THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO - Studyplace

INTRODUCTION
PLATO, son of Ariston and Perictione, was born in 428/7 B.c. and
died, at the age of eighty or eighty-one, in 348/7. Both parents
came of distinguished families. His elder brothers, Glaucon and
Adeimantus, appear as young men in the Republic. In his youth
Plato became closely attached to Socrates, who by that time was
wholly engaged in the mission to his fellow citizens described in
the Apology.l Socrates was the one man in Athens who, in those
distracting days of war and revolution, stood aloof from active
life to inquire, with anyone who cared to talk with him, what
men should live for. Under this influence Plato's thought, from
first to last, was chiefly bent on the question how society could be
reshaped so that man might realize the best that is in him. This
is, above all, the theme of his central work, the Republic.
All Plato's childhood and youth were spent under the shadow
of the Peloponnesian War. The death of Pericles in 429 had
marked the close of the golden age (as it must have seemed in
retrospect) of fully developed democracy under the personal guidance
of a disinterested statesman. Born in the year of the revolution
at Corcyra and the revolt of Mitylene, Plato, as a child of
twelve, had seen the Athenian fleet set sail on the disastrous expedition
against Syracuse, and he was twenty-three when Athens
capitulated and lost her empire to Sparta. The steps by which this
empire had grown out of a defensive league of maritime states,
formed after the repulse of the Persian invader at Salamis (480),
are traced in the first book of Thucydides. The rule of Periclean
democracy over subjects who had once been allies had not been
oppressive; but the Athenians themselves, as represented by their
envoys at Sparta on the eve of the war, can find no better excuse
than the plea that empire was forced upon them by the three
most powerful motives, ambition, fear, and interest.
1 See Sir R. Livingstone's Portrait of Socrates in this series and F. M. Cornfard,
Bef(}f"e and afm- Socrates, Cambridge, 1932.
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