Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer;

For Tuesday, read Book VI (from " And we have next to consider the of the philosophic nature, why so many are spoiled and so few escape spoiling ") to a little ways into Book VII (just until " Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.  ")

the link for Book VI is:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

There is a description at the beginning of Book VII of the Republic of people in a cave chained in place and looking only at shadows on the cave wall in front of them. They think that the shadows are real because they are made by puppets behind them that are being manipulated by people who are speaking and making it seem like the puppets are real. Plato explains the "allegory of the cave" by talking about levels of reality, physical things that the senses experience and intelligible things that the mind knows. But the cave seems to be about more than levels of reality. There is, for example, a man who escapes and goes up to the light. He returns to tell his fellow-prisoners about the world above, but they don't listen. It isn't necessary to tell this part of the story just to get an allegory about the levels of reality. What else is the "allegory of the cave" about? How else can we intrepret it? Who are the puppet handlers? Who are the prisoners? Who is the man who escapes and comes back? Put these answers together in a coherent essay.