The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)
Before discussing how Republic shook the world, we might ask whether any book shakes the world. Certainly the world changes, and many of its important changes can be plotted using the rise and fall of those ideas by which people live: ideas like freedom and democracy, or justice, citizenship or knowledge. Religions shake the world, and in practice a religion is just a fossilized philosophy – a philosophy with the questioning spirit suppressed. Still, there are people who would say that even if changes in the world can be charted through ideas, such as those of Republic, Plato will not have been responsible for the changes themselves. The philosopher merely follows the parade: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.’1 Ideas are only the whistle on the engine. What shakes the world are time and circumstance, land, food, guns and money, the economic and social forces that determine the organization of peoples at different times and places.
The author of ideas, on such a view, does not make history but merely receives a larger part in its description. Fortunately we need not investigate what truth there is in this, although it seems unlikely that ideas are as inert as all that, so that nobody is ever changed by reading either Republic or any other work of religion, morals or politics, including those very works by Hegel (such as The Philosophy of History, 1826) and Marx (such as The German Ideology, 1846) in which the idea of the futility of ideas has been suggested. Ideas work on minds. That, after all, is what they are for: we could not be adapted for thought if it was useless. An idea is just a staging post to action. And, although people who pride themselves on their hard-headed ‘scientific’ approach to human life often find it hard to understand, when we say that ideas (and culture) change things, we are not denying that food and land, guns and money change things. We are not positing some airy-fairy, supernatural force, a ‘spirit of the age’ hovering somewhere above the more mundane world. We are talking only of the modes in which people think about themselves and their doings, and it is those ways of thinking that, among other things, help to determine who has the land and the food, who picks up the guns, and where the money gets spent.
If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place. The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, quoted at the head of this Introduction, is far from alone in his estimate of Plato’s influence. A century earlier the wordy essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson outdid Whitehead in wonder at Plato’s genius, in one of the rare pararagraphs worth quoting in full:
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, – at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men, – Platonist! The Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and says, ‘how English!’ a German – ‘how Teutonic!’ an Italian – ‘how Roman and how Greek!’ As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal beauty that everybody felt related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader in New England, an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.2
Emerson was himself an illustration of the influence he is describing: his philosophy, known as New England Transcendentalism, blended a heady, Romantic, cult of personality, with a vague assurance of a Higher Order in Things which is itself derived from Platonism.
Nevertheless, Whitehead’s famous remark is wrong as it stands. Much of the European tradition in philosophy contains vehement rejections of Plato, rather than footnotes to him. We can scarcely hold that the great materialist and scientific philosophers, from Bacon and Hobbes through Locke, to Hume and Nietzsche simply write footnotes to the Plato they regarded as the fountain of error. So if we want the safety Whitehead proposes, then it is safest to hedge, and to keep only the important germ of truth that the European (and Byzantine and Arabic) philosophical traditions at least consist of a series of responses to Plato. Even those who reject what they associate with Plato are often reacting to him, and often overshadowed by him. And there will be others to tell them that their rejection misfires, and that it was anticipated by Plato himself, or only results from misreading, misunderstanding and simplifying the master.
Such defences are not, as they might seem to be, mere special pleading on behalf of a favourite authority. Plato wrote his philosophy in dialogues, a form which requires different voices, and the ebb and flow of argument. It was already noted back in antiquity that the Socrates who is the hero of these dialogues, and Plato himself, are shifting, mobile figures, readily admitting different interpretations: ‘It is well known that Socrates was in the habit of concealing his knowledge, or his beliefs; and Plato approved of the habit’, said St Augustine.3 One way of taking this is that Plato, and presumably Socrates, really did have doctrines to teach, but that for some irritating reason they preferred to unveil them only partially, one bit at a time, in a kind of intellectual striptease. This line has occasionally been taken by weak-minded commentators in love with the idea of hidden, esoteric mysteries penetrated only by initiates, among whom they are pleased to imagine themselves. We talk of Leo Strauss’s version of the approach later.
