Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic

In the Republic, Socrates seeks to convince Plato’s brother Glaucon that the just life of philosophy is preferable to the unjust life of tyranny. Jacob Howland’s Glaucon’s Fate argues that he fails. The available evidence suggests that Glaucon joined his cousin Critias and his uncle Charmides in the regime of the so-called Thirty Tyrants, the brutal oligarchy that governed Athens in the immediate aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. If Howland is right, Plato’s intelligent and courageous brother—suspended as he was between the corruption of Athenian politics and the integrity of Socratic inquiry, between kinsmen who were leaders of the Thirty and a just friend who fell afoul of them—could not be saved even by the age’s most capable advocate of virtue and philosophy. What went wrong? This is the guiding question of Glaucon’s Fate, a book that promises to challenge our understanding of Plato’s masterwork. It is the culmination of a lifelong devotion to the study of Plato’s Republic by a major scholar.