ABSTRACT
THE DIFFICULTY of the Republic lies in part in the fact that Plato tries to achieve so much in so little space. The question, What is justice? is originally put as a simple request for a definition; but it becomes an attempt to characterize both a virtue which can be manifested in individual lives and a form of political life in which virtuous men will be at home, insofar as they can ever be at home in the world of change and of unreality. Both have already been described in the course of outlining the arguments of the Republic; what remains is to stress their internal connection. For in fact Plato’s morals and Plato’s politics are closely interdependent. Each logically requires to be completed by the other. We can best understand that this is so by examining the structure of two dialogues of Plato, one wholly devoted to the question of how the individual should live, and the other entirely concerned with politics. In each case we shall discover that the argument ends in mid-air, and that we are forced to look elsewhere for a complementary argument. The first of these dialogues is the Symposium, a work which belongs to the same middle period of Plato’s life as the Republic does; the second is the Laws, which was written at the very end of Plato’s life. Socrates is the central character of the Symposium, and this is moreover the pre-Platonic Socrates, the teacher of Alcibiades and the target for Aristophanes. By the time of the Laws Socrates is no longer present in the dialogue at all. This in itself emphasizes the sharp contrast: the agnostic Socrates would never have set himself up as a legislator.
