It was after his introduction to the common corruption of the Athenian political world that Plato began to have second thoughts about his place in such a world; it was during this time that Plato began seriously to consider how the interests and well-being of a people could best be served by the citizens who govern them. And it was at this time in his growth as a thinker that a singular event occurred: Plato witnessed a series of politically motivated maneuvers and fabrications brought against his old friend and teacher, Socrates. Plato saw very clearly that the charges brought against Socrates were unjust; it is plain that Plato feared for the outcome of those charges. How, Plato wondered, could justice be achieved for Socrates; indeed, how might justice be achieved for every citizen of the state? It is this interest in the possibility of achieving justice for every citizen that serves as the major argument in the Republic, an interest which threads through every political dialogue that Plato wrote.
It is plain that Plato must have known and listened to Socrates during Plato's childhood and young adulthood (Plato's relatives, Critias and Charmides, were friends of Socrates). When Plato was 27 or 28, his friends and relatives who had invited him to join them in governing the Athenians tried to get even with some of their political enemies whom they had overthrown in their latest revolution. They tried, Plato tells us, to enlist the aid of old Socrates in helping them to arrest one of their political adversaries and to carry him off and execute him. Apparently the attempt to involve Socrates in this travesty of justice and subsequent murder in the name of the state was in order to lend the name of the great philosopher as a party to their illegal activity and to force him to share in their guilt. Socrates refused, and his refusal to ally himself with corrupt politicians was remarked and noted. But even when the political power bases shifted and a new revolution ensued, Plato was tempted to involve himself in politics, whereupon he saw the same system of political pay-backs and corruptions practiced by the "new" leaders of the state. And Socrates' steadfast refusal to deal with corrupt politicians, no matter their party affiliation, had not gone unnoticed.
