Corpus Christi College

I mean, I was, I was always drunk.

Uh, I was drunk pretty well every night, and eventually I had to be removed from living in Corpus Christi College, and I went to live on a houseboat, but I didn't quite get the irony of it, but it was moored up at Jesus Lock.

[laughs]

And, uh, when the mission happened, I tried every way to stop students going, but at the end of it, I realized I'd failed.

You're in Corpus Chr- you're trying to get rid of Jesus.

You've...

You're in Corpus Christi-

Mm

called Eton.

And he went there and then he went to Cambridge University, went to Corpus Christi and he did all the right things.

Then went into law and I went on the missing list.

What was the first real kind of like, yeah, I'm doing this for real?

And if the soul is best ruled by reason, he argues the city would be best ruled by philosophers.

With me to discuss Plato's Republic are Angela Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, M.M. McCabe, Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Emerita at King's College London, and James Warren, a fellow of Corpus Christi College and a reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

James Warren, what was the political situation in Athens when Plato was writing the Republic?

He's writing The Republic, as you said, in the first quarter of the 4th century BC.