the age of Plato. The
natural divisions are five in number;--(1) Book I and the first half
of Book II down to the paragraph beginning, 'I had always admired the
genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus,' which is introductory; the