The Republic Trivia Quiz

Answer: Justice

By designing a just city, Socrates hopes to understand the nature of a just man. He analogizes the various classes in the city to various faculties of man.

Answer: Thrasymachus

All four of the people above are involved in the dialogue with Socrates, but it is the fiery Thrasymachus who dares to challenge Socrates's logic and suggest that justice is whatever the ruler says it is, and no more.

Answer: two

Two musical modes will be allowed in the ideal city, one for writing songs about heroic military deeds and another for writing about the simplicity and fulfillment of a peaceful life.

Answer: excessive singing

Although he would certainly not approve of excessive singing, he never expressly prohibits it as he does with the other three choices. Socrates suggests striking passages from Homer which portray great heroes laughing or crying to excess.

Answer: The earth

The people are to be told that they spent their childhood in the earth and that their whole education was a dream they had while sleeping in the ground.

Answer: assigning children to the correct class and monitoring their education

The success of the ideal city relies on the assignment of each child to the appropriate class in society. Only the very best people, capable of understanding the divine form of justice, should be allowed to rule. According to Plato, most people cannot understand philosophic forms, so the people who do ought to rule those who do not.

In the "noble lie," the people are told that if a common person (of the "bronze" class) ever rules the city, the city will fall.

Answer: Callipolis

Socrates calls the ideal city "Callipolis" from the Greek "calos" meaning "beautiful," "good," or "noble" and "polis" meaning "city." I made up the other choices, but translated roughly they mean: agathipolis= good city, eleutheripolis= free city, aleithipolis= true/real city.

Answer: the sun

The cave is an allegory about a philosopher being pulled from the darkness of ordinary existence and forced to learn the philosophic forms of the virtues. In the allegory, the sun represents the form of the good, the form from which all other forms can be known.

The man blinded after leaving the cave can only bear at first to look at shadows and reflections. He eventually moves on to looking at the things making the shadows and reflections and finally can look at the sun. This man must then be forced to return to the cave to guide his unenlightened bretheren.

Answer: Doing your proper task and not interfering with the proper tasks of others

The three wrong answers above were proposed by Cephalus and Polemarchus in Book 1, but all were refuted by Socrates's somewhat questionable logic.

Answer: imitation

Plato is quite critical of poetry, and his Socrates gives a long speech about how the poet cannot know anything of his subject. He says that there is one true form or idea of "couch," and the carpenter building the couch must have some idea of this form in order to build it. Even the person buying and using a couch has some idea of its true essence.

But the painter, who only paints one exterior view of the couch, knows nothing of the couch besides what it looks like from one perspective, so his representation is a false one, detatched from the reality of his subject.