Athens Victorious

"Plato's Republic is typically thought to recommend a form of government that, from our current perspective, seems perniciously totalitarian. Athens Victorious demonstrates that Plato intended quite the opposite: to demonstrate the superiority of a democratic constitution. That this has gone largely unnoticed is due to the peculiar literary device by which Plato presents his account of different forms of government in Book VIII of the dialogue. Drawing on the psychology and theory of education developed throughout the rest of the Republic, as well as on the historical and literary context in which Plato was writing, Greg Recco shows us how to read this puzzling narrative: as a restaging of the Pelopennesian War - the thirty-year long conflict that pitted Sparta's militaristic oligarchy against Athens' democracy - in which the democratic city emerges the victor and its defining values are thereby vindicated. Students and scholars of classical studies, philosophy, and political theory will find here a different Plato and a renewed Republic."--Jacket.