The Republic

What is justice, and is the just person happier than the unjust? Socrates takes up that question one evening at the Piraeus and, to answer it, builds a city in words: its guardians and their education, the philosopher-kings who rule it, women sharing the guardians' work, and the decline of states from the rule of the best through timocracy, oligarchy and democracy down to tyranny. Along the way come the allegory of the cave, the image of the divided line and the myth of Er, which closes the dialogue with a vision of the soul's journey after death.

Plato wrote the Republic in the fourth century BC, and it remains the most widely read work of Greek philosophy and a starting point for every later argument about the just state. LibriVox volunteers share the reading of its ten books, in Benjamin Jowett's Victorian translation, in a little over thirteen hours.