ABSTRACT
It has recently been discovered that the versions of Plato’s REPUBLIC that we have are in fact later distorted versions produced by Idealist philosophers—so-called neo-Platonists, and that Plato himself was, like his pupil Aristotle, much more of a naturalist than we could have known. The discovery of fragments of the original REPUBLIC in jars buried under the Acropolis, and which the academic establishment tried to keep hidden from us for fear of wrecking centuries of scholarship, has caused a complete re-evaluation of our ideas of Platonism. Here, as an example, is a first translation of the opening of Book VII, the famous Allegory or Parable of the Cave, as it appears in Fragment #317 of the original text. Readers may wish to compare with Francis Cornford’s excellent (if a little terse) translation of the accepted version (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), on which I have depended for those portions of the text that indeed overlap. Socrates, of course, is speaking, and the ever agreeable—not to say obseqious—Glaucon, is the straight man.
