Reading plan
The Republic Reading Plan
One night's argument, in three movements and two answers
Works
3
Time
About 25 hours
Pace
The dialogue takes about three weeks at an hour a night. The whole plan fits in six weeks.
The runs sixteen to eighteen hours for most readers, the length of a long novel, and the famous set pieces are minutes of it. The cave is four pages. The ring of Gyges is one. What the excerpts leave out is what the book actually is: a single conversation, over a single night, about whether justice is worth having when no one is watching.
The book opens as a dinner party going wrong, which is where readers expecting a treatise stall. Socrates is stopped on the road home from a festival and half-compelled to stay. An old man says the best thing wealth buys is dying without debts to gods or men, and leaves to finish his sacrifices. Then Thrasymachus, coiled like a wild beast in Plato's own stage direction, springs: justice is whatever profits the stronger. The ideal city, when Socrates finally builds it, is scaffolding for that quarrel, the soul written in letters large enough to read.
This plan reads the dialogue in three movements, then two answers. Aristotle spent twenty years in Plato's Academy and takes the city apart room by room in the . Augustine, answering pagans who blamed Christians for the sack of Rome, moves the just city out of politics altogether.
The plan
1.Plato, Republic
c. 375 BC
Format
Read Books I-IV. The reading guide paces the dialogue one card per book, with questions for each session.
Why this work
Socrates goes down to the Piraeus to see a festival and is stopped on the road home by friends who joke that he cannot persuade men who refuse to listen. Book I ends with Thrasymachus silenced but not convinced, so Glaucon renews the attack with the ring of Gyges: a shepherd finds a ring that makes him invisible, and with it takes the kingdom. If the just man and the unjust man each wore one, would their paths differ? The city Socrates builds across the next three books exists to answer that question, and Book IV finds justice in it: each part doing its own work, in the city and in the soul.
Why start here
Do not skim Book I as throat-clearing. Every definition it tries and breaks, paying debts, helping friends, the advantage of the stronger, returns later, and Thrasymachus's position is the one the whole dialogue is built to defeat.
Watch Glaucon and Adeimantus set the terms in Book II: they demand justice praised for itself, stripped of reputation and reward. Everything Socrates builds afterward is constrained by what the brothers asked for.
2.Plato, Republic
c. 375 BC
Format
Read Books V-VII: the three waves and the great images. Cards five through seven of the reading guide cover this stretch.
Why this work
Socrates is interrupted mid-argument and made to defend his city's strangest features. Three waves, he says, each bigger than the last: women trained as guardians, the guardians' families abolished, and philosophers made kings. Defending the third wave forces the dialogue upward into its most famous ground, the sun, the divided line, and the cave: prisoners watching shadows, one of them dragged into daylight, and the question of what you owe the people still chained where you sat.
The connection
The city of Book IV looked finished. These books ask who could actually rule it, and the answer is the person who least wants to, which is why the philosopher must be compelled back down into the cave.
Ideas touched
Time
About 5 hours
Read the cave at the start of Book VII with the divided line from the end of Book VI still open. The cave is the line dramatized, and each stage of the prisoner's ascent maps onto one of its segments.
3.Plato, Republic
c. 375 BC
Format
Read Books VIII-X: the decline, the tyrant, and the Myth of Er. The reading guide finishes in its last three cards.
Why this work
The ideal city dies in order: honor-rule, then oligarchy, then democracy, then tyranny, each regime bred from the failures of the last, each with a matching soul. The tyrant arrives as democracy's favorite son and ends as the least free man in his own city; Book IX computes his misery with mock precision, down to a multiplier. Then Book X expels the poets and closes the whole night with a myth: souls between lives, choosing their next ones, most of them badly.
The connection
Glaucon asked in Book II for justice defended even when invisible and unrewarded. Book IX's portrait of the tyrant's soul is the direct payment on that debt: injustice with the ring on, seen from the inside.
