In Plato’s Republic Socrates retells a life-changing conversation he had with none other than the author’s two older brothers. Here, as elsewhere, he carefully listens to what his interlocutors say but also to what they do not say. The gap between these is what motivates his penetrating and challenging questions, and confers upon both questions and answers their dramatic force and significance: talk becomes action.

While translations of Plato can fail to bring across this existential motive, a true retelling will not. Plato’s greatness consists exactly in his ability to depict people thinking and talking within their own horizons, enabling us, in turn, to witness how Socrates listens to them, and for the first time ever to relive this revolutionary conversation in all its greatness.

The conversation moves upward in a parabola, the path of a projectile fated by gravity to fall after its apex, but at just that moment – the very midpoint of the dialogue – the order of foundation gives way to the order of formation: the conversation surrenders to a hyperbolic inspiration, and reaches a view of our world sub specie aeternitatis.