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ingly Straussian vein, she has subjected it to auto-critique (pp. 110, 147). Similarly, in the vein of the readings of Plato by Straussians and Harry Berger, Jr., Frank highlights the importance of character over argument as the main anchors of Plato’s text (for Berger, see pp. 40, 103; for Strauss, see pp. 9 n. 25 and 29 n. 34). Does that move make sense? How does Frank justify her Republic? By framing her “rereading” of the Republic as Plato’s effort to reconstruct mimetic poetry, rather than prevailing conceptions of justice or ethical and political practice (pp. 81–110), Frank argues that Plato wrote in ways that emphasized the authority of the reader, over and against Plato’s own as an author (pp. 15–17). To be sure, this validates the often-overlooked character of the Republic as a nondogmatic dialogue that initially addresses the structure of the polis or politeia (the city-state or its constitution) for the sake of illuminating a notion of justice that can inform the soul (psyche) of the reader (see Republic 591e). And at the end of Republic, after the structures of the good state and soul, as well as bad states and souls, have been articulated, Plato returns to a focus on the utility of his hypothetical conditions for the virtuous self, whether in this life or the afterlife. But were the political interpretations of Books II–IX mostly iterations of authoritarianism, designed to point us outside the realms of politics and power toward poetic justice? That interpretation is plausible if Plato genuinely separated the soul from the state. Yet he does not do that in any of his other dialogues that deal with power and virtue—which is to say most of his dialogues. Why should he here? Frank does not seriously engage interpreters who have taken the text at its word (albeit marked by irony and Plato’s anonymity) and seen it as a strenuous combination of politics, ethics, philosophy, and literary talent that depends partly on the reader for its truth (p. 5). Instead, she highlights the puzzling way in which Plato treats poetry in the Republic—initially reforming it in Book III so as to become a benefit to education and then banning it (apart from performing hymnals) from his ideal city in Book X. In her reading of Books II–V (Plato’s discussion of popular disregard for philosophy in Book VI is a glaring absence), there is no attempt to read aspects of kallipolis as necessary for reforming an Athens that had lost a war it should have won. There is virtually no discussion of Book V, in which Plato’s Socrates confronts the three “waves” of opposition to his initial description of kallipolis—where philosopher-guardians rule without property, personal families, or consideration of gender differences—or his accounts in Book VI and VII of how ordinary citizens, initially manipulated by sophists and rhetoricians to despise philosophers, could come around to believing in the wisdom of philosophy. Nor does Frank attendmuch to the soul–state interactions of Books IV and VIII–IX as reflections on political ethics. Perhaps most tellingly, she does not mention the dialogue’s concern with stasis—the civil strife that rendered both ethical discourse and political order untenable in Greek societies. Of course, this makes a great deal of sense if the Republic is not contending with stasis on behalf of justice but with competing agents of public discourse. This also would make it easier for Frank to minimize the deep engagement of Plato’s Socrates in the Republic with his view of the myriad sources of stasis, an abiding concern in Western political thought from Thucydides to the present, and instead to emphasize the book’s anticonventional sense of poetic justice and ignore the myriad sources of corrosive psychological and political conflict. In Poetic Justice, Frank offers a highly intelligent and coherent reading of Plato’s Republic. But if understood as Frank would have it be, Plato’s magnum opus has very little to say about the ethical and political conflicts that motivate the narrative of the dialogue and very little to contribute to ethical and political thought and action. Ultimately, Frank’s very good book may tell us less about Plato’s Republic than about certain literary, ahistorical, and antipolitical turns in American political theory.