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Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for the final installment of their 3-part mini-series devoted to Plato\u2019s Republic. (See Part 1 and Part 2, if you are new to the series.) In Part 3, Brendan and Scott take up the vexed and largely maligned role of money in Republic. Weighing the fact that there is no linguistic equivalent for the modern English term \u201cmoney\u201d in Attic Greek, Brendan and Scott nevertheless align the text\u2019s negative treatment of money-related activities with Plato\u2019s impoverished univocal thinking. Next, they consider the limits and potentials of Plato\u2019s well-known taxonomy of political regimes in Book 8 of Republic, noting how unfavorable invocations of \u201cmoney loving\u201d throughout the text\u2019s latter sections abet a fatalistic and anti-democratic politics. Brendan and Scott then ponder the ironies of Socrates\u2019 second paradoxical argument against poetry. And lastly, they explore the celestial \u201cmyth of Er\u201d that closes Plato\u2019s Republic. On their reading, this concluding myth not only implicitly betrays Socrates' injunction against poetry, but also encapsulates the text's key contradiction between expansive provisioning and zero-sum trade-offs.

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