ABSTRACT
In working out this system of truth, critics seem to suggest, Plato made stray sallies into the realm of practical politics, but these are an aberration, pardonable perhaps, because not too serious, in an intelligence otherwise detached and profound. Plato is in some ways wiser than his critics. He knew that the essential problem of Greek philosophy before his time was the problem of justice and its relation to the structure of the actual as well as the "ideal" or conceptual state. In the crisis of the Athenian democracy, there was a strong tendency for the "centrist" democrats like Cephalus to coalesce with the more ruthless and realistic "right-wing". Serious argument is reserved for Thrasymachus, against whom Socrates directed all his fire, supported, no doubt, by the sympathetic silence of Polemarchus, Cephalus' "heir to the argument". It is, perhaps, to dispel the unpleasant impression of this accusation arid this fact, that Socrates' deference to Cephalus is emphasized.
