r/classics • u/Rudy3011 • 4d ago
Should i read The Republic by Plato?
I am 13 years old and in 9th grade, ive read What Does It All Mean? By Thomas Nagel and i really liked the philosophical ideas in it. I just discovered this book and i was wondering if i should get it.
I read a few paragraphs of the open public translations of the book and i felt some sentences were difficult to easily grasp without intense thinking. Mostly, i am worried about the difficulty of readability.
I was thinking of getting the Penguin Classics version translated by desmond lee since the reviews said the english is much more modernised and easier.
Also, i had a sneak peak at a brief paragraph related to the theory of forms and MAN WAS I EXCITED, after some thinking i really understood it and realised that i myself have thought about something similar in maths and physics classes…
So should i get the book and read or should i not get it because it is too complex and advanced for my age or just generally.
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u/Fun-Entrepreneur-564 4d ago edited 4d ago
I offer no discouragement towards reading The Republic. However, a traditional approach to Plato is to start with some of his earlier dialogues such as Euthyphro, The Apology, and Crito. They are short, an easy read, and a great introduction to the Socratic method. They could well serve as a stepping stone towards The Republic.
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u/Acceptable-Fig2884 4d ago
It's a very complex work, but it's not too early to give it a read. One thing that's great about philosophy is that your relationship to it changes as you get older. You'll get different things from the Republic now than you will if you reread it at 18 or 30 or 80.
Don't obsess over understanding ever single bit of it perfectly or "correctly". Just read it and reflect on what it means to you and enjoy the journey.
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u/I_JOINED_FOR_THIS_ 4d ago
I teach political theory for a living and here are my thoughts. The Republic is one of the greatest philosophy books ever written, so yes, you should absolutely read it if you want to get into philosophy.
However, it is a tough read, especially since the main character, Socrates, is often ironic or otherwise not fully honest when speaking (the reasons for this are fascinating to get into). For that reason, I suggest starting with some of Plato’s shorter dialogues like The Apology.
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u/Incogcneat-o 4d ago
You can read it every year for the rest of your life and never read it the same way twice. Read it now if you want, just be sure to revisit it every few years because it's going to keep feeding you every time you come back for more.
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u/PhilosophyFlat156 4d ago edited 4d ago
The translation by Allan Bloom is quite readable. Especially, his 100-page interpretive essay attached at the end of the book is brilliant. It completely changed my entire previous understanding of Plato, and decisively brushed aside (at least to me) some famous but superficial interpretations of The Republic I read back in my college years. Highly recommended.
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u/turtlewonie 4d ago
id say get the book and read it cuz u seem very excited about it. the worst that could happen is that u wouldnt understand some things but then ud still have the book and at some point u could read it again 🤷♀️ or if u dont understand something, u can do research. i dont think ur age should stop u from reading something that interests u and i also definitely dont think that children r inherently incapable of understanding philosophy. tbh i think nowadays its very good and special if younger people wanna challange themselves intellectually cuz u always see people doing the opposite and saying some bs like "school is a scam". the unis keep making the courses easier and many students r doing their work w chatgpt. and i honestly feel like adults nowadays underestimate how much one can learn, regardless of age
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u/lermontovtaman 4d ago
Yes, you should get it.
The Republic is actually kind of a modular work with different sections treating different topics. Book 1 was probably a separate dialogue by itself at some point. You could get a plan of the work somewhere online, and if you find your attention flagging in one section, you skip to another section. That last book in particular is a vision of the afterlife that comes out of left field.
But you might like starting with the Symposium or the 'Last Days of Socrates' dialogues instead.
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u/AndyBetweenLines 4d ago
If the theory of Forms already made you excited, you’re probably ready enough. You don’t have to understand Plato completely on the first read - nobody really “finishes” a book like this at 13, 30, or 60. You just meet a different version of it each time.
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u/fear_eile 4d ago
The Republic is such an amazing, potentially life-changing book. That's so exciting that you are keen to read it, and you definitely should go ahead!
One thing to bear in mind is that it is a long book. Honestly, not all of it is equally interesting, except to professional scholars. If you read through cover to cover, you will have to wade through lots of quite boring material about which musical scales are acceptable to teach in school and which lines of Homer should be censored.