But the right way of interpreting Augustine’s remark is that Plato felt that philosophy was more a matter of an activity than one of absorbing or learning a static body of doctrine. It is a question of process not product. Socrates remains the great educator, and those who came to him would be listeners and interrogators, participants in conversation, and would have to throw themselves actively into the labyrinths of thought. Passive reception of the word would count for nothing – this was one of the mistakes made by Plato’s opponents, the sophists, who charged fees for imparting what they sold as practical wisdom (one might think of the witless piles of ‘wisdom’ and ‘self-help’ literature which now choke bookshops).4 At the end of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus Socrates himself makes a speech despising reading philosophy as a poor second to doing it. Many people have made the same point subsequently. Schopenhauer describes reading as a mere surrogate for thinking for yourself, and in turn quotes the German polymath Goethe, ‘what you have inherited from your forefathers you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it’.5
The important contrast is not so much between reading and listening, but between passive reception and repetition, rote learning, and active thinking for yourself. Whether the engagement is with written or spoken words need not matter, but Plato is right that there are dangers in the written word which the activities of dispute and conversation avoid. The written word is easily turned into an object of recitation or fetish, the foodstuff of unintelligent fundamentalisms. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson put it forcibly, arguing that literature is but the shadow of good talk. ‘Talk is fluid, tentative, continually in further search and progress; while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth.’6
The insistence on engagement chimes with Plato’s adoption of the dialogue form, in which different voices get a hearing, and it is the twists and turns of the processes of argument rather than any set conclusion that help us to expand our minds as we read. Philosophy, in this view, is about discovering things in dialogue and argument (‘dialectically’); anything read later could at best be a reminder of the understanding achieved in this process.7
This dramatic conception of what Plato is about makes him harder to criticize. One can reject a conclusion, but it is much harder to reject a process of imaginative expansion, and if we take the link with drama seriously, it might seem as silly as ‘rejecting’ King Lear or Hamlet. But in fact the parallel does not cut off criticism, but encourages it. For in the course of Plato’s dramas theses do get stated and defended, arguments are made, and people are persuaded. This is the kind of dramas they are. Sometimes the drama comes to an end with an apparent conclusion – after all, the thesis about the superiority of dialectical activity to passive exposure such as reading allows is itself one of them.8 And in all these cases it is appropriate to ask whether the theses, arguments and conclusions are in fact acceptable. Doing this is doing no more than taking part in the drama or entering the dialectical arena, the very activity that Socrates and Plato commend. And this is particularly so with Republic, which is far from a light game of tennis with ideas, none of which are seriously entertained. It is impossible to read it without again and again feeling that we are confronting deep and serious doctrines. It is of little importance, except to biographers, whether these are Plato’s own doctrines. They are there in the book, and for philosophy and history, that is enough.9
Republic is commonly regarded as the culminating achievement of Plato as a philosopher and writer, brilliantly poised between the questioning and inconclusive earlier dialogues, and the less compelling cosmological speculations, and doubts, of the later ones. Over the centuries it has probably sustained more commentary, and been subject to more radical and impassioned disagreement, than almost any other of the great founding texts of the modern world. Indeed, the history of readings of the book is itself an academic discipline, with specialist chapters on almost every episode in the story of religion and literature for the last two thousand years and more. To take only the major English poets, there are entire distinct books on Platonism and Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley and Coleridge, to name but a few, and of course there are many others on whole movements and times: Plato and Christianity, Plato and the Renaissance, Plato and the Victorians, Plato and the Nazis, Plato and us.10 The story of Plato’s direct influence on philosophy is another study in itself, and one peppered with names that are better known to specialists than to the world at large: Philo Judaeus, Macrobius, Porphyry, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, as well as the better-known Plotinus, Augustine or Dante. Sometimes the Plato in question is the author of other texts, notably the inspirational dialogue Symposium and the theologically ambitious Timaeus. But Republic is seldom far away.
