**A monumental work of moral and political philosophy, a book surpassed only by the Bible in its formative influence on two thousand years of Western thought.*What does it mean to be good? What enables us to distinguish right from wrong? How should human virtues be translated into a just society? In...

**A monumental work of moral and political philosophy, a book surpassed only by the Bible in its formative influence on two thousand years of Western thought.*What does it mean to be good? What enables us to distinguish right from wrong? How should human virtues be translated into a just society? In the course of its tautly reasoned Socratic dialogues, The Republic * accomplishes nothing less than an anatomy of the soul and an exhaustive description of a State that both mirrors and enforces the soul's ideal harmony. The resulting text is at once mystical and elegantly logical and may be read as a template for the societies in which most of us live today.