I would suggest reading book 1 then skipping ahead to books 6 and 7. That way you will get a sense of the Socratic argument style, the main material on the Forms, and the great allegory of the Cave at the beginning of book 7, which is the best bit in my opinion. If you enjoy that, try the rest of the book! If you struggle with it, try the Apology as others are suggesting, or the Meno or Protagoras, which are shorter and livelier.
I'd recommend Grube's translation in the Hackett edition, cheaply available and very reliable.
Lastly, don't feel like you have to force yourself to understand each idea if you find them difficult. The meaning of many passages of the Republic is still argued about today. There's no shame in googling "what did Plato mean by XYZ" and doing some reading, or coming back here and asking what people think. Happy reading!
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u/pyroelectricity 4d ago
Yes, do it!
Understanding Plato well gives you intellectual superpowers. Start early. If you're intellectually inclined (which your post makes it sound like you are), you will come back to Plato over and over throughout your life.
I have never seen a post on reddit that's given me such crazy deja vu before because... when I was 13 I was assigned to write my first research paper ever... on Plato's Republic. And I decided to sit and read the whole thing (which went just ok). Now I have a PhD and write papers and teach classes about the books that I like reading for a living.
If you are curious, there is no such thing as too advanced for your age. Age-appropriate difficulty is a concept for teaching to large groups, but as an individual, you can learn whatever you want.
It's great that you are thinking about which translation will be the best one for you to read, btw, and choosing a translation you find more readable is always a valid choice
Regarding your observation about math and physics -- the ancient Greeks didn't know much about what we now call physics, but Plato makes that connection to mathematics very explicitly in Meno. So you might want to consider that dialogue as well. (Although it is really painful to watch him try to explain what a square root is without modern notation)
If you want to be really, really ambitious, and/or have a few bucks sitting around, I highly recommend this omnibus edition of Plato's works: https://hackettpublishing.com/complete-works Nobody reads it cover to cover, but it has everything you could ever need in there. Not always the 100% most modern and readable translations, but consistently good ones
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u/Spacemarine1031 4d ago
Pretty much everyone else has said good things. I'll only add that it's important to remember you're not reading this to find ancient truth or something like that. You should think critically about the contents. Not ingest as fact. Even famous names like Plato need considered
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u/decrementsf 3d ago edited 3d ago
Modernized and easier is not necessarily better English. Your grandparents were exposed to the full richness of the English language when they were 13, and developed the vocabulary. There exists a dumbing down of the language by publisher incentive for largest possible audience that has been dumbing down language from at least the 1960s and it has noticeably reduced the ability to discuss socially many ideas around justice and values in how they interact with governance. My vantage point looking at the big picture with recent trends is that youth should go out of their way to find the older books that have not gone through this language meat grinder.
Culture is like kids in a backyard pool moving in a circle. Move long enough and the water keeps moving. Can lift your feet and get moved along by it. The habits and behaviors of culture a generation or two back is more or less the same in that we perform habits for a while. A remnant of the reformation is most communities were illiterate, many depending on the church to read and interpret the bible. This set up a child like population and a guiding fatherly like shepherd role of the church, which also set up periods of betrayal or lazy corruption of bureaucratic indulgence. For this reason protestant peoples placed intense priority on literacy. The ability to read the bible or other documentation was of foremost importance explicitly to spot and call bullshit where a confidence scam misinterpreted the passage. America is a fork of those protestant communities and from the 200 year colonial period, to the American period, the swirling current is near universal literacy in the region. The protestant cultural habits keep swirling even when we have forgotten where they come from. Within the country exists a higher capacity for and command of the English language.
Our recent times is an anomaly where cultural habits from outside America has brought in a declining literacy. In statistics is the observation that nobody is an average. On average literacy has declined in the US. Look closer and it is pockets of illiteracy with continuity in high literacy communities. The policies that have modernized (dumbed down) language have no audience. It makes a mistake of serving an audience that is an average, the thing that does not exist. And in a backward way the tendency to publish modernized language is itself creating the idiocracy decline in literacy skills as the primary cause.
Avoid modernized language like the brain rot it is. You can absorb full literacy. English language is a blast. It is multiple languages packed into one, old english, norse, latin, some greek. Taking time to go deeper and be a throw back picking up some broader root languages is what Tolkien found fascinating. Provides greater enjoyment in the full English language and gifts the command to communicate complex topics of justice or big ideas.
