As noted above, the Republic has got to be one of the most revolutionary works ever written. Some of its provocative theses are still shocking: the banishment of imitative poetry from the polis, its proto-communist structure with wives and children to be held in common, its program of eugenics. To this we can add Socrates’ insistence that philosophers should be rulers (despite his wry acknowledgement that they look like a sorry bunch), that rulers could be both women and men, that the “noble lie” or “fiction” is to be told to its citizens, and that there are certain natural “metals” in each person’s soul: gold for the rulers, silver for the guardians, iron and bronze for everyone else. Not only, it appears, is Plato in favor of brainwashing; he is, for Karl Popper and others,1 racist, totalitarian, and tyrannical. In addition, Socrates’ emphasis on the need for virtue seems to make the city not a place of happiness but a Victorian or Spartan nightmare: how can the iron-souled people doing what they are best fitted for be really happy without proper education or entertainment? Above all, how could the philosopher-rulers be happy with their lives of service to the good of the whole city? Yet, for Socrates, this is the model for happiness, the only form of life that can judge the other honor-loving and money-making lives and come out on top for happiness. How then are we to think of the Republic?