o, like
Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, are clearly distinguished from one
another. Neither in the Republic, nor in any other Dialogue of Plato, is
a single character repeated.

The delineation of Socrates in the Republic is not wholly consistent. In
the first book we have more of the real Socrates, such as he is depicted
in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, in the earliest Dialogues of Plato, and
in the Apology. He is ironical, provoking, questioning, the old enemy
of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as well as to argue
seriously. But in the sixth book his enmity towards the Sophists abates;
he acknowledges that they are the representatives rather than the
corrupters of the world. He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive,
passing beyond the range either of the political or the speculative
ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage Plato himself seems to
intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who had passed his
whole life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and not to be always
repeating the notions of other men. There is no evidence that either the
idea of good or the conception of a perfect state were comprehended in
the Socratic teaching, though he certainly dwelt on the nature of
the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen. Mem.; Phaedo); and a deep
thinker like him, in his thirty or forty years of public teaching, could
hardly have failed to touch on the nature of family relations, for
which there is also some positive evidence in the Memorabilia (Mem.) The
Socratic method is nominally retained; and every inference is either put
into the mouth of the respondent or represented as the common discovery
of him and Socrates. But any one can see that this is a mere form, of
which the affectation grows wearisome as the work advances. The method
of enquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by the help of
interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from various points of view.
The nature of the process is truly characterized by Glaucon, when
he describes himself as a companion who is not good for much in an
investigation, but can see what he is shown, and may, perhaps, give the
answer to a question more fluently than another.

Neither can we be absolutely certain that Socrates himself taught the
immortality of the soul, which is unknown to his disciple Glaucon in the
Republic (cp. Apol.); nor is there any reason to suppose that he used
myths or revelations of another world as