The Republic Interpretation Of The Democracy Of Athens

The Athens,which for a while during the latter part of the fifth century BCbecame the most powerful city-state in Greece, before it was defeated by Spartain the long Peloponnesian War. Politically, Athens stood for democracy andunder the city’s unique democratic system, all male citizens took an active partin governing. This gave it great advantages over its rivals. Athens not onlygrew rich and powerful as a dynamic trading centre, and ultimately imperialpower, but also became the acknowledged cultural centre of the Greek world.Plato was born around429BC into an aristocratic family and must havegot to know Socrates as avery young man. Socrates’s teachings had animmense effect on Plato: Socrates appears as the main speaker in nearly allPlato’s dialogues, who challenged prevailing ideas of goodness and knowledgeusing a particular method of conversational cross-examination, which way forRepublic was wrote by.At the heart of Plato’s republic is one of the most disturbing and fertileimages in world literature, the dialogue’s main speaker, Socrates, compares human beings to prisoners in a cave. they are fettered by their necks and legs,so they can look only at what is in front of them.In the Cave myth, Plato presents about as dark a vision of a policy as anywriter has imagined. Not only is the locale an underground cavern-completelylacking in the architectural glories with which Plato was surrounded inAthens—but the inhabitants or citizens are in chains. If the Cave represents thecity, it is a place from which enlightened people will want to escape as quicklyas possible, and to which they will return only reluctantly or upon compulsion,for a political writer–and in republic Plato is at least in part a political writer–Plato seems to have an extremely negative view of the pois. he did not have ahigh opinion, as we shall see, of Athenian democracy; this,after all, was thepolitical system which murdened his great teacher and friend. A famousquotation from the Gorgias sums up this disdain for what many have seen as amodel city:“Not moderation and uprightness, but harbours and dockyards andwalls and tribute–money were what they filled the city with.”...