Socrates and his friends discuss justice by building an ideal city in words, and the conversation ranges across education, poetry, psychology, and the nature of reality itself. The allegory of the cave is here, those prisoners watching shadows on walls, never seeing the fire behind them. Plato wrote dialogues, not treatises; Socrates asks questions rather than delivers answers. The philosopher-kings who should rule; the poets who must be exiled; the divisions of the soul: these ideas have shaped Western thought for two and a half millennia. The city they build does not exist. The questions they ask do.