is 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 would quickly degenerate. To the perfect ideal
succeeds the government of the soldier and the lover of honor, 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, 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 first book containing a refutation of the popular and
sophistical notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the
earlier Dialogues, without arriving at any definite result. To this is
appended a restatement of the nature of justice accordin