'philosophers are kings;' and there is another and higher education,
intellectual as well as moral and religious, of science as well as of art,
and not of youth only but of the whole of life. Such a State is hardly to
be realized in this world and quickly degenerates. To the perfect ideal
succeeds the government of the soldier and the lover of honour, this again
declining into democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but
regular order having not much resemblance to the actual facts. When 'the
wheel has come full circle' we do not begin again with a new period of
human life; but we have passed from the best to the worst, and there we
end. The subject is then changed and the old quarrel of poetry and
philosophy which had been more lightly treated in the earlier books of the
Republic is now resumed and fought out to a conclusion. Poetry is
discovered to be an imitation thrice removed from the truth, and Homer, as
well as the dramatic poets, having been condemned as an imitator, is sent
into banishment along with them. And the idea of the State is supplemented
by the revelation of a future life.

The division into books, like all similar divisions (Cp. Sir G.C. Lewis in
the Classical Museum.), is probably later than the age of Plato. The
natural divisions are five in number;--(1) Book I and the first half of
Book II down to the paragraph beginning, 'I had always admired the genius
of Glaucon and Adeimantus,' which is introductory; the first book
containing a refutation of the popular and sophistical notions of justice,
and concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues, without arriving at any
definite result. To this is appended a restatement of the nature of
justice according to common opinion, and an answer is demanded to the
question--What is justice, stripped of appearances? The second division
(2) includes the remainder of the second and the whole of the third and
fourth books, which are mainly occupied with the construction of the first
State and the first education. The third division (3) consists of the