ABSTRACT
Every part of a work as rich as the Republic suffers from being boiled down into a sequence of arguments. In this instance Books 8 and 9, textured and perceptive accounts of both political history and psychology, suffer the most. They contain fewer arguments, and simpler ones, than the rest of the Republic, and this chapter's discussion of those arguments must not be taken to exhaust these books' value. Most of Book 8 and the first pages of Book 9 rely on anecdotes and examples. The theoretical structure returns in Book
9, when Plato finishes his catalogue of bad cities and people and looks only at the most just and most unjust individuals; at that point he introduces lines of argument conceptually unrelated to the preceding parade of vices, lines of argument which, moreover, take his conclusions in a direction we could not have foreseen at the end of Book 4.
