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PLATO'S REPUBLIC CONTINUES TO AROUSE intense controversy among commentators, both for its ethical and political project and for its psychological, epistemological, and ontological implications for the knowledge of philosophers, who, says Plato, should be set as guides for such a project. Considering just a few examples from recent years, we might recall that a new critical edition of the dialogue has been published1 that contains significant innovations both in the text and in the attribution of lines to speakers. Moreover, this new edition has been accompanied by a volume of philological commentary edited by the same author.2 Numerous translations in the main modern languages have also been published with a more or less detailed apparatus of notes.3 An equally significant quantity of works of commentary, individual or miscellaneous, of extremely varied origin and composition has appeared, from the monumental work coordinated by M. Vegetti (1998- 2007), to the volumes of O. Höffe (1997), E. N. Ostenfeld (1998), S. Sayers (1999), R. Gutiérrez (2003), B. Mitchell and J. R. Lucas (2003), S. Rosen (2005), M. Dixsaut (2005a-b), G. Santas (2006), and G. R. F. Ferrari (2007). Just this brief indication of the mass of philological, historical, and philosophical studies suggests the constant-and constantly renewed-appeal of a dialogue that is rightly considered as one of the most influential and representative of Plato's thought.
This is not, of course, the appropriate context to suggest an interpretation of the Republic ; more modestly, I simply wish to indicate some of the main lines of discussion that the recent critical literature has followed in order to bring out some of the problems raised by a reading of the work. A preliminary difficulty that should be faced in some way concerns the object of the dialogue: if Diogenes Laertius had no doubt in classifying the Republic as one of Plato's political dialogues (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 3.50-51), it is fairly easy to see that the work's characteristic interweaving of themes can only be dissolved into clearly defined sections at the price of rather forced schematizations.4 In the face of such a complex articulation of the theme, one inevitably wonders where the essentially "political" nucleus of the dialogue is to be found, unless, of course,...