Abstract

I argue that the internal evidence of the Republic supports a conjecture first advanced by the historian Mark Munn: Glaucon was an accomplice of the so-called Thirty Tyrants who most likely died at the side of his relatives Critias and Charmides in the Battle of Munychia. If Munn is right, the Republic must be read as a poignant philosophical drama, the tragedy of Socrates’ unsuccessful struggle to save Plato’s brother from the corrupting influence of his family and his city. This perspective raises important questions about the nature and limits of Socrates’ philosophical pedagogy, which must in turn be seen within the context of the dialogue’s symbolic and mythical representation of the cosmic moral drama of the soul.