The Republic

The Republic — summary

A shepherd finds a ring and the world breaks open

Picture a young shepherd in the hills of Lydia, somewhere in modern Turkey, more than two and a half thousand years ago. There is a storm. The ground splits open near where his sheep are grazing, and he climbs down into the crack. Inside, he finds a hollow bronze horse with little windows in its sides. He looks through one of the windows and sees a corpse, larger than any human he has ever seen, naked except for a single gold ring on its hand. The shepherd takes the ring and climbs back out.

A few days later, sitting with the other shepherds, he twists the ring on his finger. He becomes invisible. The men around him talk about him as if he had walked off into the trees. He twists it the other way and he is back. The shepherd is named Gyges. Within weeks, he uses the ring to seduce the queen of Lydia, kill the king, and seize the throne. The story is told in The Republic by a young man named Glaucon, and the question Glaucon hands his older friend Socrates is brutally simple. If you had that ring, would you still bother being a good person? And if not, what was your goodness ever really worth?

That question is the engine of The Republic. Plato wrote the book around 375 BC, decades after his teacher Socrates had been executed by the Athenian democracy and his own family had been mixed up in a short, blood-soaked dictatorship called the Thirty Tyrants. He had watched a city he loved tear itself apart and kill the wisest man in it. He sat down to ask, in maybe four hundred pages of conversation, what justice actually is, why we should care about it when nobody is watching, and what kind of person, family, school, and city we would have to build for justice to have any chance.