Plato's Republic as an iMessage conversation

"I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was books. Because I could go read what Aristotle wrote or what Plato wrote. And I didn't have to have an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the way."

Steve Jobs

The Republic is structured as a series of conversations and I've always found it the most approachable of the major works of philosophy. Even so, I struggle with prose that is translated directly from the original Greek.

It made me think: is there a better way to read the classics?

The result: a iMessage interface that presents The Republic in a fresh way.

I call it TheRepublic.txt. It includes both the Original and Modern translations of each of the ten books in The Republic. When you first load a conversation, you're presented with an iMessage style interface, and chat bubbles load on the page based on who's speaking.

This was a fun project, and I'll probably expand it to other works that I find interesting. Let me know if you have any suggestions.