ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Plato's Republic—a conflicted text, a work that not only surreptitiously recomposed the oppositions of freedom and slavery faced by Plato and his contemporaries, but also provided a rhetorical comice for later disputants about democracy. If one approaches the Republic as the work of a political as well as philosophic imagination, Fredric Jameson might urge that he/she attempts to reveal the terms of Plato's ideological system, which the text represses. Typically, the closed text obscures its ideological purpose and represses opposing discourses. Plato's choice of disputants in the first book of the Republic provides the initial hint of the political purpose of the work. The social imaginary of Plato's racial myth is a slave society, the social order long familiar to Greeks of the Classical Age and before. Plato's fascinating deceits in the Republic were inspired by the supersession of a narrow class partisanship.