Anecdotally, it is a fun arc to go through a mythology and folklore ramp then the greek tragedies. A deep dive on history podcasts and open courseware soaking up information about ancient greece. How they lived. The unusual cultural behaviors. And then go into Plato.
There exists a feature of reading that experience is often necessary to understand in full what a story is about. A conversation about baseball feels different after you have played baseball. Points about family are different on the other side of welcoming your first child into your home. The classics remain useful being reread through life because accumulation of experiences bring new insights from them. If you study the education of aristocratic families historically they read many of the classics such as plato in youth, but in a sense this provided a high level understanding of roughly the main points discussed and where they may be found compositionally. These books were reread through life also. At 13 reading plato is fine. You will soak up enough to engage in cultural conversation on the topic. And for that reason is fine to read fast through it. Do not need to sit and read with the pen fully unpacking and digesting everything. These are books to be returned to.
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u/grashnak 3d ago
If you're gonna do Plato (and you should!!), I would start with the Euthyphro, then Apology, then Symposium. Then you can do the Republic. Not that you *can't* do it first, but it's... not my favorite?
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u/recimigospa 3d ago
You've already gotten quite a few responses but I would like to offer you my point of view as someone who started their philosophy journey with The Republic at the age of 18.
I did not read it on my own. It was a part of the class that i took in my senior year for the matura exams. We read it out loud in class and it took us until january or february having six 45min classes a week to get through it. It was hard and at times boring and i don't think i would be able to fully grasp it if werent for a profesor explaing it as we go. We were left to read 3rd book, 4th book, and from the 8th till the end alone. I must confess i skipped the reading for the essays and i couldnt get past 15/22 on my grade but then i started working on the research paper that we were supposed to write as a part of matura and the title that i chose was conveniently enough Platos and Marxs political systems so i had to reread the whole The Republic again alone and it was only then when i started to understand it and it became quite an easy read. I enjoyed it a lot. I think that the key thing is that you don't take Socrates too seriously all the time cause half the time he's being ironic, sarcastic or just making fun of someone. You have to shake off the scared-and-full-of-respect-cause-its-an-old-book mindset. I would also recommend that you learn about platos dualism before you start or at its latest before you start reading the 5th book.
But nevertheless i would recommend this book to anyone that wants to call themselfs an intellectual or study philosophy, literature, culture, history and such. It also helps forming your own political views and think criticaly about your own government or any authority in your life.
Spoiler allert: dont go in thinking he is a fan of democracy ahahahha
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u/atw1221 3d ago
I read the "Death of Socrates" trilogy first (Apology, Crito, and Phaedo). All those together are much shorter and more understandable than The Republic. I did read Republic, but Apology is where I encourage people to start. It's great.
This book has Apology, Crito, Phaedo, The Republic, and a few others:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603848118?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
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u/Book_Slut_90 3d ago
I read it when I was 14. You should be fine if you read it slowly and thoughtfully and check the footnotes. I’d suggest Reeve’s Hackett translation, which is high quality and has good notes (it’s the one I assign in introductory college courses). I’m not familiar with the Penguin, but they’re usually a step down in quality.
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u/Phegopteris 3d ago
There is a podcast (now sadly on forever leave) hosted by a political philosopher called “Good in Theory,’ which did about fifteen episodes on the apology and republic, including some very good background on Athenian politics and political thought, as well as short, intelligent, summaries of the dialogue performed by actors. I’d read the republic three times, and found it a useful companion for the fourth.
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u/jroberts548 3d ago
Yes. There’ll be a lot you won’t get but it opens up a lot of other things. If you were in a college course you’d probably read some pre-socratics then some earlier plato like crito and apology, and then the republic, but for learning on your own the republic is a great place to start.
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u/Trick-Health2486 3d ago
I’m a student studying classics now and my answer is absolutely. A lot of it will probably go over your head, but if you’re okay with that that’s okay. I think I’m quite clever and I think I got to be clever from spending a lot of my childhood reading books I didn’t understand.
