“The Republic is trolling” is literally canon. Socrates describes his ideal city in Book II, it takes like three pages (368e-372c). Then Glaucon interrupts to complain that life in that city would lack fancy luxuries. Socrates: “the true city, in my opinion, is the one we’ve described, the healthy one, as it were. But let’s study a city with a fever, if that’s what you want”. (372e) All the famous bits follow. Philosophers suck even harder at reading than at writing so no one remembers this.

some-triangles:

Yep.  The obvious reading and not one which was touched upon at all in the class I took on it at [university with serious business classics department]

I think this is a product of the same kind of selective cultural amnesia which the article about Captain Kirk I reblogged yesterday dissects.  Like – we inherit our way of reading these works from the Enlightenment, whose leading lights dragged the greek classics out and put them on the pedestal where they currently reside, and they had a certain vested interest in the philosopher king idea, so a Grand Missing of the Point ensued and remains with us to this day