Review “If our world and Homer’s are no longer the same, that is largely because of Plato, and perhaps most of all because of Plato’s most famous book, The Republic. This work was its author’s main weapon in his fight to forge a new world, to replace the quarrelsome magnificence of Achilles and Odysseus with the rational grandeur of Socrates . . . [The Republic] does not simply underlie some of our more abstruse theories. It is part of the fabric of our common sense.”