Anyone who stays very long in the vast silent mausoleums lined with works about Plato and his influence runs the risk of suffocating. Anyone writing on this topic must be conscious of an enormous and disapproving audience, dizzying ranks of ghosts overseeing and criticizing omissions and simplifications. Many of these ghosts belong to the most brilliant linguists, scholars, philosophers, theologians and historians of their day. They do not take kindly to the garden to which they devoted their lives being trampled over by outsiders and infidels. And Republic is the shrine at the very centre of the sanctuary, since for centuries it has been the one compulsory subject in the philosophy syllabus, so these same scholars will have been educated with it as the centrepiece and inspiration. Nor is this attention merely historical: a distinguished modern Platonist says, rightly, that the sun never sets on the reading of Plato: ‘always, someone somewhere is reading the Republic’.11
But as I have said, Plato and his Republic have their detractors, and we might initially find all this attention incomprehensible. In Raphael’s famous painting in the Vatican, known as The School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle together hold centre-stage, but while Aristotle points to the earth, Plato points upwards to the Heavens.12
The poet Coleridge made the same contrast, saying that everyone was born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, meaning that Plato is otherworldly, a dealer in abstractions, while Aristotle is the plain empirical man who faces things as they are in the world as we find it. Coleridge continued that ‘I don’t think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist, and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian.’13 In this opposition, Aristotle represents what George W. Bush’s White House referred to contemptuously as the ‘reality-based community’, which believes that ‘solutions emerge from the judicious study of discernible reality’. Plato is the patron saint of ascent away from the reality-based community. In his own time the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes satirized Plato’s hero Socrates by placing him among the clouds.
If these are the options, then one might expect the minds of the reality-based community, focused upon experience, to prove fitter than those that take themselves off to cloud-cuckoo land. In a Darwinian world, we might expect the former eventually to oust the latter altogether. Dreaming is of little use, while coming to grips with the way of things surely is. And ours is a practical, scientific, empirical civilization, which provides an inhospitable climate to dreamers. It is surprising, then, that Plato is not more neglected, and we may wonder whether his appeal is the result of a conspiracy between dry-as-dust scholars and mad visionaries and theologians.
Such was the view of Francis Bacon, the great proponent of the scientific revolution at the beginning of the seventeenth century. One of Bacon’s concerns was the just basis of scientific taxonomies, or the sorting of things into manageable kinds, in a world with no chemistry, no accurate mechanics, and little botany or biology, and he grudgingly allows Plato some credit for the Socratic insistence on definition and accurate meaning. But more generally he saw Plato, along with other Greek philosophers, as a leading example of the mind’s ‘premature and precipitate haste’, a sophist himself but even more dangerous:
The disputatious and sophistical kind of philosophy catches the understanding in a trap, but the other kind, the fantastic, high-blown, semi-poetical philosophy seduces it. There is in man a kind of ambition of the intellect no less than of the will, especially in lofty, high-minded characters. A conspicuous example of this occurs among the Greeks in Pythagoras, where it is combined with a rather crass and cumbrous superstition, and in a more perilous and subtle form in Plato and his school… 14
Greek philosophy in general, thought Bacon, deserved the response reported to have been made by Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse: ‘the words of idle old men to callow youths’. Such, as well, was the stout eighteenth-century reaction to Plato, expressed by the forthright Alexander Pope:
Go, soar with Plato to th’empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;15
‘Quitting sense’ here is nicely ambiguous: both abandoning, or pretending to transcend, the ordinary world as we experience it, and (as a result) entering realms of religion-flavoured nonsense. This was the standard eighteenth-century view. Even the acute and generous sage of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, faltered when it came to representing the character of the Platonist, being able to manage no more than a caricature or pastiche of life spent in rapturous contemplation of Divine and Eternal Things, or perhaps the one Divine and Eternal Thing.16
