# Republic

- id: republic
- original title: Πολιτεία / Politeia
- author: Plato
- language: Greek
- composed: c. 380 BCE–370 BCE, Athens
- field: philosophy

The design of the just city and the just soul. The Arabs philosophized with it secondhand; the West got it whole only when Ficino's Latin Plato was printed in 1484.

## The chain

- **c. 1469–1484** Greek -> Latin, translation [attested]
  Marsilio Ficino (translator), Florence
  Part of Ficino's complete Latin Plato for the Medici circle, printed at Florence in 1484: the first time the West could read the whole Republic since antiquity.
  Evidence: James Hankins 1990; Marsilio Ficino 1484
- **1871** Greek -> English, translation [attested]
  Benjamin Jowett (translator), Oxford
  The Victorian Plato that schooled the anglophone world; earlier complete English versions (Spens 1763, Taylor and Sydenham 1804) never had its reach.
  Evidence: Benjamin Jowett 1871
- **1930–1935** Greek -> English, translation [attested]
  Paul Shorey (translator), London
  The Loeb facing-page English; the text carried in this library.
  Evidence: Paul Shorey 1930; Thothica 2026

## Worth knowing

The Republic is the strange inverse of this atlas's Aristotle chains: no complete Arabic translation survives and scholars doubt one ever existed, so the Arabs knew the book chiefly through Galen's synopsis, and Averroes, lacking the Politics, wrote his political commentary on the Republic instead, a work that now survives through Samuel ben Judah's Hebrew of 1320-22. The complete book reached Latin with Ficino in Florence and English with Spens and then Jowett; the Loeb English of Paul Shorey is the one this library carries.

## Sources

- James Hankins (1990). Plato in the Italian Renaissance. Brill.
- Paul Shorey (1930). Plato: The Republic (Loeb Classical Library). Harvard University Press, 1930-1935.

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).