 By treating these ethical and political questions as interrelated, and then going on to depict both an ideal political regime (“Kallipolis”, the fine or beautiful city) in which they could be solved, and the imperfect regimes into which such an ideal regime will decay, the Republic lays out a novel and ambitious template for political philosophy: not only to interrogate the meaning of virtue and citizenship, but also to develop an ideal regime and an account of how and why such regimes may fail. That template will be followed by Aristotle’s Politics, by Cicero’s De re publica, and by Thomas More’s Utopia, among other successors. In Plato’s hands, however, this template included some specific political prescriptions to maintain the unity of the ideal city which most of his successors abhorred. In particular, Book V of the Republic suggests that a sufficiently unified regime can be achieved only by depriving its guardian-rulers of private property and of private families, instead making them live in austere communal conditions in which they are financially supported by their money-making subjects and allowed to procreate only when and with whom will best serve the city. In Book II of his Politics, Aristotle would read this prescription as applying to all the citizens in the city envisaged in the Republic, and both he and, later on, Cicero would deplore what they construed as this abolition of private property. Even those following and radicalizing Plato precisely by advocating the abolition of property for all the citizens, rather than only deprivation of it for the rulers, as would the sixteenth-century Sir Thomas More, were generally opposed to if not also scandalized by the suggestion of procreative communism.