One of the most forceful rejections of Plato comes from the historian and essayist Lord Macaulay, writing yet later, in 1837, when the Victorian adoption of Plato was just getting under way:
Assuredly if the tree which Socrates planted and Plato watered is to be judged of by its flowers and leaves, it is the noblest of trees. But if we take the homely test of Bacon, if we judge of the tree by its fruits, our opinion of it may perhaps be less favourable. When we sum up all the useful truths which we owe to that philosophy, to what do they amount? We find, indeed, abundant proofs that some of those who cultivated it were men of the first order of intellect. We find among their writings incomparable specimens both of dialectical and rhetorical art. We have no doubt that the ancient controversies were of use, in so far as they served to exercise the faculties of the disputants; for there is no controversy so idle that it may not be of use in this way. But, when we look for something more, for something which adds to the comforts or alleviates the calamities of the human race, we are forced to own ourselves disappointed. We are forced to say with Bacon that this celebrated philosophy ended in nothing but disputation, that it was neither a vineyard nor an olive-ground, but an intricate wood of briars and thistles, from which those who lost themselves in it brought back many scratches and no food.17
The otherworldly Plato is certainly supposed to make his appearance in Republic. Part of its fascination is the cleavage between the relatively practical programme of moral and political education, and the mystical gloss on it somewhat rhapsodically voiced in the centre of the work. In those sections Plato certainly appears to downgrade the world of matter, the world of sense, as a mere world of shadows. The path of wisdom leads us away from concern with that world. By contrast there is a world of final, immutable, changeless objects of contemplation, at the summit of which stands the ultimate object of a special kind of knowledge independent of sense experience. This is also the ultimately real and the ultimately fitting object of love and desire: a constantly radiant eternal source of light, the form of the good itself. This is his ‘transcendental’ streak – meaning an interest in subject matters and ways of knowing beyond the empirical world, and beyond our access to it by means of sense experience. As we shall see, the interpretation of his idea of ascent is much contested, but however it falls out, Plato, like many theologians, would indignantly insist on his place in the reality-based community. It is just that the reality in which he is based is higher, better, beyond our everyday world of shadows and illusions, fixed and eternal – really real.
Religious Platonism is described by Aldous Huxley in terms of ‘the perennial philosophy’, in his book of that name:
the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being – the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions18
We may or may not find ourselves enchanted by the vision of a metaphysical ascent, depending on whether we were born Platonists or Aristotelians. Our point at present is that while it makes Plato a religious inspiration, it ought to have made him rebarbative to those of a more empirical bent, and as I have been detailing, it has fairly often done so. Yet Republic has been not only an inspiration to poets and mystics, but the trusted companion of educators and reformers, and men with their finger firmly on the pulse of government and current affairs, such as John Stuart Mill or Shelley himself (whose poetry was firmly in the service of political reform) or that pillar of Victorian earnestness, the renowned Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett.19
Part of the solution may be that the otherworldly theme is more prominent in other dialogues, such as the Timaeus and the Phaedo. It was the first of these especially that came down through antiquity to influence Christian thought, the Neoplatonists of the third century AD, St Augustine, Boethius, the Renaissance Platonists, and for that matter Coleridge himself. One can ignore the metaphysical ambition for large parts of Republic, reading the work as Plato-lite, as it were. There is still a visionary quality about it, but then only in the sense that it promotes an ideal or image of what a better social world, or a better person, would be like. In that sense, almost any work of moral and political philosophy, from the Upanishads to the New Testament to Marx, is visionary. And the contrast with Aristotle breaks down, for he too has his ideals and his recipes for the good life. Aristotle himself spent some twenty years as a member of Plato’s circle in Athens, which scarcely suggests disaffection root and branch.
