“Well, then,” said I, “don't you think that the business of fighting is an art and a profession?” “It is indeed,” he said. 'We surely agreed, if you remember, that it is impossible for one man to do the work of many arts well.” “True,” he said. The interlocutors will imagine a city, one as good as possible in every way they can conceive, and then they will look at justice and any other key virtues responsible for the city's excellence.

To find it more easily, Socrates proposes searching on a larger scale. To do this Justice must first be defined correctly, but it is not immediately clear what such a definition might be. After rejecting several definitions of Justice in book 1, in the second book the brothers challenge Socrates in earnest to show that Justice is truly good for the just person and Injustice really bad for the unjust person, not only because of personal reputation or the rewards and punishments that might come from such a reputation, but because Justice in and of itself is beneficial and Injustice in and of itself is harmful.

In this work, the characters of Socrates and Plato's two elder brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, imagine and study the features of an ideal city, the 'Kallipolis', in an effort to define justice and to prove that it is intrinsically beneficial to the just person. One of Plato's most important works on education and the one that's best known by far today is the Republic.

The republic socrates