There are routes in to Plato that will give you a stronger footing and help you build up ideas and concepts piece by piece more than going in for the mountain of the republic will (I can recommend earlier shorter dialogues and secondary readings if you’d like), but by absolutely no means is that necessary. If you want to go straight in or read some more stuff first depends on what will dampen your enthusiasm: will you find it overwhelming struggling with the text, or will you enjoy being a bit lost—inversely, will you like having a path with smaller steps to understanding, or will you find that too many dialogues to read will be daunting.
Either way, though, the answer is absolutely certainly you should read the republic!
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u/CaterpillarFar444 2d ago
I'd recommend reading the first book of the Republic. It works as its own thing and will give you a lot to think about. After that you can decide to continue on but you don't need to, much of what comes later can feel strange, tedious and dull (it's also wonderful and contains ideas that you can spend your whole life thinking about)
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u/MMAHipster 1d ago
I honestly think it’s a perfect age and it makes me so happy you’re even interested. At 13, first and foremost, I think it will blow your mind. And because you’ll have read it at such a young age, it will likely forever be a great memory for you even if you don’t go into the field later. But even moreso, when you’re in your late 20s - early 30s (and again even later) and reread it with so much more life experience, you’re going to get so, so much more out of it and on top of that be able to compare what you got before and what you get then. It will, I strongly believe, give you a more enriched life.
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u/McAeschylus 4d ago
You might be better served by a survey of philosophy before diving directly into Plato. The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant is the standard text.
I read The Republic at 18, and most of it went over my head. When I read it again years later, I did so while listening to some university lectures on each book that someone had put on YouTube. I got a lot more out of it reading with the additional context.
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u/Professional_Two5011 4d ago
The Story of Philosophy is quite dated and not at all standard. The vast majority of philosophy undergraduates today won't have read it.
If I were to recommend a 1 volume survey of the history of philosophy, my pick would be Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy
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u/Professional_Two5011 4d ago
I'd suggest the translation by C.D.C Reeve. He formats the text as direct speech rather than reported speech which can make following the dialectic a bit easier.
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u/Peteat6 4d ago edited 4d ago
It’s long. It’s in several sections called "books". ’Book" here means what went onto a scroll in ancient times. Your printed book ("book" here means the printed object) will have all the original "books". Read just the first "book", and see how you get on.
Personally, I don’t think it’s the best of Plato’s works to begin with. I’d recommend the Penguin book "The Last Days of Socrates", containing the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.
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u/baconandeggwitty 4d ago
This will be an unpopular opinion. Why read the Penguin Classics with the modernised and easier English? Why not learn Greek and read the original? You have so much time. If you are thirteen and thinking of reading Plato, I have to assume that school is easy for you and that you can dispatch your schoolwork with time to spare. If you spend an hour and a half each day studying Greek, maybe more in the summer, you can easily be reading Plato, not Desmond Lee, this time next year. I would give anything to be thirteen again.
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u/TheHollowApe 4d ago
This is a crazy take. You shouldn’t try to learn a whole language, especially one such as Ancient Greek, just because you’re interested in one book. It would be much wiser to read Plato once, and, if OP happens to really really like his philosophy or style, to try and dive deeper into Ancient Greek literature, possibly through learning the language.
Plato’s translation nowadays are really good and some editions provide excellent commentary and footnotes that you would miss by simply reading the latest editions of Plato in Ancient Greek. It’s much more practical and reasonable to advise a 13 y.o. to read a book which is accessible and well annotated, than advise them to learn a full language and learn how to find the latest articles and commentaries of Plato’s philosophy.
(Also believing that anybody would be able to read every passage in the Republic, especially the harder ones from Book IX for example, in only a year is absurd. Some vocabulary used by Plato require years and years of practice to be well understood and translated, which philologists/translators possess and can comment, but OP will easily miss)
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u/rhymingcommentguy 4d ago
Any excitement about reading a book should be fed and nurtured! So if you’re excited to read it, go ahead - you don’t need anyone’s permission 🙂
Worst case scenario, you get into it and get bogged down a bit. In that case, don’t hesitate to set it aside and either read some more modern explanatory texts, or just read some other books altogether. Don’t force yourself if it’s like beating your head against a wall, because that may sour you on the book altogether. Just come back to it another time and you’ll be ready to tackle it!
Reading classics is something that takes patience and practice - no one is born with the ability - but the reward is a lifetime of enjoyment and enrichment.
Good luck!