Much of Republic can be read as Plato-lite. These parts can be read regardless of our attitude to the heavy-duty metaphysics of the central chapters, although we have to wrestle with Huxley’s perennial philosophy in due course, when we come to those central parts, and notably the part that everyone remembers, the Myth of the Cave. I shall argue that on its best interpretation, it is far from suggesting an airy-fairy, visionary picture of divine raptures and illuminations. In fact, we can tame it, and see it as no more than a sensible plea for just the kind of understanding of the actual world that science and mathematics offer us now, two millennia later. Perhaps Plato has been horribly betrayed by Platonists – not an uncommon fate for a great philosopher.
But there are other less doctrinal reasons why the sovereignty of Republic ought to be surprising. The work is long, sprawling and meandering. We shall find that far from holding water its arguments range from ordinarily leaky to leaky in that special, zany way that leaves some interpreters unable to recognize them as ever intended to hold water at all. Its apparent theory of human nature is fanciful, and might seem inconsistent. Its apparent political implications are mainly disagreeable, and often appalling. We should not mince words: in so far as Plato has a legacy in politics, it includes theocracy or rule by priests, militarism, nationalism, hierarchy, illiberalism, totalitarianism, and the complete disdain of the economic structures of society, born in his case of privileged slave-ownership. In Republic he managed simultaneously to attach himself both to the most static conservatism and to the most wild-eyed utopianism. On top of all that, the book’s theory of knowledge is a disaster. Its attempt to do what it apparently sets out to do, which is to show that the moral individual, and only the moral individual, is happy, is largely a sequence of conjuring tricks.
More insidiously, in so far as there is now an aesthetic tone associated with Plato, it is not one to which we easily succumb, unless we have absorbed too much of it to escape. Plato’s high summer, in England at least, lay in the golden glow of the late Victorian and Edwardian age – the vaguely homoerotic, vaguely religious, emotionally arrested, leisured, class-conscious world of playing fields, expensive schools and lazy universities, the world of Walter Pater, or E. M. Forster, of half-forgotten belletrists and aesthetes like John Addington Symonds or Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, or golden boy-poets like Rupert Brooke. This is not the world around us. It is not quite a world of slave-ownership, but capitalism throws up its own drones.
An equally shocking thing about it in some people’s eyes is that in writing Republic Plato utterly betrayed his teacher Socrates. Socrates is the first and greatest liberal hero and martyr to freedom in thought and speech. For writers like John Stuart Mill and George Grote – practical, liberal, utilitarian thinkers – this was the real Socrates, the eternal spirit of reflection, criticism and potentially of opposition to the state itself. But in Republic he is presented as an out-and-out dogmatist, rather than the open-minded, patient, questioning spirit his admirers love. He is shown as the spokesman for a repressive, authoritarian, static, hierarchical society in which everything up to and including sexual relations and birth control is regulated by the political classes, who deliberately use lies for the purpose. He presents a social system in which the liberal Socrates would have been executed a great deal more promptly than he was by the Athenian democracy. In Republic the liberal Socrates has become the spokesman for a dictatorship. In presenting this figure Plato even betrayed his own calling, being once a poet, who now calls for the poets to be banned.
A work may have many defects, yet be forgiven if the author comes through as a creature of sweetness and light, just as Plato’s literary creation, the Socrates of the earlier dialogues, does. But there is not much help here. True, there must have been enough sweetness and light in Plato to create the figure of the heroic, liberal Socrates in the first place. But if that figure evaporates, as it does in Republic, there is not much else to go into the balance. We know very little about Plato, and what there is to know is not generally appealing. If he is put in historical context, we may find an archetypal grumpy old man, a disenchanted aristocrat, hating the Athenian democracy, convinced that the wrong people are in charge, with a deep fear of democracy itself, constantly sneering at artisans, farmers, and indeed all productive labour, deeply contemptuous of any workers’ ambition for education, and finally manifesting an immature hankering after the appalling military despotism of Sparta.
