"In one sense, the Republic is a monologue. No one is presented directly as speaking, other than Socrates himself. But Socrates recounts in great detail a complex conversation that he had with, or in the presence of, ten other persons. I shall come back shortly to the question of the identities of these ten characters. The immediate question is why Socrates is represented as recounting the conversation about the just city to an anonymous audience, that is to say, to no one. Are we meant to infer that the Republic, like Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is a book for everyone and no one? Simply to launch a trial balloon, I shall observe that both works are addressed to no one among the contemporaries of the main speaker; Zarathustra is not the superman but the prophet of the coming of the superman, and Socrates, as he makes clear in the Platonic corpus, is unwilling to participate in politics and, given his peculiar nature, he is incapable of doing so. Socrates is thus the "prophet" of the philosopher-king but not one himself."