Plato's Dialogue

Persons & Scenery

The involved characters are Socrates (the narrator); Glaucon (Plato’s brother); Adeimantus (another brother of Plato’s); Polemarchus; Cephalus; Thrasymachus; Cleitophon; And others who were mute auditors. The scenery is the house of Polemarchus and his father Cephalus at the Piraeus. The dialogue is narrated by Socates the day after it took place to: Timaeus, Hemocates, Critias, and a nameless person.

Structure Of The Dialogue

Book I of The Republic focus on a passion Socrates had, that is not defining justice in its word meaning, but rather finding out the very nature of justice. It aims to answer what is justice and is it more profitable than tyranny.

In this dialogue, Plato spoke through his teacher Socrates, seeking a definition for justice. Socrates denied every suggested and introduced definition and refuted them with their own unthinkable contradictions. Still he offers no definition of justice– In his mind he was going through a definition of his own, benefiting from this discussion to make sure that it makes a respectable weight of sense, before announcing it in his following books. The discussion ends in blur, and everyone is left in confusion– even Socrates.

The book opens with a description of the scene, where Socrates and his friend Glaucon (one of Plato’s brothers) are returning from some religious festivals in the Piraeus. The two men were ambushed by Adeimantus (another brother of Plato’s), Polemarchus who asks them in a rather friendly-harsh way to come and sit with some friends and talk a bit.

The discussion begins.

Socrates starts talking to the old rich Cephalus and asks him about old age and its difficulties, in which Cephalus reports, that old ag...

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...take them willingly without payment, unless under the idea that they govern for the advantage not of themselves but of others?"

Some preliminary answers come immediately to mind: the personal rewards to be gained from performing a job well are commonly distinct from its intrinsic aims; just people are rightly regarded as superior to unjust people in intelligence and character; every society believes that justice (as conceived in that society) is morally obligatory; and justice is the proper virtue (Gk. areth [aretê]) of the human soul. But if Socrates himself might have been satisfied with responses of this sort, Plato the philosophical writer was not. There must be an answer that derives more fundamentally from the nature of reality (Plato: The State and the Soul).

References:

Plato: The State and the Soul, 18/12/2011, http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2g.htm