This book argues that Plato’s medical language in political contexts is not mere metaphor but a medical model of political analysis. Centering on the Republic, it shows how Plato adopts, critiques, and reworks Hippocratic ideas to diagnose, explain, evaluate, and treat political conditions. The payoff is a solution to a central puzzle: how the ideal city can be both exceptionally stable and yet liable to degenerate into vice. Its stability, I argue, is a robustness and resilience analogous to bo
