Plato's Republic

Grube the translator of Plato's Republic points out "The Republic was probably written about twenty years after Socrates'(a mentor of Plato) and purports to report a conversation supposed to have taken place some thirty or thirty-five years before. It is not an esoteric treatise for students of philosophy, it is addressed to the ordinarily educated man and is intended to be understood by him. There are, it is true, some difficult and highly controversial passages, but these are few and far between."