Plato’s Republic Retold

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates retells a life-changing conversation he had the day before with none other than the author’s two older brothers. Here, as elsewhere, Socrates carefully listened to what his interlocutors said but also to what they did not say. The gap between the spoken and the unspoken is what motivates his penetrating and challenging questions, and confers upon both questions and answers their dramatic force and significance: talk becomes action. While translations of Plato can fail to communicate this existential motive, a retelling cannot; if the reader loses the thread, he finds himself speculating about Plato’s warrants and agenda in having his characters say what they say. But Plato’s greatness consists exactly in his ability to depict people thinking and talking without an agenda of his own, enabling us, in turn, to listen to Socrates in the way he listens to others, and for the first time ever to retell this revolutionary conversation in all its greatness.