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

The Republic dramatizes Socrates attempt to convince Platos brother Glaucon that the just life of philosophy is preferable to the unjust life of tyranny. Jacob Howland argues that he failed, and that Glaucon joined his relatives Critias and Charmides in the brutal oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants that governed Athens in the immediate aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. What went wrong? This is the guiding question of Glaucons Fate, a book that promises to challenge our understanding of Platos masterwork.