But as so often with Plato, there is a complication to that picture, nicely brought out in Friedrich Nietzsche’s pleased reaction to the delightful fact that on Plato’s deathbed he turned out to have been reading the comic writer Aristophanes (who was also a friend):
there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato’s secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait [little fact] that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no ‘Bible’, nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic – but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life – a Greek life which he repudiated – without an Aristophanes?20
We are told that Jesus wept, but not that he ever laughed. With Plato, as with Socrates, laughter is often nearer than it seems. This is a good sign. Perhaps the grumpy old man was not quite so grumpy after all. But this does not really matter, for it is the concrete, enduring book that concerns us, not its shadowy and departed author. And it is a good dictum that while many books are wrongly forgotten, no book is wrongly remembered. So we need to work harder to come to terms with the unquestioned staying power of Republic. We need to understand something of the hold this book has had and continues to have on the imagination of readers. What follows is a modest attempt at that task.
It is written, as is perhaps already apparent, by a natural sceptic. My temperament is irreligious and empiricist, down with Aristotle and the reality-based community, rather than up with Platonism in the heavens. When at the beginning of my philosophical life I came across Plato’s dialogues, I was far from enchanted, even by the earlier, less dogmatic ones. I could see that the figure of Socrates had a certain charm, but only up to a point, as his relentless grindings put me in mind of nothing more than some dreadful lawyer bent on confusing any poor victim in his clutches. I could respond to his rhetoric, rising to something sublime when, for instance, in the Crito, he defends his submission to the unjust verdict of the city of Athens that condemned him to death. But even here the heroism grated a little, striking me in some moods as a kitsch reduction to absurdity of classical virtue.
I saw Plato’s arguments themselves as often little more than cheap point-scoring, and certainly no better than the material that he puts in the mouth of his professed opponents, the sophists. Worse than that, I saw his whole picture of the soul’s ascent as a reactionary, primitive, useless obstacle to the path of real understanding, which lies in science. Plato, together with his vulgarization in Christianity, was something that had to be overcome in order for the Enlightenment to win. So it is not in a spirit of piety that I enter on this slight essay.
But I would plead that this distance is a kind of qualification for what I am attempting. True, it means I have little conscience about skipping over tracts of discussion that still strike me as profitless, where more sympathetic or more patient interpreters strain every nerve to extract some real or imagined good from them. Perhaps my best defence is that if even someone like myself could come to understand the overwhelming intellectual or moral or spiritual force that history has allowed to Plato, then I might be well placed to enable others to follow, more so than if I had started even partly willing to let myself get carried away.
This mind-set also explains something about the architecture of the book. I had originally planned a run-through of the highlights of Republic, followed by an essay in the history of ideas, saying something about how later cultures and later thinkers responded to it. This plan foundered, because I am neither a classicist nor a historian by training. I find it easy to tiptoe past large tracts of history, here at least following the distinguished early twentieth-century Platonist Paul Shorey:
We need not recur to the Middle Ages further than to add one example of medieval confusion of thought and of the way in which the Timaeus of Plato exalted their imaginations and confounded their ideas.21
Like Shorey, I find I can sidle past quite a lot of the history of Platonism, with nothing but a sigh of relief.
Indeed, I can congratulate myself on being unusually free of what Bertrand Russell called the evil of specialization, which dictates that ‘a man must not write on Plato unless he has spent so much of his youth on Greek as to have had no time for the things Plato thought important’.22 This means that my instinct is to home in on the ideas themselves, rather than on Plato’s own context as he writes them down, and still less on whatever Cicero or Augustine or King Alfred or John Stuart Mill made of them. Instead, I have freely mingled presenting the plot of the book, the historical residues and responses, and something of the cultural worlds that Plato helped to shape. Perhaps this means that I am not writing a biography of the book, and certainly I am not writing a history of the life of Republic, so much as a case-study of it, but I suppose that too is a kind of biography. So Plato himself, Christianity, seventeenth-century writers like Locke or Hobbes, nineteenth-century ones like Nietzsche, twenty-first century neo-conservatives and many others can find themselves cheek by jowl in any section. Perhaps the chapters to come are best read only as a preparation for a biography of the book, telling us just a little of why its life has been so long and so distinguished.