author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not
worked out the argument to the end before he begins. The reader who seeks
to find some one idea under which the whole may be conceived, must
necessarily seize on the vaguest and most general. Thus Stallbaum, who is
dissatisfied with the ordinary explanations of the argument of the
Republic, imagines himself to have found the true argument 'in the
representation of human life in a State perfected by justice, and governed
according to the idea of good.' There may be some use in such general
descriptions, but they can hardly be said to express the design of the
writer. The truth is, that we may as well speak of many designs as of one;
nor need anything be excluded from the plan of a great work to which the
mind is naturally led by the association of ideas, and which does not
interfere with the general purpose. What kind or degree of unity is to be
sought after in a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is a
problem which has to be determined relatively to the subject-matter. To
Plato himself, the enquiry 'what was the intention of the writer,' or 'what
was the principal argument of the Republic' would have been hardly
intelligible, and therefore had better be at once dismissed (cp. the
Introduction to the Phaedrus).

Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to
Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the State?
Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah, or 'the day of the
Lord,' or the suffering Servant or people of God, or the 'Sun of
righteousness with healing in his wings' only convey, to us at least, their
great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals to us his
own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of good--like the
sun in the visible world;--about human perfection, which is justice--about
education beginning in youth and continuing in later years--about poets and
sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind