  As this overview makes clear, the center of Plato’s Republic is a contribution to ethics: a discussion of what the virtue justice  is and why a person should be just. Yet because Socrates links his  discussion of personal justice to an account of justice in the city  and makes claims about how good and bad cities are arranged, the  Republic sustains reflections on political questions, as  well. Not that ethics and politics exhaust the concerns of the  Republic. The account in Books Five through Seven of how a  just city and a just person are in principle possible is an account  of how knowledge can rule, which includes discussion of what  knowledge and its objects are. Moreover, the indictment of the poets  involves a wide-ranging discussion of art. This article, however,  focuses on the ethics and politics of Plato’s Republic. For  more on what the Republic says about knowledge and its  objects, see   Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology,  and for more about the discussion of the poets, see   Plato: rhetoric and poetry.  