x1 Characters

Below are brief descriptions of the main participants in Republic Book I, adapted from Debra Nails’ highly recommended study, The People of Plato. For a fuller study of these and other characters throughout the Platonic corpus, please consult her book.

Adeimantus (432/428 – >382) is a brother of Plato and Glaucon. According to Socrates (Rep. 368a), both Glaucon and Adeimantus were recognized for their military service at a battle at Megara, which perhaps occurred at 409. Adeimantus is accompanying Polymarchus when Socrates and Glaucon arrive in the Piraeus.

Cephalus ( ? – 421/415) is father of Polemarchus and Lysias. We learn from an autobiographical speech by Lysias (12) that Cephalus was invited by Pericles himself to come to Athens around 450 and as a metic became very wealthy as the owner of a shield-making factory.

Clitophon ( 452 – >404) is a friend of both Lysias and Thrasymachus who intervenes briefly in the discussion between Socrates and Thrasymachus.

Glaucon (ca. 429 – >382) is a brother of Plato and Adeimantus. According to Socrates (Rep. 368a) both Glaucon and Adeimantus were recognized for their military service at a battle at Megara, which perhaps occurred at 409. Both brothers will be Socrates’ chief interlocutors in Books 2-10 of the Republic.

Lysias (ca. 445 – 380) is son of Cephalus and half-brother of Polemarchus. Very wealthy, he and his brother sponsored choral performances, paid war taxes (eisphora), and ransomed citizen prisoners of war (Lys. 12.20). When the Thirty temporary wrestled power from the democracy, Lysias fled the fate of his brother in 404 and returned in 403 to help restore the democracy. He became a successful speechwriter for legal clients, and many of his speeches survive today.

Polemarchus (ca. 450 – 404): is a son of Cephalus and half-brother of Lysias. He was likely born in Syracuse and moved to Athens along with his father ca. 450. The house which provides the setting of the Republic is Polemarchus’.When the democracy was briefly overthrown as the end of the Peloponnesian war, the oligarchic regime known as the Thirty executed Polemarchus. Lysias recalls the events of Polemarchus’ arrest and death in a speech Against Eratosthenes (Lys. 12).

Socrates (470 - 399): A stonemason by trade, Socrates acquired a reputation for discussing philosophy in public places. He did not write down his philosophical beliefs, so whatever we know about him comes from the works of a number of his contemporaries including Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes.

Thrasymachus (ca. 455 - ? ) is a sophist from Chalcedon, a city in Asia Minor at the mouth of the Black Sea. Plato’s Socrates discusses his rhetorical style in the Phaedrus (267c-d) and later says that both Thrasymachus and Lysias provide the wrong models to acquire rhetorical skill (269d).

1 Taken from Steadman's “Plato's Republic I ' (POD, 2012)