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Three or four years ago I did a quixotic thing. I spent six months writing a short "beginner's" guide to Plato's Republic. The commission came from a friend, who seemed to be showing remarkable confidence in entrusting this work to someone who had last studied the Republic as a schoolboy of 17. 1 wasn't just daunted by the magnitude of the task -- expounding perhaps the most all-encompassing and controversial text of western philosophy -- but also by the opposition I was taking on.
Plato hardly lacks for enemies: Karl Popper famously nailed him as the founding father of all kinds of totalitarianism, both communist and fascist.
The eugenic fantasies in Book Five of the Republic not only inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but also, more disastrously, politicians and scientists in societies as apparently dissimilar as Hitler's Third Reich and Roosevelt's America. But Plato's worst crime, for me, was his advocacy of extreme, Soviet-style censorship of the arts and his proposal, unless a convincing defence could be offered, to banish poets from his ideal state.
As I got stuck in, reading the text with my terribly rusty Greek using the Loeb and other translations, I began to see the truth of Heidegger's remark that "a dialogue by Plato is inexhaustible of itself, by its nature". Part of the beauty of the Republic is its lightness of tone. Those who regard Plato as a fascist have simply got it wrong. Or to put it another way, the Nazis and others made the mistake of taking him too literally.
Time and again the work asks for itself not to be taken too seriously: the words for laughter and play ring through it, as much as the idea of the good. Socrates (the dialogue's main speaker) ruefully admits that his proposals are more of a thought-adventure than a political blueprint. The whole thing is a conversation, rendered in prose of inspired spontaneity. You need to read it, above all, in the right, open spirit (as Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, paradoxically couldn't).
Then there is the fact that Plato, who proposes to banish poets, is himself a poet. For all his commitment to logos (reason) over mythos (story), Socrates, when he wants to express the most profound insights of the Republic, comes up with images, myths and parables.
Most profound of all is the image of the cave, that place of darkness where humanity lives in chains, entranced by a shadow-show of passing unrealities and, most devastatingly, unaware of its own captivity. The cave seems as uncannily relevant an image today, in a world entranced by the unrealities of celebrity and gross materialism, as it did to Augustine, Bacon and Jung. Then there is the ship of state, Socrates' picture of democracy in action, where no-one heeds the helmsman who might guide the vessel on its true course (away from the iceberg of global warming, perhaps).
However much you disagree with it, you cannot help but be energised by the Republic's passion, its intellectual verve and reach, its determination to track every great question which concerns us as human beings down to its irreducible core. Plato makes you think afresh about education (challenging the current obsession with skills and techniques), art, psychology, democracy.
I still can't be sure that Plato didn't really mean to banish all poets (not just bad poets), however regretfully. That is one point where 1 differ with a friend, with whom I have been conducting Platonic dialogues (about Plato, and in the spirit of Plato and Socrates, if that doesn't sound to pretentious) for nearly a decades.
My fried is a Platophile. Her Greek is much better than mine (she was brought up on Evvia), so she can enjoy the subtle playfulness of tone that no translation catches. She doesn't see Plato as the gloomy old misanthrope of some critics. Her favourite dialogue is the Phaedrus, the one that most beautifully captures the yearnings of love, described in one great passage as the growing pains of the wings of the soul.
This is the Plato, in her words, who believes "love inspires good works, and makes beautiful things".
Translator Irene Noel-Baker's most subversive (as it were) tribute to Plato is her inspired idea of using verse. She has gone one better than Shelley, who regard Plato as "a poet of the very first rank" and translated the Symposium into philosophical prose, not poetry.
Her free verse translation of Book Ten of the Republic (published by the Aldeburgh Bookshop in Suffolk, www.aldeburghbookshop.co.uk) works brilliantly in catching the spontaneity and airiness of the original, the way it catches though on the wing, and moves from phrase to phrase as much as argument to argument. No-one who read the Republic in this version could regard Plato as a fascist.
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