Plato’s Republic is the master’s masterpiece; but how to go about interpreting it is still disputed. Indeed, it may be a masterpiece just because how to understand it is fiercely controversial. This collection of 24 original essays by an international mix of junior and senior scholars reconsiders the Republic as a written text and rethinks its philosophical legacy. The volume seeks to explore how the Republic goes about doing philosophy with its reader without importing assumptions as to what counts as a philosophy and what does not, what should be kept and what discarded. The working assumption for uniting these different aspects is that 'Plato writes nothing in vain'. To that end, much can be learned by studying how its sections can take on different meanings between a first and subsequent re-reading.