Greco-Christian stream·Dialogues of Plato·The Republic
The Republic — justice; the ideal city; the philosopher-king
The longest and most influential of the dialogues. Ten books on justice — its analogy in the structure of the soul and of the just city; the philosopher-king; the three classes; the noble lie; the analogy of the divided line; the allegory of the cave; the doctrine of the form of the Good. The crown of Plato's middle period.
Source context
- Theme
- justice, the ideal state, and the tripartite soul as political and metaphysical order
- Soul-faculty
- Intellectual Soul
Steiner
- GA 8, chapter 4Steiner treats Plato's dialogues as initiatory instruments in which philosophical content is inseparable from the spiritual condition of the reader, suggesting that works such as the Republic encode mystery-wisdom in a form accessible to progressive degrees of inner development.
- GA 18, p01c02Steiner identifies Plato's dialogue form as the vehicle through which Socratic philosophical investigation — the search for universal ideas — was preserved and transmuted into a literary-philosophical corpus foundational to Western thought.
- GA 208, 1921-10-23Steiner notes that Plato's use of dialogue reflects his own inner experience of receiving wisdom through an entity that spoke within him, giving the dialogic form a deeper spiritual justification than mere literary convention.
Cross-tradition
- Vedanta / Sanskrit political philosophy (Manusmriti, Arthashastra)Cross-tradition congruence appears in the tripartite social order — philosopher-rulers, warriors, producers — which structurally parallels the varna schema of Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya as cosmically grounded functional castes rather than merely political classes.
- Kabbalah / NeoplatonismCross-tradition congruence exists between Plato's hierarchical soul-faculties (reason, spirit, appetite) and the Neoplatonic-Kabbalistic schema of descending hypostases, in which each level of the macrocosm has a corresponding faculty in the microcosmic human constitution.
The Republic
translated by Benjamin Jowett New York, C. Scribner's sons [1871]
THE INTRODUCTION
ARGUMENT
CHARACTERS
BOOK I
SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS - GLAUCON - ADEIMANTUS
GLAUCON - CEPHALUS - SOCRATES
CEPHALUS - SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS
SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS
SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS - THRASYMACHUS
SOCRATES - THRASYMACHUS - GLAUCON
SOCRATES - CLEITOPHON - POLEMARCHUS - THRASYMACHUS
SOCRATES - THRASYMACHUS
SOCRATES - GLAUCON
SOCRATES - GLAUCON - THRASYMACHUS
BOOK II
GLAUCON
SOCRATES - GLAUCON
ADEIMANTUS -SOCRATES
ADEIMANTUS
SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
SOCRATES - GLAUCON
SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
BOOK III
SOCRATES - GLAUCON
BOOK IV
SOCRATES - GLAUCON
BOOK V
SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS - GLAUCON - THRASYMACHUS
BOOK VI
SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
GLAUCON - SOCRATES
BOOK VII
BOOK VIII
SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
BOOK IX
SOCRATES - GLAUCON
BOOK X
SOCRATES