by him will do as well as any other); for a writer of fiction,
and especially a writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless
of chronology, only aims at general probability. Whether all the persons
mentioned in the Republic could ever have met at any one time is
not a difficulty which would have occurred to an Athenian reading
the work forty years later, or to Plato himself at the time of writing
(any more than to Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas);
and need not greatly trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having
no answer "which is still worth asking," because the investigation
shows that we can not argue historically from the dates in Plato;
it would be useless therefore to waste time in inventing far-fetched
reconcilements of them in order avoid chronological difficulties,
such, for example, as the conjecture of C. F. Hermann, that Glaucon
and Adeimantus are not the brothers but the uncles of Plato,
or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato intentionally left anachronisms
indicating the dates at which some of his Dialogues were written.

CHARACTERS

The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus,
Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus.
Cephalus appears in the introduction only, Polemarchus drops at
the end of the first argument, and Thrasymachus is reduced to silence
at the close of the first book. The main discussion is carried on
by Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Among the company are Lysias
(the orator) and Euthydemus, the sons of Cephalus and brothers
of Polemarchus, an unknown Charmantides--these are mute auditors;
also there is Cleitophon, who once interrupts, where, as in the Dialogue
which bears his name, he appears as the friend and ally of Thrasymachus.