Crafting the Perfect ‘Republic'
Plato's most far-reaching work is today his most widely read, indeed the most widely assigned text by any author at America's top universities (according to a 2016 study by the Open Syllabus Project, a non-profit group that surveys college curricula). That's surely what Plato hoped to achieve as he composed his 'Republic.' From stylistic clues we can tell that he kept revising the work through most of his adult life (that is, through the first half of the fourth century B.C.), far longer than any of his other 30-odd dialogues. An ancient Greek anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, holds that just after his death a tablet was found on which, in his last hours, he had been reworking the opening sentence of the 'Republic.'
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