Lane Melissa S. - The Republic

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

THE REPUBLIC

PLATO (c. 427347 BC) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He came from a family that had long played a prominent part in Athenian politics, and it would have been natural for him to follow the same course. He declined to do so, however, disgusted by the violence and corruption of Athenian political life, and sickened especially by the execution in 399 of his friend and teacher, Socrates. Inspired by Socrates inquiries into the nature of ethical standards, Plato sought a cure for the ills of society not in politics but in philosophy, and arrived at his fundamental and lasting conviction that those ills would never cease until philosophers became rulers or rulers philosophers. At an uncertain date in the early fourth century BC he founded in Athens the Academy, the first permanent institution devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the prototype of all western universities. He travelled extensively, notably to Sicily as political adviser to Dionysius II, ruler of Syracuse.

Plato wrote over twenty philosophical dialogues, and there are also extant under his name thirteen letters, whose genuineness is keenly disputed. His literary activity extended over perhaps half a century: few other writers have exploited so effectively the grace and precision, the flexibility and power, of Greek prose.

SIR DESMOND LEE was born in 1908 and was a scholar both at Repton School and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained a double first in classics. He was a fellow and tutor at Corpus Christi, and a university lecturer there from 1937 to 1948. His lifelong association with the college continued after he became headmaster of Clifton College in 1948. In 1954 he left Clifton College to take up the position of headmaster at Winchester College where he remained until 1968. In 1959, 1960 and again in 1967 he was chairman of the Headmasters Conference. Returning to Cambridge in 1968 he became Senior Research Fellow at University (now Wolfson) College, and then from 1973 to 1978 President of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.

He is also the translator of Platos Timaeus and Critias in the Penguin Classics.

Desmond Lee died in 1993.

MELISSA LANE received her PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University, where she teaches the history of political thought and political philosophy in the history faculty. She is a fellow of Kings College. Her books include Method and Politics in Platos Statesman (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Platos Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind (Duckworth, 2001).

RACHANA KAMTEKAR teaches philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on ancient ethical and political philosophy, and she has written on the relationship between social justice and happiness in Plato, and on moral development and moral motivation in both Plato and the Stoics. She was educated at Stanford University and the University of Chicago. She previously taught at Williams College.

PLATO

Translated by
DESMOND LEE
With an Introduction by
MELISSA LANE

SECOND EDITION

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in this translation 1955
Second edition (revised) 1974
Reprinted with additional revisions 1987
Reissued with new Further Reading 2003
Reissued with new Introduction 2007
1

Copyright H. D. P. Lee 1955, 1974, 1987
Further Reading Rachana Kamtekar, 2003
Introduction Melissa Lane, 2007
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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