Status Updates From Πολιτεία, τόμος 2

Books 8 & 9 are the most ridiculous of the whole of The Republic. This is where Plato clearly jumped the shark! He pressed the similarity between soul and city too far, and ended up with a laughable theory about how each of them gets corrupted through the successive states of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and, finally, tyranny. Pure nonsense.

The conversation between Socrates and Adeimantus et al. has shifted toward epistemology. The reason is that the rulers of the ideal state must be able to apprehend the Platonic Forms and so that they can refer to them and govern well. The final discussion of Book VI is a prelude to the allegory of the Cave.