Ideas touched
Time
About 5 hours
In the Myth of Er, the souls choose their own lives and a spokesman announces that the chooser bears the blame, god is blameless. Hold that one line against everything the dialogue has said about education, which is the art of choosing well.
4.Aristotle, Politics
c. 335 BC
Format
Read Books I-III, then Book VII. Book II contains the direct critique of the Republic.
Why this work
Aristotle spent twenty years in Plato's Academy, and Book II of the takes his teacher's city apart clause by clause. Against the abolished family: what is common to the most people gets the least care. Against the city's engineered unity: a city is by nature a plurality, and unify it too far and it stops being a city at all. Around the critique he builds his own account from the ground up, household to village to polis, with the claim the whole tradition still argues about: man is by nature a political animal.
The connection
This is the student answering, and the method is the message. Plato deduces one city from the idea of justice; Aristotle collects constitutions and asks what actually holds cities together. The quarrel between those two procedures is still running.
Ideas touched
Time
About 5 hours
Mark every place Aristotle names Socrates in Book II. Each naming is a specific provision of the Republic being rejected, and together they map exactly which parts of Plato's city he thought could not survive contact with human beings.
5.Augustine, City of God
AD 413-426
Format
Read Books XIV and XIX: the two cities, and the two kinds of peace.
Why this work
Rome fell to Alaric in 410, and refugees blamed the disaster on the abandoned old gods. Augustine's answer took thirteen years and turned into a theory of history: two cities, built by two loves, love of self reaching contempt of God, and love of God reaching contempt of self. Book XIX turns to politics proper and takes up Cicero's definition of a republic, a people bound by agreement about justice, to argue that by its own standard Rome never was one.
The connection
At the end of Book IX, Socrates concedes that his city may exist nowhere on earth, a pattern laid up in heaven for the man who wants to found himself. Augustine takes the concession literally and builds on it: no earthly regime is the just city, and the best politics can do is keep a negotiated peace while the real city is on pilgrimage through it.
Watch what Augustine does with peace in Book XIX. Even a band of robbers wants it, which makes peace the one good every city seeks and no earthly city secures, the exact structural role justice played in Plato.
Common questions
How long does it take to read the Republic?
Sixteen to eighteen hours of actual reading for most people, across ten books that average about ninety minutes each. At an hour a night, that is two and a half to three weeks. This plan splits the dialogue into movements of roughly six, five, and five hours, so you always know how much is left.
Which translation should I read?
Grube revised by Reeve (Hackett) is the classroom standard: accurate and plain. Allan Bloom's version is the most literal and comes with a long interpretive essay; Desmond Lee (Penguin) reads most smoothly. The book is conversation, so test them aloud: read Thrasymachus's first speech in each and keep the one that sounds like a man losing his temper.
Do I need to read all ten books?
To get what the book is for, yes. The famous stretch is Books V through VII, but the challenge that drives everything is set by Glaucon and Adeimantus in Book II, and the payment on that debt does not arrive until Book IX. Skip the decline of the regimes and you get the cave without the reason it was built.
Why does Plato ban the poets?
Homer was the schoolbook of Greece, so expelling the poets in Book X is an argument about education, not entertainment. Plato's charge is that imitation feeds the part of the soul the whole dialogue has been trying to subordinate, and he calls the fight with poetry ancient even then. He also issues an invitation: let anyone who can defend poetry return it to the city. The tradition has been answering ever since, starting with Aristotle's .
Where to go from here
The tradition never stopped rebuilding the city. Hobbes raises it out of fear, Rousseau out of consent, and the American founders out of compromise, and this site's Power, Law, and the Citizen plan follows that argument from Aristotle to Tocqueville. Read it next and the becomes the opening move of a twenty-four-century game.
The ideas this plan kept touching, justice, tyranny, education, the soul, each have their own page on this site, with the near the head of the line and the rest of the tradition answering it.