Plato criticizes Homer’s effort to promote religious skepticism through his portrayal of the gods for overestimating the power of human reason and underestimating the power of human passions, and he criticizes Homer’s education concerning human excellence for inadvertently glamorizing the passionate and tragic hero Achilles and all too effectively hiding his own example as a philosophic thinker behind the mask of the divinely inspired singer. Plato therefore replaces the Homeric education with a new, poetic, Platonic education that presents Socrates – the fearless, dispassionate, self-sufficient, apolitical philosopher who promulgates the pious, edifying, and reassuring doctrines of the separate Forms and the Immortality of the Soul – as an explicit object of admiration and model for imitation.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the interpretation of a recently discovered, unpublished typescript by Strauss on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. In this transcript, available as Appendix A and composed sometime after 1956, Strauss underscores the conflict between philosophy and Islam in Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The transcript consists only of short notes and therefore, to reveal its message, it needs to be interpreted in the context of Strauss’s other writings. Strauss’s interpretation of Averroes is based on the idea that Averroes must have been aware of the incompatibility of Islamic revelation with the best regime of Plato. Unlike other scholars, who are mainly preoccupied with Averroes’s access or lack thereof to a reliable translation of Plato’s Republic, Strauss argues that the deficiencies of Averroes’s commentary do not mean that Averroes did not have access to Plato’s Republic; he claims that such apparent deficiencies might be intentional and significant for understanding Averroes’s views.